A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Of course, this follows right after our readings of yesterday. That is the sower and the seed and the good seed and all that. So our lord dismissed the crowds and went home. Note that word home there.
His disciples came to Jesus with this request. Explain to us the parable of the weeds in the field. That's this parable our just our lord had just given to the people. Christ answered, the farmer sowing the good seed is the son of man. The field is the world, the good seed, the citizens of the kingdom.
The weeds are the followers of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the world, while the harvesters are the angels. Just as weeds are collected and burned, so it will be at the end of the world. The son of man will dispatch his angels to collect from his kingdom everybody who drew others into apostasy and all evildoers. The angels will then hurl them into the fiery furnace where they will wail and grind their teeth.
Then the saints will shine like the sun in their father's kingdom. Let everybody heed what he hears. And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise to you, Lord. In the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit.
Amen. I want that parable is a toughie, believe me. And I'm not trying to escape it. But I do wanna use this reading this morning as an illustration of the dangers, the pitfalls, and the chicanery of translations. Now notice this first sentence.
Jesus dismissed the crowds and went home, h o m e, home. Well, that struck me right away when I read that yesterday preparing for the day. Because we're told very explicitly that Christ didn't have a home after he left Nazareth. So I beguiled a few hours in some research. Of course, it wasn't ours.
I came words are terribly important things. All this talk about logical positive has to do with words. And remember, words are our communication. It's the only way we get around. First, the spoken word and then how you represent it, by all kinds of signs and symbols.
So don't minimize words. Of course, you know, today, the fancy phrases that in a decent argument to turn the whole thing off, say, oh, that's just a matter of semantics. See, what they're saying is just a matter of words as if that was something trivial. Words are frightfully important. And the best thing ever written on it is a Lewis Carroll Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty, and Little Alice.
If you haven't read it, behooves you to read it. Now the point is this. This says that Christ went home. The Greek says nothing of the sort. The Greek word is.
Well, now we have that that's the word we have at the base of economics. What's economics? Economics doesn't have to do with a building. Think of that. Even if going from your English, you could get this information out of your English dictionary.
The Greek word is and that gives us our English word economics. So when you in English, we're talking about English. There's a tremendous difference between referring to a house and a home. Refers to a house, to to a residence. When you use the English word home, you're telling us something totally different.
A tent, a cave in the side of a hill is not a house. Even I know that. And yet it can be a home. When we say home, sweet home, we're not talking about a kind of building. What do you mean by home?
We we well, if you see, a house is a is a description of a very definite kind of building. Whereas the word home has to do with a social unit of people. And there's no justification for translating IKEA as home, as I've got in my in my Greek dictionary. Why do the why did the translators do this? I have no answer.
I knew some of these men personally. They're good. They're they're real scholars, and they very likely have a defense for this. But I don't know what it is. The Greek says that Price dismissed the crowd and went back to the house.
Whose house? I don't know. But he went back to a house, but doesn't say home. Now you say, well, this this is trivial. Well, maybe it is.
But I'm just using this as a concrete illustration of the of the dangers, the pitfalls of translation and how words are frightfully important. When you say Christ went home, that gives you immediately, you build up a picture of a domestic. That's that's that that is the correct translation of. Domestic. A a domestic unit of some sort.
It may be one person, two persons, or three persons, but it's associated with that. A person living in an apartment over in in Grosvenor can say, I went home. They're not talking about a building. They're talking about Apartments 1134 or something. You so you can call an apartment a home.
You can't call an apartment a house, except by some kind of figure of speech. You see, you is just a very simple, not very important distinction. But I wanna show you that what you can throw into words. And anytime you use a translation, you are not dealing with the original. Obviously, if it's a translation, it's not the original.
A translation is what some man or or a group of man, plus a whole battery of computers today, it's what they think the original text says. So then they tell you what they think it means in the vernacular of the day. That may change in another fifty years completely, completely in some instances. Take the word pre well, we can't go into it. But just take the word prevent and then look that up in your dictionary.
The word prevent. And so when people say, they hold this book up and say the word of god, it is not. That's a translation of what somebody thinks the the revealed word says. This is very important to remember, and this is why, you see, what has happened to your mainline religions. In the sixteenth century, when Luther stood up, and I I have a great admiration for Luther in many ways.
Never get me wrong on that. He wasn't a brain like Calvin or Melanchthon, but he had he had a lot going for him. So he stands up. And first of all, he rejects his local bishop. Well, first of all, he rejected his superior.
He was he was an Augustinian monk. So he went against his vow of obedience. The next thing he did, he rejected his the bishop of the diocese. Alright. So then they took the case to Rome.
So he rejected Rome. And then when Rome again went against him, he rejected Rome and then appealed to the councils. Then when when when he was when he was disproved through the councils, then he appealed to the bible, the word the the written word of God. And the first thing he did, you know, was make his own translation. That's the first thing the old man did.
It's it's not a very good translation, but he translated to serve his own purpose and and into into the German of his day. Now, when you when Lutheranism and Calvinism, they're very different things. They shouldn't be put together. But these are the two main developments of Protestantism. When they rested their case on the Bible, they were resting their case on the written word.
Now Calvin had more sense in Luther. He said, you've gotta go back and use the original, the Hebrew and the Greek. And Calvin was right. It's demanding a good bit of people to learn Hebrew and Greek, but that's what he wanted done. Now what happens when that is taken away from you?
And that's exactly what has happened in our deconstructionism. We are told now that words are just words, that they really that you really cannot communicate an idea. And even if you could even if there were because there's nothing behind the word except our experience, and you have an experience only of the individual. You have no experience of of the immaterial. So what has happened now to the word of god?
It's gone. Now where so what do you rest your case on now? That's the reason the mainline protestants are down going down the drain. They're they've lost they've lost the battle and they've lost the war. And what do you have now?
You have now the charismatics who who base their religious convictions on experience, their personal individual experience. And let me tell you, don't let us throw stones. There's an awful lot of that in the holy Roman Catholic church. We have thrown out doctrine because they tell us you cannot know these things. How can you know what God is?
How can you know what heaven is? How can you know what humanity is? All you know are individuals. And even if you could know it, you couldn't communicate it because words are meaning less. I'm not exaggerating this.
To put this in a more philosophical term, the price crisis in the church today is epistemological, meaning it's a problem of knowledge. And my time's out. It's way out. Anyway, this is the thought of the day. Whenever you're reading a book, remember it's a book.
All you have here are a lot of squiggles in in black on white. A person who can't read English, this is just as bad to them as Arabic is to me. Keep it in mind. In the name of the father, the son, the holy spirit. Amen.