Homily for July 31st, 2014: Jeremiah 18:1-6; Matthew 13:47-53.
“Like clay in
the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, says the Lord.”
So speaks God in our first reading to his people of old,
through the prophet Jeremiah. The words are timeless. The Lord is speaking them
to us, right now. The things we experience, as we travel life’s way, are
shaping us, as the potter shapes the lump of wet clay on his swiftly turning
wheel. A litany of thanksgiving which I learned at age twelve, included
thanksgiving “for hardships, rebuffs, humiliations, disappointments, failures –
which remind me of my need of you.” Those things are painful. But they are one
way that God shapes us into the people he wants us to be. In a long life I have
known great success, but also great and painful failure. I have learned more
from my failures than I ever learned from success. We should thank God not only
for success, but also for our failures. We all have them.
Our gospel
reading contained a different symbol: the dragnet cast into the sea, which
collects everything in its path. In Matthew’s
gospel it immediately follows the parable of the weeds among the wheat, which
we heard last Saturday. Both parables have a similar message. Jesus’ first
hearers would easily have understood that message. They were familiar with
dietary laws, which separated unclean foods from those they were permitted to
eat. Sea creatures without fins or scales were unclean, and hence inedible. So
once the net is brought ashore, there must be a selection. The clean fish are
put into buckets and taken to market. Everything else is thrown away. “Thus it
will be at the end of the age,” Jesus tells us. “The angels will go out and
separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace.”
In the other parable they do the same with the weeds among the wheat.
God is not
mocked, Jesus is telling us. The power of evil, of which we see signs daily in
the morning headlines, and on the evening news on TV, is temporary. In the end,
goodness will triumph, and evil will be burned up in the flames of God’s
justice. That too is the gospel. That is the good news.
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