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Last night we did our study on the parable of the wheat & tares. However, although the reading we took of it was useful, it seemed disconnected from the historicity of the text.

For instance, we simply assumed that Jesus meant the mixed wheat and tares waiting for harvest to refer to our own church (or perhaps society) situation, with believers and unbelievers intermingled. But I have the greatest difficulty seeing how Jesus could have been speaking about anything resembling life today. How would his hearers, Jews all, have known what the global spread of Christianity would become, 2000 years later? How would they have known even what Christianity itself is? How would they, even before the gospel had moved outside Israel, have understood the movement called 'church' that sprang up as an alternative to Israel? I suggest they had difficulty enough knowing what 'following Jesus' meant for themselves as second-Temple Jews responding to their own national Messiah; far less would they have comprehended an established trans-national church comprised mostly of gentiles, amidst fully gentile nations!

In short, our reading seemed fraught with problems. Most of all, it lifted the text from the narrative context, leaving it without an ascertainable meaning that can be pinned down. If my words aren't understood in the context of my hearers and our society - the pool of meanings that we share and can reasonably be said to use - then they are wax noses, and can be shaped to whatever is desired.

By way of contrast, that which Jesus' hearers did know, in the wider context of Israel's national hopes and dreams, can be used to understand what he told them. They knew that Jesus was claiming to be bringing their long-hoped-for kingdom of YHWH, but that he was doing it in a most extraordinary way. Here, then, Jesus tells a story about that kingdom that is arriving in the midst of Israel. They also knew that when the kingdom came, their current age was supposed to end, with God's people (Israel) finally vindicated and established in favour in a new age, forever. That was what Israel kept telling herself; what she longed for. But Jesus had encouraged those who followed them to think of themselves as the true people of God, the true planting of YHWH. He was bringing the kingdom and they were its inhabitants, the seed. How then should they act? Should they uproot those outside the kingdom, but strangely found in its midst? This is a political question indistinguishable from religious commitments. Shall we rise with the sword and execute thy judgement, O Lord? Here, then, Jesus tells a cryptic story about the patience required during the arrival of this kingdom, until the end of the age, when YHWH Himself would bring judgment and vindication - exactly that which was looked-for at the coming of the kingdom. So here is this man, claiming to be the one to bring about Israel's destiny, now, telling old stories with new twists, re-orienting the kingdom around himself, describing what was going on right before the eyes of his hearers: Israel's destiny was arriving. No wonder Jesus' disciples asked for clarification!


I think it's indicative that orthodox Jews understand this point very well: and they deny that Jesus was the Messiah. They see the connection, and therefore think that the age of Moses is still with us. It is either Christ or Moses, and Moses' age - the one into which Jesus was born and in which his followers heard him tell his subversive kingdom-stories - ended with the burning of the tares in the fires of Jerusalem, making it a rubbish-heap in AD70.