Of
the four Gospels we have telling us of Jesus’ life, Luke is the one you would
be most likely to read as a bedtime story. There aren’t the demons of Mark;
there isn’t the slaughter of the innocent children of Matthew, there isn’t the
constant hand-wringing and “fear of the Jews” we find in John. None of the
Gospels are cuddly, but if there’s one that seems closest to “Minnesota nice” it is the Gospel of Luke. So,
when Luke says something that appears to be judgmental and harsh we should take
pause. These are a few moments when Luke is decidedly not “Minnesota nice,” moments where we are called
to remember what was at stake and that these aren’t just nice stories. This
Gospel is far more important than that.
Epiphany
is the day in the church calendar where we celebrate the revelation of Jesus as
God’s Son—usually it’s with a star that some kings follow to Bethlehem. This year, however, we’re in Luke
and the revelation comes in just a couple verses when the Holy Spirit descends
on him in baptism. In that moment, Jesus was shown to be more than just another
human being; the rumors and the prophecies were finally put to rest. Jesus was
the Son of God. For Luke, there could be nothing more important, but Luke is
also concerned about what the son of God is going to come and do. You have to
remember that people expected the messiah to come as a king and rule over the
nations. They expected a military ruler—one who would overthrow the Roman Empire and restore the Jewish people to power they
hadn’t known in centuries. Jesus did not live up to those expectations. The
people needed to know what it meant for the son of God to come and live in
their midst; it wasn’t what they were expecting.
This
is why John the Baptist comes to prepare the way. A couple of weeks ago we had
Mary telling us that this Jesus in her womb was going to overthrow everything,
which still sounded like he might be a military ruler, but John the Baptist tells
us this Jesus is so much bigger and more important that. Jesus is coming, he
says, to “baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in
his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his
granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire." Jesus is
coming to do things that the people didn’t even imagine. They wanted a king to
set them free through politics or war, but they got a Savior to free them from
something far more hideous, personal, and tricky: their sin.
The
line about the wheat and the chaff reminds us that Luke is not just a fluffy
Gospel. Luke wants us to know that Jesus will restore what was created good and
utterly destroy sin and the power of the devil. But this is where we are
handicapped by what I believe to be a bad translation of Luke’s Gospel. People
get confused when reading this, thinking that some of us are wheat and some of
us are chaff and Jesus’ job is to go around sorting which of us are good and
which of us have been naughty—kind of like a divine Santa Claus. Jesus is not
Santa Claus. You don’t get coal in your stocking from Jesus, and this story is
not about Jesus separating good people from bad people.
Wheat
farmers should already know this, because translators, in their infinite
wisdom, decided to translate the Greek word σιτος (“sitos”) as “wheat” when
σιτος is really the word for “seed” or “grain.” The translators seem to not
understand the difference between wheat and grain. Grain is the seed; the thing
that is useful. Wheat is the whole thing: useful seed and inedible chaff. Chaff
is not separate from wheat; it is part of it. It is the protective casing
around the grain, which protects it from the elements. When you want to harvest
the wheat grain you loosen it and separate the heavier grain from the lighter
chaff—that is threshing and winnowing. And now, all the farmers are saying, Yeah, we know that, and I had better stop talking about farming before I expose
my ignorance.
Suffice it to say, it is easy to get confused when
Jesus talks about separating the wheat from the chaff when, in reality, the
chaff is part of the wheat. Right about now, you are rightfully wondering why I've taken so long to make this seemingly unimportant point, so here's why I believe this is especially relevant: The large majority of the time you hear these
verses quoted by anybody of a religious bent it is to say that Jesus has come
to separate the righteous from the sinners. They say he is coming in the final
day, like the divine Santa Claus, and those of you who have failed to repent of
your sin are going to be burned up, like the chaff, in eternal damnation. This
is how most religious people talk about this text, except for the Minnesota nice pastors
who talk about this text the way most Minnesotans talk about things that sound
a tad too judgmental, which is to say we ignore it.
I’m
going to do neither, because I think this is one piece of scripture that is so
entirely misused by the masses. If we know
what wheat is—grain and chaff—then this whole business of Jesus separating the
righteous from the sinful is simply a misreading. There are no people who are
completely righteous, and there are no people who are completely sinful.
Instead, we are all wheat—we contain within us both a seed and a hard outer
casing. We are both saints and sinners. And as much as we try to rid ourselves
of the chaff, it is always part of who we are. In this case, Jesus is coming
not to sentence part of us to hell, but to burn off that part of us that is
keeping us back from experiencing the fullness of life. Jesus is coming to burn
the chaff that is our sin so that we can bear fruit.
This
is one of the most powerful metaphors in the Bible and it has been distilled
into speaking a shallow message about eternal damnation. It’s much sexier to
think about Jesus as the one casting the evil ones into the depths of hell;
that is, after all, what the people wanted from their militaristic messiah. But
what we got instead was a Savior—one who doesn’t damn but saves. If you’ve ever
wondered why I don’t ever preach much about eternal damnation it’s because that
was not what Christ came to do. It’s far too easy to convince ourselves in this
black-and-white world to believe that we are wheat and the world is chaff, but those
distinctions are our chaff speaking; it is that part of us that wants to
control this world, that wants a militaristic messiah and who denies that we
are both grain and chaff, sinners and saints.
You
are both. You are all wheat. Thankfully, on this Epiphany, we are reminded that
one has come especially to be a winnower—to separate our sin from the part of
us that was originally called “good” and in-so-doing to save us. That is
salvation. That is what Jesus has come to do—not to tell us that we are grain
or that we are chaff, not to get you worrying about whether you are good enough
to avoid being threshed straight into hell, because when you start to split
those hairs you will inevitably realize, if you’re honest with yourself, that
you are not good enough. Instead, Jesus is coming to tell us that we are both
grain and chaff—saints and sinners—and he’s come to set us free.
Thanks
be to God for that.
Amen.
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