Proper 11 Year A
Taken from Twelve Months of Sundays Year A
Description
Twelve Months of Sundays – Year A
Ordinary Time
Proper 11
Genesis 28.10–19a
Romans 8.12–25
Matthew 13.24–30, 36–43
To get the full flavour of the Pauline passage, hold in your mind the story of the children of Israel on their way through the wilderness, having left Egypt but not yet having arrived in the promised land. Paul’s vision of the Church in the present age is frequently informed by this picture (compare, for instance, 1 Corinthians 10). The crossing of the Red Sea is picked up in his thinking by the death and resurrection of
Jesus; baptism, in which the Christian shares in that dying and rising, is the sign and seal of our liberation from slavery, and the starting point for the pilgrimage to our promised inheritance. This is one of the key ways in which Paul envisages the Christian life as both already and not yet redeemed: ‘we were saved’, he says (past tense), ‘in hope.’
Those ‘in Christ’ are thus ‘the children of God’; ‘Israel is my son, my firstborn’, says God through Moses to Pharaoh...
Taken from Twelve Months of Sundays Year A by N T Wright
Published by SPCK