Blogging Towards Sunday, July 27, 2025

Matthew 13:31-35 & Acts 28:16-31

We come this Sunday to the end of our series in the Acts of the Apostles. This final portion seems to be in-complete. It’s thought, that it’s a sort of unfinished book because we finish it as we read it and respond to it. It’s like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Book (a genre popular when I was young). We are both the readers and the authors. We are the audience but not spectators. It’s the continuing story of both the church then and the church now.

In our episodic readings we’ve skipped a bit of the story. What we’ve missed is Paul’s traveling back to Jerusalem. He goes to deliver the monies that he’s raised from the Gentile churches to care for the widows of the Jerusalem church. While there we here of his second recorded arrest in Acts 21-22. Throughout the story he has been accused of disturbing the peace, teaching against Jewish customs, and potentially violating Roman laws regarding religious practice. In Jerusalem, he is accused of teaching other Jews to reject their Jewish heritage. Hoping to demonstrate this was not true, and at the advice of the elders, Paul visits the temple. He goes there to demonstrate his continued participation in his culture, even with his commitment to Jesus as king. He’s arrested after a riot begins. In his trial he invokes his Roman citizenship. A bit like asking to be judged by the supreme court, he is to be transferred to Rome to be judged by the emperor (of his representatives). Hence the context and setting of our reading today and the end of the book.

Stories from ancient tradition say that Paul was executed in Rome on the same day as Peter. Their executions were associated with the year 64 CE when Nero instigated a gruesome persecution of Christians to redirect blame for the Great Fire that destroyed the Circus Maximus. Peter was crucified upside down because he felt he was unworthy to be crucified in a manner similar to Jesus. Paul was beheaded because Roman citizens could not be crucified.

Luke has carefully crafted his telling of the Acts. It’s unlikely that he doesn’t stick the landing in offering a sloppy or accidentally incomplete conclusion. In his final sermons and words, Paul ends on the word “undeterred,” talking of the miraculously surprising ways in which God repeatedly calls followers of the Way of Jesus in unexpected places. This is combined with a quote from Jesus in Matthew 13:31-35, which itself comes from Isaiah 6:6-10 which seems to speak of the mystery of unbelief and how God’s work with the unbelieving isn’t ending but just beginning. The Spirit of God gives new hearing, seeing and understanding – new vision and new creation – in calling to a new way of living rooted in the way of Jesus.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION & EXAMEN:

• What engaged, enraged, or surprised you in these texts?
• Acts 28 tells of Paul’s final sermon and teaching.  He quotes Jesus in Matthew 13 who quotes Isaiah 6.  What is he saying?
• Paul says that the future of the Jesus movement is with the Gentiles because they have responded to the gospel.  He says this in Rome – the capital of the Roman Empire – or the Gentile world of the time.
• In Matthew 13 Jesus is talking about the kingdom of God – the expression he uses to describe the “new thing” that God is doing in the world.  It’s so new that it has to be described in parable stories.  It’s so new that many will hear without hearing it, see without understanding.  The implication is that Jesus knows that haven’t “heard” it, because if they had they would have changed their actions and mindset; they would have repented.  How have you experienced the teaching and way of Jesus calling you to be open to – and even to embrace – new things?
• God tells Isaiah that the people will hear but not understand, see but not get it.  What’s going on with that?
• How is the Church a sort of living parable of the kingdom of God in the world?
• How is the good news of Jesus, proclaimed in and by the church, heard but not listened to, seen but not understood?  By whom?
• Why would Luke end the story of the emerging church and the work of Paul like this?
• How are we called to be a church – a community of people committed to the way of Jesus – that is heard, seen and understood?
• What are the authors of our readings, possibly trying to tell us as the church today through these texts?