Readings (Year A):
1 Kings 3:5, 7–12
Psalm 119:57, 72, 76–77, 127–128, 129–130
Romans 8:28–30
Matthew 13:44–52
Reflection: God is working for the good of all the world
One of Jane Austen’s characters once pointed out a funny fact: that many of us get “acquainted with Shakespeare without knowing it. It is a part of an Englishman’s constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct.”
In other words, Shakespeare is simply in the air, and we breathe him in without knowing it. Phrases like “It’s Greek to me” and “I will wear my heart upon my sleeve” and “wild-goose chase” all come down to us from the Bard. Perhaps he didn’t invent these turns of phrase, but his work certainly popularized them and maybe even preserved them for us. Four hundred years later, we are still using these phrases, and most of are unaware of their histories. We might not have read The Merchant of Venice, but we know what it means to wait for something with “bated breath.”
I learned scripture in my Pentecostal childhood the way that Austen says the English learn Shakespeare. The scriptures were “in the air.” Without having actually read these phrases, I knew to say things like “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” But later in life when I started studying scripture in grad school, I realized that my understandings of some of these catchphrases were lacking. The problem with learning little bits of phrase in isolation from their wider context is that we actually need that wider context if we’re going to stand a chance of using that phrase productively and responsibly.
And so it is with one of the phrases from today’s series of readings: “Brother and sisters,” writes Paul, “We know that all things work for good for those who love God.” This was one of our favorite scriptures to quote in my Pentecostal church, and most of us had our own version of it because in fact we learned the verse by instinct, like Austen says. But no matter which version we quoted, we used it to mean the same thing: that God was going to give us what we wanted, that the trial we were experiencing was going to work out in our favor, and that our happy ending was just a moment away.
Those are all lovely thoughts, and I think that God is the kind of God who does really want us all to have a happy ending. The kind of God who Jesus calls a Father, a Father who loves to give his children what we ask for. But at the same time, Paul, who wrote these words, understood that things don’t always work out the way that we want: he was imprisoned, he was beaten, and he was regularly driven nuts by church drama.
So, did he really believe that God was working out everything for our good?
For the record, Paul does say “good” and not “our good.” The focus in this passage is not on our individual good, but the good of the whole, the good of creation, of the world that God so loves. That’s one difference from how I used this Scripture in childhood. When one of my youth leaders would pray with me, when I was younger, he would remind me that God was working all things out for my good. But that’s not Paul’s focus. Paul is fixated on the world that God is recreating, the new creation. That world—where peace and love and justice reign—that’s the good that God is working out.
And we see a glimpse of this world in Jesus. That’s why Paul calls him the firstborn: he is like a blueprint of the new world that God is making. In fact, the passage we’re reflecting on is all about Jesus. Listen to the passage again:
“We know that all things work for good for those who love God,
who are called according to his purpose.
For those he foreknew he also predestined
to be conformed to the image of his Son,
so that he might be the firstborn
among many brothers and sisters.”
The good that God is working out in real time, even as I speak, is the good of conforming the world to the image of Jesus, who is everything that God has ever hoped for. Jesus is that part of reality where God and all that is not God become intimately and forever connected and entangled, never to be separated. Jesus shows us what it looks like to live a life that is completely open both to God and the world. He shows us what it looks like when mercy and justice kiss, what it looks like to prepare a table that is big enough for our friends and our enemies, what it looks like to give and receive a love that is worthy of the God whose name is love.
That is the good that God is working on and working out. So yes, let’s keep praying for what we want, and let’s keep believing that God does want us to get good things. But let’s also remember that the ultimate good is for the world to grow up just like its older brother, Jesus Christ, the love of God joyfully walking among us.
