Seeds & Soil: Causes

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

“Causes”

Jesus shares the parable of weeds planted along with the good wheat. He tells his followers that when goodness and malice are sufficiently mixed up together, all should be allowed to grow until harvest. Sometimes, our attempts to root out embedded evil may do great harm to the good. Sorting will come soon enough. Not only will the weeds be burned off, but God will also take care to burn off the causes of mendacity as well.

 
Artwork: Vincent Van Gogh

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Trinity.

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July 19th, 2026. Primary reading today is Matthew 13, 24 through 30, 36 through 43. Our prophet's reading today is from Isaiah 44, 6 through 8. It includes these words. I am the first and I am the last. Besides me, there is no God who has announced from of old the things to come. Let them tell us what is yet to be. Do not fear or be afraid. Have I not told you from of old and declared it? You are my witnesses. Is there any God besides me? There is no other rock. I know not one. I am the first and I am the last. Do not fear or be afraid. There is no other rock. I spent this last week home with a pile of family. There is a reunion and a wedding shower coming up this week. I wasn't able to make it, but plenty of people were around. We spent days swimming in the lake by my aunt's house. Several of my aunts worked as summer lifeguards through their twenties, and they both still swim every week. So does my sister. They all crisscrossed the half mile wide lake several times. I caught a firefly. I walked through a warm summer thunderstorm that soaked me completely. It was a return. Isaiah says, I am the first and I am the last. And then the smoke from the forest fires in Canada filled the air, and we stayed inside and played cards, which was good because we all had sunburns. And that was a return to the wildfire smoke. Isaiah says, do not fear or be afraid. We ate a lot. We ate blue moon ice cream, my favorite flavor, one you cannot buy outside of the Midwest. My sister and I polished off an entire chocolate cake. We polished off that cake in the middle of the night playing cards. And boy, did we play cards. We played cards for hours. My sister and I were up past 1.30 one night, and then we stayed up with my aunt past 3.30 another talking. We had no idea it was so late. We thought maybe midnight. Isaiah says, there is no other rock. So when we hear, the Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will be thrown into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, then righteousness will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their father. After a parable about sorting wheat from weeds, it is good to remember that hundreds of years earlier Isaiah said, I am the first and I am the last. Do not fear or be afraid, there is no other rock. Because when we read these terrifying passages about sorting and fire in Matthew 13, 24 through 43, it is good to remember that God is in all things. First and last. It is good to remember that we are not meant to fear. It is good to remember God is our rock. There is no other. Today's primary scripture reading, like last week's and next week's, is from the Gospel of Matthew chapter 13. In telling his version of the good news, Matthew organized Jesus' teaching sessions into five major blocks, which map to the five books of the Torah: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Matthew 13 maps to Leviticus. Please notice that the teachings here in Matt 13 are parables that are open to interpretation. The teachings in Leviticus are more prescriptive. But both Matt 13 and Leviticus are meant to guide. In Matthew 13, we have stuff like the kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field. But while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and then went away. In Leviticus, we have stuff like, you shall, you shall not. You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind. You shall fear your God. I am the Lord. By not being prescriptive, Jesus is trying to guide people to understand the cohesiveness of God's word beneath the proscriptive rules. Last week we read in Matthew 13, 10, Jesus saying, The reason I speak to them in parables is that seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand. Jesus just keeps trusting his students to get the cohesiveness of God's word beneath the rules of Leviticus. He is using parables to teach. Jesus tells his followers he isn't giving people clear rules but parables, because a straight-up list of rules meant to help everyone do the right thing can get in the way of doing what is right. We all know the rule, do not lie. That rule hangs on a scaffold of trust and being trustworthy. We all know the rule, do not lie. And haven't we all known the person who tells the truth with excessive cruelty? They tell the truth, but they destroy the trust. A straightforward rule can become a stumbling block for someone blind to the scaffold beneath the rule. In today's primary reading, the farmer allowed both the weeds and the wheat to become part of the harvest. The weeds were later bound into bundles and burned. Jesus explains, The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will be thrown into the furnace of fire where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their father. Let anyone with ears listen. That's Matthew 13, 41 through 43. Today's scripture is another one of those passages that seems to suggest some of us are righteous and destined to spend eternity with God, and some of us are evildoers headed to the fires of hell. Some of us are wheat, some of us are weeds. The straight read of this passage sounds like the evildoers will be fed into the fire, where they will wail in pain, and the righteous will shine with the light of God. Wow. Hell. Depending on your translation, there are one to two dozen references to hell in the New Testament. These passages include stories of the rich man who ignores suffering in Luke 16, 19 through 31, and religious leaders who miss the point in Matt 23.15. And beyond these stories, there are other references to sorting, judgment, and fire, such as Matt 25, 45 and Luke 3.17. Marx Jesus tells his followers multiple times that self-mutilation is preferable than being thrown into hell. Purely on a fairness level, it is easier for most people to believe there is no God than to believe justice is a meaningless concept. People of all sorts of beliefs will tell you what goes around comes around. We want to live in a just world. We believe evil should be punished and goodness rewarded. The idea of hell as a place of judgment and pain for those who escaped proper consequences in life can be a comfort or terrifying, depending on which side of the line you place yourself. Hell can be shorthand for the reckoning and accountability our tormentors deserve, but never got. Like uppercase capital H, E-L-L, the place, and hell, the idea of a place of reckoning in our Bible, and retain a sense that justice will prevail without abandoning belief in God's mercy and love. That is a giant question. What I'm asking is how do you deal with Matthew 13, 41 through 43 and other passages like it while also reading the words of Isaiah? I am the first and I am the last. Do not fear or be afraid. There is no other rock. One approach is to choose to read these scriptures with different eyes while salvaging the promise of justice. There are ways to reconcile a God of love with a place of painful reconsideration. I invite you to listen again. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their father. Let anyone with ears listen. They will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers. It is the causes of sin and the causes of all who do evil that will be collected out. The causes. The Greek word here is scandalon. We find it several dozen times in Scripture, but it's an unusual word, not found in almost any other ancient text. Scandalon has been variously translated in the Bible as a cause, stumbling block, trespass, impediment, temptation, trap or snare. We've talked about this word before. A scandalon is a baited trigger. Think of those little wire trap that you catch the mice with, with the little spring. The scandalon is the little wire you put the cheese on that triggers the snapping jaw that dispatches the mouse. A scandalon ties something desirable and life-giving to life-ending consequences. This passage promises that the triggers of sin will be collected to burn. The scandalon the causes. Next, most English translation tells us that evildoers will be collected and thrown into the furnace of fire. The words translated here as evildoers. Well, they're literally the Greek phrase, doing what is not permitted by law. Got that? The Greek, doing what is not permitted by law, has been turned into the word evildoers in our English. By that definition, anyone who has ever forgotten to put on their turn signal is an evildoer. And yes, I realize we are talking about religious law here with the word scandal on. By that religious law definition, anyone who has worn a cotton polyblend t-shirt is an evildoer. If that is all it takes to be condemned to hell, who is this god of quote-unquote love that we follow and worship? What I want you to notice in all of this is that the translators of our English language Bible, who have been raised on 1,500 years of the idea that hell is a destination, read this phrase, doing what is not permitted by law, in a way that they do not in most other places. Here in Matt 13, they translate it as evildoers. So instead of translating this phrase, doing what is not permitted by law as a verb, doing this bad thing, our scripture translators give us a noun. Person who does this bad thing. Translation is interpretation. The translators, though well-meaning, are the ones consigning people to the furnace of fire, not the original scripture. This scripture states that the causes of sin and the causes of all evil actions will be collected out and will burn. Not the people, not the evildoers. The causes of the sin and all the malicious reasons we have evildoers in the first place will be burned off. But wait, in that furnace there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Doesn't this indicate people themselves are in hell? Let's reconsider this passage as well. Have you ever had a personal reckoning in which you looked, I mean, really looked at why you made harmful choices? If you look at the root of your not so great choices and violations, you have stared down your own questionable motivations and ugly past. This passage suggests that our worst decisions will be known for what they are. Sins committed because of a scandalon. There were reasons. Looking back, it was a trap. We took the bait. When the causes of sin are destroyed in a refining fire, our actions remain. We made those bad choices. We hurt people. We did not live out the will of God. We live bound by fear, greed, anger, despair, and cruelty. Facing this reality, there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. If only we could have seen it all earlier. What is left on the other side of that refining fire is our true identity as beloved children of God. Then our scandalon burned away, the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their father. Let anyone with ears listen. Matt 13, 41 through 43 does not say, good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell. Today's scripture is part of a larger conversation about what ensnares us. It describes the experience of reckoning, the resulting grief, and our eventual transformation. We don't need to keep reading into scripture an afterlife location of fiery condemnation for hell to be real. There is indeed a place of judgment and painful reckoning in this life and the next that restores justice and alignment with God's loving will for us. And God does love us. Isaiah says, do not fear or be afraid. There is indeed a place of painful reckoning. We can call that place hell. It sure feels like hell when we're in it. But we aren't cast into hell by an angry God if we color outside the lines of our Methodist coloring book. Even without a lake of fire, we can think of hell as a reality and also a natural consequence of sin. Because becoming fully reconciled to God requires us to become fully reconciled to ourselves and our history, good and bad. And that reckoning hurts like hell. This passage from Matthew is just one of many about hell. I am not a biblical scholar, and I know only enough Greek to get me into trouble. You may disagree with this approach, this translation opinion, or this particular reading of this text, and that is okay. However, I do think as a Christian community, it's time to reread these scriptures about hell with more love, knowledge, and nuance. It's time to read them remembering a God who says, I am the first and I am the last. Do not fear or be afraid. There is no other rock. It's time to return home to a God of love. Amen. Good word for the road this week. If we cannot live with a vengeful God, but also cannot live without a God of justice, we do have options. This week I encourage you to think of ways you still feel unreconciled to God, ways you've stumbled. You don't need to do anything with that info, but just start thinking about it. Because there is a place of reconciliation, and if you know to look for it, you will find it. God loves us. God doesn't wish for us to be in hell.

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