On the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany

Colossians 3.12-17, Matthew 13.24-30

This Sunday’s lectionary readings make for a startling juxtaposition. For the Epistle, we’ve stopped the lectio continua sequence from Romans but the theme continues: Paul gives us a picture of the life of the Christian community, one of mutual forgiveness, charity, peaceableness, thanksgiving, all grounded in Christ’s unfathomable grace. And then we get to the Gospel, where we get a different picture of Christian life together, here analogized by Jesus to a field with tares amongst the wheat, left to grow together until the harvest time. The picture here is not of mutual amity and concord but of lasting and ineradicable distinction in the church between wheat and weeds, distinction that will last until their separation at the final harvest.