Living in the Spirit
July 20, 2014

 Scripture Reading: Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 

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! — Matthew 13:41-43

I was overdosed on the second coming as a child to the extent that for many years I did not want to read or hear anything that remotely related to it. I have since attended a seminary class on Revelation and facilitated a study of the book of Daniel in my Sunday School Class. What brought about that change? A wise seminary professor said to me that such works have a lot more to say to us than my limited experience had taught. It was a struggle because I started with a serious negative bias. One of the joys of plunging into this literature was finding that it is the source of the words for some of the most beautiful music ever written. Sometimes we need to let the arts say what we cannot adequately describe in words, but that is for another devotion.

Matthew in our scripture today says at that end time Christ will send angels to pluck out and destroy all sin and all evildoers. This is good news for we all engage in practices that we call sin, those things that makes us miss the mark toward which we along with Christ are striving or become separated from God. But what or who are evildoers? Is that different from being a sinner?

The Greek word translated in the NRSV as evildoer means, very simply put, having no law.* Now for those of us who accept Jesus as the Christ, we also accept his statement that he came not to abolish the law but to fulfill the law. (Matthew 5.17) I take that to mean that he is not as interested in our ridged obedience to the letter of the law as much as he is to our being ever vigilante to the intent of the law. Laws are not for individuals; they are created to provide order to the interactions in community. Thus, loving God is intrinsically intertwined with loving our neighbors as we love ourselves. Sin may indeed deal with our separation from God. Evildoing, it would seem, relates to our failure to love our neighbors. Evildoing indeed is a sin as it surely separates us from God, but it apparently is to be dealt with in its own right in the final judgment. It indeed is our interactions in community that Jesus highlights in Matthew 25 when he talks about separating the sheep from the goats.

Prayer: Father, forgive me when I become self-righteous in law and when I fail to love my neighbor as myself. Amen

*Kittle, Gerhard and Friedrich, Gerhard Editors, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume by Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Will B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000.

All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of American. Used by permission. All rights reserved.