Mark Whittall

The kingdom of God is like a man who sees a crowd of 10,000 hungry people at the end of day. Instead of sending them away, he takes five loaves and two fish, blesses and breaks them, and gives them to the crowd. And all eat and are filled, and there are even 12 baskets left over. We’ve been listening to parables of the kingdom of God the last two Sundays, the yeast, the mustard seed, the weeds and the wheat and so on. This week in our gospel reading, we see the same thing ac

If you were here last Sunday you might recall that we took two of our readings, the story of Jacob the cheat, and Jesus’ parable of the wheat and weeds, and we put them together, and we found that we needed both of them to tell the story of how God responds to our human situation. So I thought we’d try the same thing again this week, this time with the reading from Romans and with the gospel from Matthew. Two very different texts. Two very different agendas. In the epistle

Something has gone wrong. There are weeds among the wheat. The field had been sowed with good seed, but when the wheat comes up, weeds appear as well. The wheat is threatened, the crop might fail. And the slaves of the householder are the ones who face real consequences, the ones who will go hungry if the crop fails. They’re upset. Anxious. Angry. And they want to do something about it. Isn’t that how we react when things go wrong? Something has gone terribly wrong in o