“Beware the gaps in the lectionary!”A Biblical studies professor of mine once said that.
Beware those places in the Sunday readings where verses get skipped over.
Okay, so if you are following along in the generic printed bulletins, you can’t tell that’s what happened a couple of minutes ago when Bruce read the Gospel. If you are reading from the online version, though, you can see the Scripture reference for this morning’s text is Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43. Verses 31-35, right there in the middle of the passage, are left out.
And who, you may ask, decided to do this? The North American Consultation on Common Texts, in collaboration with the International English Language Liturgical Consultation, decided to do this! And they know what they are doing, right?
I mean, all that’s in those five verses, between the story and Jesus’ explanation of it are a couple of “the kingdom of heaven is like” sayings, and a note that he liked teaching in parables. They don’t seem to have anything to do with this parable about a carefully planted field that gets contaminated under cover of darkness, and the meaning that his disciples, and you and I, are to draw from it.
Still, I’m not sure they’ve done us any favors by taking that short cut to the tidy wrapping up of a story that on the surface seems pretty simple but, if we sit with it a bit longer, pretty challenging...(read more)
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