GOSPEL, FIRST READING & PSALM TRANSCRIPT (Subscribe or Login for Full Transcript):
And so what he says here is that you will know the tree by its fruit, because the good man (this is interesting), out of the good treasure of his heart, produces good, and the evil man, out of the evil treasure, produces evil. Now pause there.
We’ve seen Jesus use the image of treasure a lot in the gospels. “Build up your treasure in Heaven. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” So you have this image (often time) of a treasury; a kind of deposit. And he uses that image for spiritual wealth, for spiritual merit or spiritual treasures. And what’s interesting about this is that in both cases, the treasure is located in the heart. It’s the good treasure of his heart that produces good. Now in context here, you’ve probably heard people say, “You’ll know the tree by its fruit.” What fruit specifically though, in this version of the parable, is Jesus focusing on? He’s focusing it on our words, what we say. For he says (at the end), “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.” So there’s a direct connection between our heart and our mouth. So the vices and the virtues in this context that Jesus is using are vicious words or virtuous words; sinning with our mouths, sinning with our tongues. In context that makes sense because what’s the whole Sermon on the Plain, the second half of its all been about? Judging others, condemning others, blessing those who curse us, praying for those who persecute us. So all of those things are things that we do with the mouth, and Jesus (notice this), in the Sermon on the Plain, as he’s trying to get the disciples to learn what it means to imitate him, notice, he doesn’t spend the whole sermon talking about the sins of the flesh (not that those aren’t important), but he’s first talking about the sins of the tongue, because it’s out of the mouth that the abundance of the heart speaks. And because in the Sermon on the Mount he’s going after the human heart he wants to transform the heart, the first thing he has to deal with is transforming our mouths, transforming what we say.
And I can’t help but (once again), just think about contemporary applications of this in light of our context today where we have social media, which is basically a gigantic international platform where people can say things to one another, say things to people they don’t know (right?), without any kind of the normal repercussions that would follow in human conversation face-to-face. So what happens is people say things they shouldn’t say. They say things rashly. They make judgments rashly. And my own experience of this, as I (kind of) entered that world and try to navigate it is, oftentimes I’ve been very saddened and disheartened by the kinds of things that I see Christians saying in the world of social media. Even people who, like Christian leaders that you might have a great respect for, when they are speaking off the cuff in this (kind of) social media context, reveal judgments and condemnations which really (at least in my opinion) seem to be at odds with a (kind of) reserve in discretion that Jesus is calling for in the Sermon on the Mount: not to make rash judgments, not to make condemnations. And it’s disturbing because if Jesus is right (which he always is), and it’s out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks, then if Christians are tearing one another to pieces verbally, then where are our hearts? Have we really been formed by Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain? Are we imitating the master here as he teaches the disciples to grow in self-knowledge of our sinfulness? Not to run around, taking specks out of everyone else’s eyes, when we still have our own logs to deal with? It’s very easy to hate other people’s sin with passion. It’s much more difficult to learn to hate your own sin far more than you hate anyone else’s. And that’s really what Jesus is trying to teach us to do.
SECOND READING TRANSCRIPT (Subscribe or Login for Full Transcript):
So if you don’t know the context, it’s a little unclear about exactly what Paul is referring to.
So in the first verse, the first thing we want to say is that when Paul says:
When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality…
Here he’s alluding to his description of two kinds of bodies that he’s given in the preceding verses. So in the preceding verses, Paul raised a question that the Corinthians had. Basically what they asked him is, they said, “What kind of body will we inhabit in the resurrection? What’s it going to be like?”
So in order to answer their question, he gives a series of contrasts between the earthly body that we live in now (the fallen body), and then the glorified body that we will receive on the last day in the resurrection of the dead. So I’m not going to read those verses through in any depth, but I’ll just give you some of the contrasts that he gave.
So for example, Paul described the old body, this fallen body, as earthly, perishable, dishonorable, weak, soulish — literally in Greek,
psychikos, meaning animated by a natural human soul— of the dust, mortal, and from Adam. So those are some basic characteristics of our bodies. They’re earthly, they’re perishable — which means they can die. They’re dishonorable, which means that we often sin in them; we bring shame to the body. They’re weak — we can get sick, we can suffer. They are soulish, meaning they are animated by a human soul. And that they’re from the dust and mortal, so eventually they die.
By contrast, he describes the resurrected body, the risen body with a series of characteristics. So here he says that the resurrected body is heavenly, so it’s not from the earth… it’s from heaven. It’s imperishable, it’s glorious. Glory here is an interesting word. Whenever we speak about glory, we can talk about the glory of God, which is His awesomeness, His power, His tremendousness, His beauty. And so the glory of the resurrected body is similar. It’s going to be awe-inspiring, beautiful, and holy in such a way that it gives glory and praise to God. It’s going to magnify the glory of God.
He also says the resurrected body will be powerful, as opposed to weak, spiritual as opposed to soulish — and here the Greek word is
pneumatikos. It means just animated, not just by the human soul but by the Holy Spirit of God, suffused with the Spirit. It will be from Heaven, it will be immortal, and it will be from the last Adam, Christ, rather than from the first Adam.
So two of those characteristics — perishable vs imperishable and mortal vs immortal — are what Paul is picking up on on the first verse for this reading. So when he says:
When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality…
He’s not talking in abstractions about perishability or immortality in some kind of… as some kind of mere idea. No, he’s actually referring to what he just spoke of, so you can fill it in this way:
When the perishable [body] puts on the imperishable [body], and the mortal [body] puts on immortality [body], then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
“Death is swallowed up in victory.”
So he’s speaking here about the final resurrection of the dead. And it’s fascinating, because the image that he’s using there for the resurrected body is he’s comparing it to a garment that we can take off or put on. So what he’s describing here when he talks about the resurrection is not just that our souls are separated from our bodies and then go on to live forever in Heaven — which is kind of how most people imagine that for everlasting life or immortality of the soul.
No, no, no. What he’s saying here is that our perishable bodies will put on the garment of imperishability, and our mortal bodies will put on the garment of immortality, so that in this new and glorified state of the resurrection, not only will there be no more sin, not only will there be no more suffering, but ultimately, there will also be no more death. We will live on in our bodies, but in such a way that we can never die
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