Lectionary Commentaries for February 23, 2025
Seventh Sunday after Epiphany

The Taizé community has put to music words from St. Teresa of Ávila, offered here in English translation:

Nothing can trouble, nothing can frighten.
Those that seek God shall never go wanting.
Nothing can trouble, nothing can frighten.
God alone fills us.¹

The hymn verse describes the reality out of which Jesus speaks in Luke 6:27–38. Earlier in this chapter of Luke, Jesus has spoken to those excluded, reviled, and defamed on his account. He offered them blessings and encouraged them toward joy. Now he encourages all who hear him to live out of that same joy, regardless of what others are directing toward them. When they do, they will be resisting hate, curses, abuse, theft, and judgment by responding to those things with love, mercy, nonviolence, generosity, and forgiveness.

Jesus knows how different the ethic is that he commends from that which is widely acceptable: “If you love those who love you, what credit [or “what grace”; the word in Greek is charis] is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them” (Luke 6:32). That is the acceptable ethic.

The implication is that anyone can love those who love them. Anyone can lend to someone from whom they expect repayment. That kind of love and lending is a transaction. You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.

A closer look at such transaction-based behavior reveals the problem: In such a world, what you do dictates what I do. When we return hate with hate, the original hate has won! It inspires and directs our actions. This is not to be. In the reign of God, what we do is not directed by what others do to us. In the reign of God, what we do is a response to the God who alone fills us, the God who “is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked” (Luke 6:35).

Three additional observations may be helpful to the preacher.

Life together

First, Jesus is speaking to all those who are listening to him (see also 6:27). He speaks throughout the Sermon on the Plain to the people gathered as a group. The King James translation will show the places where Jesus says “you” in the singular by translating the Greek as “thee” or “thou.” The plural form is translated as “you” or “ye.” In the Sermon on the Plain, only Luke 6:29–30 and 41–42 are addressed to individuals. This may be because these verses circulated apart from the rest and were incorporated into the Sermon on the Plain by Luke. Perhaps these verses are directed to individuals because cheeks, coats, goods, and motes in eyes are possessed by individuals.

The great majority of the Sermon on the Plain, however, including its exhortations to love enemies and show mercy like that of the Most High, is spoken to the community of those listening to Jesus. This ethic is not meant to be tried alone. The text is not a directive, for instance, to an individual suffering spousal abuse to bear up under it while the rest of her Christian congregation looks the other way. In the reign of God, we live and act in community, which means, bluntly, that we concern ourselves with each other’s business more than the transaction ethic might suggest we should.

Historical and contemporary expressions of Christianity offer examples. One thinks of the accountability groups, or “bands,” that were part of John Wesley’s work to reform the Anglican church, or small-group ministry in the current day. The goal of such groups is to support one another in Christian life and witness. The lifestyle commended by Jesus in the Sermon on the Plain is life lived in such a group.

An ethic of resistance

The second point to be made is that Jesus offers his ethic as a way for the community of his followers to resist the tit-for-tat of the present age, not to be passive in the face of it. When we live the ethic of this Sermon in the face of this world’s violence, we are collectively saying to those who hate, abuse, strike, judge, and condemn, “You are not the boss of me.” We are demonstrating that bad behavior cannot goad us into reacting in kind. We are resisting the evils we deplore.

In his passion, Jesus will perform the ethic he commends here. He resists by praying for the one (might we say, the enemy?) who will deny him three times (see also Luke 22:31–34). When he speaks on the cross, it is to forgive (see also Luke 22:34, 43) and to commend his spirit to the merciful Father he refers to in Luke 6:36. He resists violence with self-giving love.

“Not as the world gives”

He dies, of course, prematurely and violently. This fact brings us to the last observation for the preacher to consider. The “good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over” is not a reference to success in the transactional economy that Jesus calls his followers to resist settling for and settling into. Our giving is indeed met with God’s giving, but that is because it is in the nature of God to give, not because we found the magic coins for the cosmic vending machine.

“Not as the world gives do I give to you,” Jesus says elsewhere (John 14:27). We might imagine the pressed-down, shaken-together, running-over measure as the measure of God’s promise to fill us precisely at those times when, by all worldly measures, the life is being drained out of us. Jesus dies on the cross. In resistance and response, the Father raises the Son from the dead. Following this pattern, the Most High continues to fill those who are empty and call to life those as good as dead.

Notes

1. Teresa of Ávila. The text is available at URL: https://hymnary.org/text/nada_te_turbe_nada_te_espante, accessed January 7, 2025.

This week’s first reading brings us to the climactic moment of Joseph’s story in Genesis. For some time, Joseph has been ruling as a kind of vice pharaoh over Egypt. But his identity as a Hebrew has been hidden. In this scene, he “reveals” (to use a great Epiphany word) his true identity to his biological brothers, who have come from Canaan to Egypt, desperate for food to survive a regional famine. Before this big reveal, they had assumed Joseph was either enslaved among the Midianites or dead—for it was they themselves who sold him away! This moment of revelation is powerful, told with high drama, high stakes, and exquisite irony.

In fact, all this is such a good story that it can be difficult to preach without killing its drama. Preaching this revelatory moment in the story in isolation from its backstory is kind of like telling the punchline of a joke without any of the setup. If preachers jump right to this narrative moment, it could confuse their congregations—especially if they are unfamiliar with the long sweep of the Joseph novella in Genesis.

Of course, preachers could choose to toss out the lectionary strictures and preach the whole Joseph story as kind of a longer, multi-week series of its own. Alternatively, one could select some helpful excerpts from the backstory to read in addition to this climactic moment.

One of the plot points to surely note is that this is not the first time Joseph and his brothers have seen each other since they sold him into slavery. By this point in the story, Joseph’s brothers have been back and forth between Canaan (their homeland) and Egypt a number of times. And Joseph, unrecognized by his brothers, has put them through an emotional wringer. He has pretended to think they were spies and thieves, planting evidence to frame them. In light of that accusation, Joseph has made his brothers fear for their lives and for the life of their starving, elderly father Jacob back in Canaan.

The throbbing irony of all this setup builds the tension that leads to the climactic moment of revelation. Once Joseph reveals himself, will he exact revenge on his jealous brothers who ganged up to sell him into slavery?

God intended it for good?

Perhaps the key line in this key scene comes when Joseph (after revealing himself) interprets his life story theologically, like this: “God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant. … So it was not you who sent me here, but God” (Genesis 45:7–8). Or, as Joseph restates it a bit later, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good” (50:20). It is tempting to read these verses and jump immediately into preaching a powerful, theologically rich sermon that claims, “See?! Everything that happens, even the terrible things, are part of God’s sovereign plan!” And in a way, this biblical text does promote something like that.

But you probably don’t need me to tell you that when you preach that kind of doctrine of divine providence, you run the risk of minimizing people’s actual suffering and trauma. In effect, you are asking them to simply get over it—to accept their pain (like Joseph’s) as a necessary part of God’s cosmic plan.

You may remember a few years ago, the news cycle went wild when a prominent (and notably white) megachurch pastor tried to make a similar theological jump about the trauma of slavery in the United States. He said that slavery was awful, of course, but that—like all things—it must have been part of God’s design, and part of its effect was to build a society that brought much blessing and prosperity to white people. So instead of saying that slavery manifested “white privilege,” he proposed that we call the impact of slavery “white blessing.”¹

Now, there are all sorts of problems with what he said. But underlying his words, the reason that a nice white guy and veteran pastor could say something so torturously racist is that he was trying to ram the square peg of the evil of slavery into the round hole of his doctrine of God’s providence—such as many derive from Genesis 45:8 or 50:20. And that just doesn’t work. Furthermore, it is dangerous.

A more nuanced take on “providence”

I feel a need to clarify here that I actually do believe in God’s providence over what happens in the world, but it is a doctrine that requires some nuance. And I think a closer look at Joseph’s story gives us some of that nuance. For example, even though Joseph credits God with using his brothers’ treachery to save Egypt and, by extension, Jacob’s whole clan, he still names their sin, saying, “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt” (Genesis 45:4). There is some “truth” spoken into this “truth and reconciliation” moment.

In addition, Joseph doesn’t forgive immediately, but only after (as told in the previous chapter) his brother Judah has offered to rescue Benjamin by taking his place as a slave in Egypt. It appears that Joseph looked for some growth in character among his brothers before offering them reconciliation.

Joseph even requires a kind of “reparation” or “restorative justice” for his brothers’ betrayal, in that they—the ones who sold Joseph away out of jealousy for their father’s love—are tasked by Joseph with reporting all of his successes to their father: “You must tell my father how greatly I am honored in Egypt” (Genesis 45:13).

Therefore, even though Joseph frames all that has happened as somehow incorporated into God’s providence, nevertheless human agency, responsibility, and accountability are not erased. Joseph forgives his brothers not because they are pawns in some unstoppable divine cosmic plan, but as a gift of grace.

Grace overturns evil

Joseph chooses grace because he recognizes that God has parried even his brothers’ treachery, evil as it was, toward the overcoming of a devastating regional disaster. Grace does not excuse evil, but it releases the claim of retribution and opens the door to reconciliation.

I believe it is right to affirm that God is still in control of things. Chaos and evil are not going to win in the end. But affirming God’s providence does not mean that evil is part of God’s cosmic design. Rather, it is an ungodly feature of the world that God overcomes—and sometimes even commandeers—to bring liberation.

God can turn even our own pain toward good for us, sometimes using that pain as a way to help us connect with and help others who are suffering. That is a hopeful thought, without erasing, demeaning, or minimizing the pain itself.

Providence in hindsight

Finally, it is important to remember—as the Joseph story reinforces—that providence is a “hindsight” doctrine. God’s providence can only be recognized in hindsight, in the face of unexpected good. It is not a way to explain away present evil or pain or trauma. It is not a “get over it and move on” doctrine. Providence is a way to understand, looking back, how unexpected good could possibly have come out of legitimately evil circumstances.

The reconciliation that happens at the end of the Joseph story comes bundled with plenty of hard truth-telling and with restorative justice. It does not paper over the sins perpetrated or the pain they caused. But it does affirm that such evil does not limit God’s power to accomplish good. And that is a fuller, thicker way to talk about the good that God brings about in this text and in our world.

Notes

1. “Megachurch Pastor Apologizes for ‘White Blessing’ Comments,” AP News, June 17, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/e2ca67fa8f349641a1d8565255b87e98, accessed November 5, 2024.

The issue at the center of Psalm 37 concerns the intersection of moral, ethical, and economic existence for the faithful.¹ The advice of the acrostic and wisdom psalm is a heartfelt and difficult one: to vigorously live out the hope founded on faith in the God of the righteous and the meek.

As such, the psalm deals with the connections between the earthly reality of economic and ethical living and the heavenly reality of divine moral will. Those who strive for righteousness are choosing to live in a world in which God reigns as the moral and economic authority—not, as it may be tempting to believe, the wicked, the wrongdoers, and their minions. Righteous living, in other words, is a protest against the machinations of the wicked and a concrete expression of faith in God.

Verse 35 clearly depicts the problematic center of the lived experience of the psalm:

³⁵ I have seen the wicked oppressing,
and towering like a cedar of Lebanon.² (See also 37:7, 16)

The psalm ascribes wicked behavior to the prosperous, figured in verse 35 as the legendary cedars of Lebanon. In addition, the psalm suggests that prosperity is the fruit of wrongdoing, including the oppression of the poor and righteous (37:7, 12, 14, 32). The other side of the wicked-prosperous equation is the call for the poor to commit themselves to godly righteousness (see also 37:3–5). That is, the psalm presents a bifurcated vision of lived experience in which the wicked prosper by their wickedness and the righteous suffer despite their righteousness. 

The bifurcated moral vision fuels the rhetorical passion of the psalm from the beginning:

¹ Do not fret because of the wicked;
do not be envious of wrongdoers,
² for they will soon fade like the grass,
and wither like the green herb. (37:1–2)

The psalm addresses the righteous poor throughout, and the opening counsel against worry and envy assumes, first, that the poor suffer on account of the wicked wrongdoers and, second, that the wicked prosper on account of their oppressive wrongdoings (37:7, 35).

The simplistic equation of wickedness and prosperity makes the moral clarity of verse 2 possible: God will destroy the prosperous because they are wicked. And the clarity of that moral vision funds the rhetorical force of the psalm’s repeated plea for trust in God: “Trust in the LORD”(37:3); “Take delight in the LORD” (37:4); “Commit your way to the LORD” (37:5); “Be still before the LORD” (37:7).

The simple moral vision in which the prosperous are wicked and the poor are righteous serves the rhetorical purpose of the psalm well: namely, the exhortation of the meek toward righteous living and faithfulness toward God. The apparent moral clarity, however, can become a moral pitfall and, in any case, is a mirage. We do well, therefore, to examine closely and appreciate more fully the complexity of the psalm’s moral vision concerning the intersection among economic, ethical, and moral realities. 

The pitfall is the temptation to take too seriously the simplistic division between the prosperous and the poor and between the wicked and the righteous. The temptation to do so is endemic to the psalm, since the psalm itself seems to cast such a vision. But also endemic to the psalm is a counterargument to the simplistic moral vision. 

The first counterargument is the psalm’s confident declaration that God oversees both the moral universe and the economic reality. Consistently throughout the psalm, God is said to be against the wicked and their wrongdoings and for the righteous and their good deeds. Furthermore, in this theological vision of the moral/economic landscape, the wicked are destined for destruction and the righteous for the inheritance of the land—which means, in the agrarian society of ancient Israel, financial security and, within the context of the Hebrew Bible, the fulfillment of God’s promise to Israel.

This theological claim that God oversees both the moral and economic dimensions of lived life speaks against a strictly bifurcated reality in which the wicked oppress the poor and the rich oppose the righteous. In fact, the temptation to buy into the simplistic moral vision that binds wickedness and prosperity is precisely what the psalm warns against from beginning to end.

The reason the poor are to eschew fretting about the wicked and being envious of wrongdoers for their prosperity, according to the psalm, is because God, and not the seemingly powerful wicked wrongdoers, is the one who is ultimately in control. That is, the perception that the wicked are in control of the lived economic realities of the poor is a momentary mirage. 

If the poor and the righteous fret about the wicked and are envious of wrongdoers, it is because they have begun to believe that the wicked prosper by their wickedness (37:7) and are tempted to mimic them. The psalm speaks against such a perception as a mirage and declares that God is in control. It is God who will give the land as an inheritance to those who trust in him and choose to live in righteousness (37:9, 22, 29, 34). That is to say, to believe that the wicked prosper by their wrongdoing is to fail to trust in God.

Two further temptations and potential misperceptions arise once we ascribe to God full control over the moral and the economic realities.

The first temptation is to interpret the present situation, in which the wicked seem to have prospered by their wrongdoing, as a permanent feature of divine rule—that is, as proof of divine failure to uphold the promise of salvation and redemption for the righteous who trust in the Lord (37:39–40).

The second potential misperception is to defer God’s promised salvation perpetually into the future. The former leads to despair, and the second to an otherworldly focus. 

This brings us to the more nuanced moral and economic vision of the psalm. The psalm acknowledges that the wicked prosper by their wrongdoings, including the oppression of the poor and the righteous. However, it does not equate prosperity squarely with wickedness. For example, verses 21–22 speak of “the righteous [who] are generous and keep giving” and apparently have already been “blessed by the LORD” and have “inherit[ed] the land.” The prosperous may be equally wicked and righteous. And the same can be said about the poor. The poor can be wicked (37:22).

In the same vein, the psalm exhorts the oppressed and the righteous to trust in God because they also experience the temptation to fret and be envious of the wicked wrongdoers, to believe that prosperity can be had by wickedness. In sum, the psalm complicates any effort to bind prosperity to either wickedness or righteousness, while steadfastly maintaining that God favors the righteous and the oppressed against the claims of the wicked.

In conclusion, Psalm 37 speaks against the temptation to see wickedness, especially the oppression of others, as a sustainable path toward prosperity. God is not neutral about the ethics of economic life and condemns gain that comes at the cost of injustice and oppression. Rather, the psalm claims that God looks with prejudicial interest on the plight of the poor and remains committed to a blessedness that builds on the moral and ethical good.

³Trust in the LORD, and do good;
so you will live in the land, and enjoy security. (37:3)

Notes

1. This commentary was published previously on this website for February 20, 2022. 
2. Biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version.

In today’s passage, Paul functions as the Corinthians’ teacher. He starts to bring his long discourse on resurrection to its climax by exploring the nature of the resurrected body. “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” (15:35). These questions are probably crafted by Paul and put in the mouth of an imaginary interlocutor (“someone”), rather than Paul’s quotation of a real person in the Corinthian community (it is different from 15:12). Right after posing the rhetorical question in verse 35, Paul retorts immediately by calling the hypothetical person “Fool!” (verse 36) and sets the stage for the coming lesson.

Of course, one does not have to emulate Paul’s chastising pedagogy. “What would you prefer? Am I to come to you with a stick, or with love in a spirit of gentleness?” (1 Corinthians 4:21). No modern preacher would teach her congregation by calling them fools, wielding a stick, or rebuking their slow understanding. One should focus on what Paul wants to communicate through this passage and how to appropriate it creatively.

In 15:36–38, Paul first employs agricultural metaphors to explain the resurrection body. It is probably common knowledge that the seed (which seems dead when sown) and the actual plant that grows out of it are radically different. Paul interprets this natural pattern of plants as God’s sovereign work. God gives each of the dead seeds its own future body. Likewise, the current mortal body of believers will transform into a new body from God.

In verses 39–41 (not part of this week’s passage), perhaps catering to his audience, Paul shifts from agriculture to philosophy. Paul suggests a taxonomy of bodies and kinds of flesh (animals, birds, fish, stars, et cetera), by which Paul demonstrates that a resurrection body classification makes sense.¹

Building upon the aforementioned nature analogies, Paul articulates the difference between the earthly and the resurrection body in a series of opposite pairings (15:42–44):

Paul depicts what is sown as inferior (perishable, dishonor, et cetera), and what is raised as superior (imperishable, glory, et cetera). The first three pairs consist of figurative examples, but the final contrast (physical body versus spiritual body) directly addresses the issue at hand.

It should be noted that Paul does not view the difference between the current body and the resurrection body as one between physicality/materiality and immateriality. In this regard, the New Revised Standard Version translation, “physical body” and “spiritual body,” is misleading. The terms indicate relationships. Incorporating Paul’s clarification in verses 45–49, the contrast between the two bodies is better phrased this way:

• sōma psychikon: a body animated by psychē in association with the earthly one (Adam); in other words, the living psychē
• sōma pneumatikon: a body animated by pneuma in association with the heavenly one (Christ); in other words, the life-giving pneuma

Or, more simply put, they are the Adamic body and the Christic body. Both bodies are concrete bodies, but bodies configured in different relationships.

Reading this teaching 2,000 years later, it is unclear whether (or how far) Paul convinced his Corinthian pupils. Maybe it was effective in its day, but it is still puzzling to a modern audience. While Paul does not devalue the body itself (because at the resurrection all will have bodies), he regards the earthly body as inferior and waits for a better body to come. How would this teaching be helpful for our diverse bodies?

As an ancient apocalyptic Jew, Paul does not answer modern questions explicitly. Yet, it is possible to seek and find pieces of truth revealed obliquely in Paul’s text. As Paul points out, all bodies are given by God (15:38), and no one can judge the way God works. Not all flesh is alike (verse 49). Whatever color of skin, ethnicity, gender/sexuality your body identifies with, the difference is appreciated and accepted as God’s own gracious gift.

Compared to the future glory of the resurrected body, all bodies on this side of eternity are temporal (“perishable”) and vulnerable to suffering (“dishonor,” “weakness”). Nevertheless, God will not simply condemn or eliminate these bodies. God will graciously clothe them with bodies that are no longer temporal nor vulnerable (verse 53), so that all may have transformed bodies, bodies that are in full relationship with Christ (life-giving pneuma)’s body. Paul says that this transformation is a mystery (verse 51). Until this mystery is fully revealed, Paul encourages his audience to be devoted to the work of the Lord with steadfastness (verse 58).

As Holly Hearon notes, “The fulfillment of that promise [of resurrection] is, from Paul’s perspective, dependent upon our remaining embedded (or embodied) in Christ in the present age.”² In the end, Paul’s vision articulated in the first century points to divine realities in the modern world: “GLBTI communities might then remind Paul that in God’s creative imagination, a body can encompass far more diversity and complexity than he could possibly suppose.”³

Paul’s rhetorical question about the nature of the body (15:35) should not be misunderstood as an invitation to a sophisticated theory of what this resurrection body will be or how this is all possible (this, Paul would rebuke!). The conclusion of the resurrection discourse is clear: it encourages a creative response to God’s work through embodied lives, in all forms, here on earth (verses 57–58).

Notes

1. Jeffrey R. Asher, Polarity and Change in 1 Corinthians 15: A Study of Metaphysics, Rhetoric, and Resurrection, HUT 42 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 100–110.
2. Holly E. Hearon, “1 and 2 Corinthians,” in The Queer Bible Commentary, ed. Deryn Guest et al. (London: SCM Press, 2006), 612.
3. Hearon, “1 and 2 Corinthians,” 613.