Sixth Sunday after Trinity by Rev’d Lucy
Genesis 25.19–34
Romans 8.1–11
Matthew 13.1–9, 18–23
Our first reading begins, as so many stories in Genesis begin, with a genealogy: “These are the descendants of Isaac, Abraham’s son” (Genesis 25.19). God had promised Abraham a land, descendants beyond counting, and that through them all the families of the earth would find blessing (Genesis 12.2–3). That promise has now passed to another generation, and the question is whether it can pass any further.
Isaac is forty when he marries Rebekah, and sixty when the twins are born (Genesis 25.20, 26). For twenty years the covenant promise made to Abraham seems to have no future at all. Like Sarah before her, and Rachel after her, Rebekah waits through years of childlessness. Then Isaac prays to the Lord for Rebekah, and she conceives. But the children struggle so violently within her that she goes to enquire of the Lord: “If it is to be this way, why do I live?” (Genesis 25.22). The Hebrew is more ambiguous than our translation, closer to “Why am I thus?”, or even simply, “Why am I?” We know far more today about the extraordinary demands that a twin pregnancy places on a body, and the greater risks it carries. Anyone who has carried twins through weeks of heat like these may have some sense of what Rebekah describes. She has no medical language for it, only the struggle she feels within her and the question she brings to God, as recorded in the text.
And she is answered. “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger” (Genesis 25.23). Later Jewish readers under Roman occupation heard hope in this verse. Esau was the father of Edom, and Edom had become a name for Rome itself, so that “the elder shall serve the younger” promised that the empire pressing down on them would not have the last word.
Christians have often heard the oracle in the opposite direction, as though the elder serving the younger meant Israel giving way to the Church. That reading has done real harm. Paul quotes this very oracle in Romans 9, yet only two chapters later asks, “Has God rejected his people?” and answers immediately, “By no means!” (Romans 11.1). Whatever Genesis is saying here, it cannot mean that God’s promise to Israel has been revoked.
What the oracle never says is that the course of the promise rests on anything either boy has done. Rebekah is told this before either of her children have ever drawn breath, and the story that follows certainly resists any tidy assignment of virtue and vice. Esau grows up a hunter, a man of the field, and Isaac loves him for it; Jacob keeps to the tents, and Rebekah loves him (Genesis 25.27–28). When parents show such favouritism and partiality, it inevitably breeds jealousy and enmity between their offspring. When Esau comes in famished and asks for “some of that red stuff,” Jacob names his price, and Esau, who can see no further than his hunger, lets the birthright go: “I am about to die; of what use is a birthright to me?” The narrator’s verdict is pretty unambiguous, “thus Esau despised his birthright” (Genesis 25.34). Meanwhile, Jacob ‘the heel grasper’, has taken his brother’s desperation and exploited it, and he is the one the promise now runs through. If we’re honest, I suspect we recognise them both in ourselves, though we would rather not: the hunger that cannot see past the next hour, and the grasping that knows exactly what it wants.
The pattern does not end with Jacob and Esau. Jacob, his mother’s favourite here, becomes a father who favours one son so plainly that the others come to hate him, and throw Joseph in a pit, and let him be carried off to Egypt (Genesis 37.3–4, 24, 28). The wound is handed down like an heirloom.
When Matthew opens his Gospel with the long genealogy that begins with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and runs down to Jesus, he does not clean the line up either. He names Tamar, wronged by Judah and driven to desperate measures; Rahab and Ruth, a Canaanite and a Moabite who become mothers in Israel; and Bathsheba, whom he calls “the wife of Uriah”, so that David’s crime remains legible in the record (Matthew 1.3, 5, 6). These women do not stand in the genealogy as examples of failure. Their names carry histories of injustice, displacement, courage, loss and unexpected faithfulness into the family of Christ.
At the end of that line, Jesus is conceived of the Holy Spirit and carried by a young unmarried woman from a small town in an occupied province. The promise comes to fulfilment through a wounded and fragile family marked by division and failure, by people drawn in from beyond Israel’s borders, and by lives shaped through circumstances no one would have chosen. It arrives as gift. Its future rests on God’s faithfulness.
That child grows up, is crucified, and raised from the dead, and Paul is writing about what his death and resurrection have accomplished. Sin, for Paul, is a power that gets hold of human lives and will not let go, turning even good things to its own ends. He is not setting a Christian people against a Jewish one, or the Spirit against the law, which he has just called holy and just and good (Romans 7.12). The law has not failed, but human life under sin cannot bring about the good that the law commands.
Paul calls that life “flesh”. Augustine gave its posture a memorable name: homo incurvatus in se, the human person curved inward, so that even our kindnesses are quietly measured by what they return to us, and the horizon shrinks to the size of the self. It is a kind of imprisonment, and not one from which we can simply decide to escape.
And to people who cannot free themselves, Paul says this. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8.1). Which is why we began this morning by confessing our sins. We did not begin by proving ourselves worthy to be here. We began by hearing God’s forgiveness declared over us.
God has done what we could not do. In love, God sent the Son “in the likeness of sinful flesh” and there, Paul says, “condemned sin” (Romans 8.3). God’s judgement is directed against the power that holds human life captive, and those who are in Christ are set free.
Paul then moves from Christ’s once-for-all act, to the life of the Spirit within God’s people. The Spirit is God’s own presence, dwelling in us and bringing about what human effort could not: the life towards which the law had always pointed. And the promise reaches all the way into our perishable bodies, the bodies that will fail us and are failing some of us now: “he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you” (Romans 8.11).
Now, with all that in mind, let’s listen again to our Gospel reading. “A sower went out to sow” (Matthew 13.3). Matthew’s explanation invites us to think about how the word is received, and there is a temptation, once again, to turn four kinds of ground into four fixed kinds of person: which one am I, and which one is the person in the next pew? That can produce a real existential anxiety, as though the parable were asking us to discover which settled category we belong to. Paul has already given us another word under which to hear it: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
Most of us, if we are honest, will recognise more than one of these conditions in ourselves. Sometimes the word cannot get in at all. Sometimes it springs up with joy and withers when it costs us something. Sometimes the cares of the world and the lure of wealth quietly crowd it out. And then, by grace, there is fruit.
The parable spends as much time looking at the ground as it does at the seed. The seed is the same seed everywhere, scattered by the same hand. What differs is what it meets when it lands: a path beaten hard by many feet, a thin covering of earth over rock, thorns established there long before the seed arrived. Human lives are formed like that too, by what we inherit, by what happens to us, by what grows up around us, and by what we let go on growing.
And before the parable says anything about the soils at all, it shows us a sower scattering seed across the whole field: on the path, on the rock, among the thorns and on the good soil alike. The kingdom is given away like that, generously and liberally, before anyone has been asked to prove themselves.
A few verses later Jesus tells another parable. When the servants find weeds among the wheat and want to pull them up, they are told to leave them: “let both of them grow together until the harvest” (Matthew 13.30). In pulling up the weeds they would uproot the wheat as well. The roots are tangled together beneath the surface. The field is not ours to sort.
Some of you may have visited Delcy Morelos’s installation in the Sculpture Court this summer, where soil and clay and hay and cinnamon and cloves have been built up into walls and passages, so that instead of standing over the earth you find yourself held inside it. When I visited, one of the attendants told me that Morelos had scattered clove seedlings across the sculpture. The heat of these last weeks came, and the seedlings were scorched and died. Jesus says exactly that of the seed on the rock: “when the sun rose, they were scorched, and since they had no root, they withered away” (Matthew 13.6).
Depth is not something a seed provides for itself. None of us begins on untouched ground. We inherit it from others, and we help prepare it for those who come after us.
What we can do is attend to the ground. In this church, in our homes and families, in our communities and workplaces, we help cultivate the ground in which other people hear the word of God. Standing inside Morelos’s sculpture made that strangely tangible for me. The ground in which something grows is never simply there. It has been formed over time, tended or neglected, made deeper or left shallow. Human communities are like that too.
We can make room for roots to go down, break up what has gone hard, and keep anxiety and money from taking all the light. We can keep scattering the word with the same generosity as the sower himself, resisting the temptation to decide in advance where it will or will not bear fruit. We cannot make the seed grow. Paul has already told us whose work that is: the Spirit dwelling among God’s people, giving life where we could never produce it for ourselves.
In a moment we will come to this table with empty hands. There is no bargain to strike here, nothing traded, nothing to prove, no birthright to be bought or sold. Christ gives himself to us in bread and wine. The God who kept his promise to Abraham’s family has given us his Spirit, which is at work in us and among us, deeper than we can see.