July 17, 2011 | 8:00 a.m.

Time Will Tell

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 139:1–12, 23–24
Ecclesiastes 3:1–8
Matthew 13:24–30, 36–43

“Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. . . . Let anyone with ears listen!”

Matthew 13:40, 43 (NRSV)

I believe that the indestructible love of God is an unfolding, dynamic reality and that every single one of us is endlessly being invited to trust, accept, believe, embrace, and experience it.

Rob Bell
Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived

In chapter 13 of Matthew, Jesus speaks in parables about the kingdom of God. In the parable we read this morning, Jesus provides what scholars call “a little apocalypse,” for the story speaks of what will happen at the end of time (Ulrich Luz, Matthew, Hermeneia series, p. 267). The imagery it depicts is not pretty: fire, weeping, and gnashing of teeth. Like all apocalyptic imagery in the Bible, whether in the Gospel of Matthew or in the Book of Revelation, the point is to motivate listeners to decisive action. By painting such a picture, the parable functions in this way, making anyone with ears listen!

It would be a mistake to take such passages in the Bible as literal descriptions of what will happen at the end of time, for that was never the point of apocalyptic imagery in the ancient world. And yet, given the grip that images can have upon our imagination, it is hard to shake them loose, and so we hear Christians to this day saying things like “Turn or burn.”

It would also be a mistake to use this parable as a justification for identifying some people as “wheat” to be saved and others as “chaff” to be burned. And yet that is precisely how this passage has been used at times. Listen to this story told by Rob Bell, pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He writes,

Several years ago we had an art show at our church. I had been giving a series of teachings on peacemaking, and we invited artists to display their paintings, poems, and sculptures that reflected their understanding of what it means to be a peacemaker. One woman included in her work a quote from Mahatma Gandhi, which a number of people found quite compelling. But not everyone. Someone attached a piece of paper to it. On the piece of paper was written: “Reality check: He’s in hell.” (Love Wins, p. 1)

It would be a mistake to use Jesus’ parable to justify religious wars for the benefit of the “wheat,” or the saved. And yet that is precisely how this passage has been used. Interpreting the parable in such a way, a sixteenth-century leader of church and state justified the Inquisition that tortured and killed anyone considered guilty of heresy, saying that at the edge of the field one could “pull out two or three, on occasion six or eight or even ten or twelve, indeed, even a hundred weeds without damaging the wheat” (Ulrich Luz, Matthew, p. 273).

History has shown us that when it comes to our interpretations of this and other apocalyptic texts, we have made many mistakes. And the price has been heavy.

In her book The Battle for God, historian of religion Karen Armstrong asserts that “the apocalypse of September 11” can be seen as a logical outcome of a history in which an extreme Islamic fundamentalism has made similar mistakes. In tracing the development of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian fundamentalisms, Armstrong shows that they share in common the use of apocalyptic imagery as the lens through which world events are read.

To deflate such overblown readings of history, among other things, what we need is a more complex, detailed knowledge of history, not just from a secular point of view, but also from a religious point of view.

At a time when the History Channel, history books, and historical documentaries are gaining popularity, it would seem that our knowledge of history would be gaining depth. What we find, however, is the opposite. According to a nationwide test on how well American students know U.S. history, results released last month show that American students know very little about their nation’s history.

To many history teachers, this isn’t breaking news. Lendol Calder, a professor at Augustana College, has been teaching a survey course in U.S. history for more than fifteen years. During the first week of this course, he always asks his students to write a one-to-two page history of the U.S. without relying on any resources. The point of this exercise has been to find out what his students think the American story is. Over the years, Professor Calder has found that decreasing numbers of his students think of U.S. history as a “glory story.” What troubles him is that the glorified version of U.S. history has not been replaced by any other story. Instead, over 70 percent of his students “now see the American past as just ‘one . . . thing after another.’” In his assessment, because students are increasingly failing to see history as an unfolding story, fewer and fewer will be interested in learning history.

This phenomenon is the issue featured on the editorial page of a recent publication of the Christian Century magazine. The editors of the magazine explain why this matter should be of such concern. They write,

People who don’t know their country’s history make for poor citizens. People who don’t have a narrative sense of the American past are especially susceptible to politicians and other ideologues who try to weave their own versions of the past in an effort to manipulate people’s emotions. Knowing something about the past entails coming to grips with complexities and learning that real people wrestled with life-and-death questions and made tragic or wise choices. (Christian Century, 12 July 2011, p. 7)

The editors, I find, are convincing in their argument that knowledge of history is crucial for cultivating strong citizens, citizens who are not susceptible to ideologues, whether political or religious. For this reason alone, I can see why religious persons, including Christians, should be very concerned about people’s lack of historical knowledge today.

There is, I think, yet another reason why religious persons, Christians included, should be very concerned about this problem. We know that religions provide powerful symbols, images, and concepts through which historical events can be interpreted. Beyond this, we can safely say that the work of religious symbols, images, and concepts is to help us to make sense of the big picture: the whole of history and the whole of creation, heaven, hell, and everything in between. When we find ourselves losing the ability to tell the story, to make sense of history, whether it is of our own country or of the world, I suspect and I worry that we are neglecting, forgetting, diminishing, or not quite sure what to do with the symbols, images, and concepts that we have inherited from our religion.

The scripture lessons we read today, from the Gospel of Matthew and from the book of Ecclesiastes, address in very different ways the big questions of religion. As different as they are from each other, they make clear that there is a connection between one’s view of history, in its largest possible scope, and one’s approach to the moral life. What one thinks about the next life has profound implications for how one lives this life. Unlike the parable in Matthew that exhorts listeners to live in obedience to Christ so that they can be part of God’s kingdom of heaven, the author of Ecclesiastes takes an entirely different approach. Having observed that no human effort, no matter how great, how purely desired, how well planned and executed, can ultimately make a difference in history unless God ordains it so, the author of Ecclesiastes questions the conventional moral formula that goodness leads to reward and wickedness to retribution. Instead of viewing history as having a goal or purpose toward which humanity can make progress, he views history as “an endless procession, with constant weary movement, but no real change” (R. B. Y. Scott, Ecclesiastes, Anchor Bible Commentary, p. 202). History consists of “a time to be born and a time to die”; “a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted”; “a time to weep and a time to laugh”; “a time to love and a time to hate”; “a time for war and a time for peace.” Time, according to the author of Ecclesiastes, is ordered by God, and in verse 11, he goes on to say that although God “has put a sense of past and future into the minds of people, they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

Given Ecclesiastes’ unorthodox view of the role of human agency in history, many biblical scholars have wondered how it came to be that Ecclesiastes was even included in the biblical canon. I like to think that Ecclesiastes was included because the early church fathers were wise enough to know that no challenge to orthodoxy was too great a challenge for God. No question was too scandalous or too heretical for God to handle. When it comes to how we should live our lives, we have to ask the big religious questions about heaven and hell, salvation and judgment. We shouldn’t shy away from asking these questions.

And yet we do. In his book Eternal Life?, even the great German theologian Hans Küng admitted the embarrassment that theologians feel when they are asked the question, “Do you believe in life after death?” It is an age-old question, and if we want to make sense of life in the here and now, we have to ask questions about eternal life.

The problem, as I see it, is not only that religious people are sometimes embarrassed to ask the big questions that only religion can address, but that we are also too quick to narrow down the big questions in such a way that we do not make space for whatever God’s answer might be. In his book Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, Rob Bell puts his finger on this problem. Let’s return to the story that I shared earlier, a story taken from Bell’s book, in which someone, presumably a Christian, responded to an artwork that had included a quote from Mahatma Gandhi by writing a note that said, “Reality check: He’s in hell.” If we boil it down, this response reveals that all that matters is “whether or not a person is going to heaven” (p. 6). Compared to open-ended questions such as “What is eternal life?” or “What is the kingdom of heaven?” whether or not a person is going to heaven is a very narrow question. And when that question about personal salvation is all that matters, Bell explains, “the central message of the Christian faith has very little to do with this life other than getting you what you need for the next” (p. 6).

That cannot be the whole story, for it fails to make room for the religious image and concept of the kingdom of heaven as being the day when and realm where all things are as God intends them to be: when and where creation is restored, renewed, and redeemed and peace will reign. Although, as the author of Ecclesiastes cautions us, we can honestly speak only from this side of creation, perhaps we might still imagine or conceive of a new creation that so compels us to live this life in such a way that what we do, how we spend our time, and for whom we labor, might all endure into the new age to come.