Again, the kingdom of Heaven is compared to a drag net thrown into the sea, and gathering together of every kind; which, when it was filled, drawing it up on the shore, and sitting down, they gathered the good into containers, and they threw out the rotten. So it will be in the completion of the age: the angels will go out and will separate the evil from the midst of the righteous, and will throw them into the furnace of fire; there will be weeping and gnashing of the teeth. (Matthew 13:47-50)
We come now to the sixth parable in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel that begins with the phrase the kingdom of heaven is like… or compared to. When we look at the way these parables are set out in the text of the Gospel, we can see that they fall into two groups of three parables each and that each grouping is separated by Jesus giving the interpretation of one of the parables of the series. So, in the first group we have the parable of the wheat and the tares, followed by the parable of the mustard seed, followed by the parable of a woman taking leaven and mixing it into three measures of meal. Then we have Jesus giving an explanation of the parable of the wheat and the tares before delivering the next group of three parables, the treasure hidden in a field, the pearl of great price, and finally the parable of the dragnet. This last one is followed by a short explanation, that interestingly is very similar to what is said concerning the parable of the wheat and the tares.
Each of the parables illustrates a series of principles that govern a person’s experience of spiritual regeneration as they seek to live their lives from the Lord’s Word. All that is described as relating to the kingdom of heaven relates to the Lord as the Word operating within our psychological or spiritual world. This is the world that we experience as our mental life. It’s important that we remind ourselves of this when we read the Scriptures so that we avoid deflecting the responsibility of examining our own life, and not anyone else’s, in the light of the truths that the Word offers.
Let’s look at an example of this tendency to view others rather than ourselves using part of the reading from today.
So it will be in the completion of the age: the angels will go out and will separate the evil from the midst of the righteous, and will throw them into the furnace of fire; there will be weeping and gnashing of the teeth.
If this is read from what is lower, we will not understand its meaning or the outworking of the principle of the kingdom of heaven that is being illustrated. For the things of the spirit are spiritually discerned, the natural man or mind cannot grasp spiritual things; it is in a deep darkness to them. But the spiritual man, or mind, is in spiritual light and spiritual light is the light of love or charity. And when the Scriptures are read from that light, the Lord’s love shines through. Now the natural mind will be limited to one of two responses when reading this passage. It will either accept that the passage is literally true, believing that, at some point in the future, angels will be involved in separating out the evil from the righteous and that the evil will be thrown into the furnace of fire. Or it will find difficulty with this idea not seeing how a loving God could allow people to be thrown into a furnace of fire, even if this is fire is regarded as a symbolic metaphor for suffering. This latter view could lead to a rejection of the Scriptures as the Word of the Lord.
Both views present difficulties because both stem from thinking literally about what the Word has to say regarding spiritual realities. The difference between them is seen in the view which each holds of the Scriptures. The first holds onto the Scriptures as the Word of God but ends up with a false, harsh view of the nature of God and spiritual life. The second view ends up rejecting the Scriptures because of their apparent harshness, or if they aren’t rejected outright, then there is a process of picking and choosing what can and can’t be accepted. This closes off the possibility of a fuller understanding of the principles that are being offered to support the living of a spiritual life. But when a spiritual perspective is brought to the reading, these difficulties are removed and we can see the truth of what’s here, not in an abstract sense but within the very experience of our lives.
To read these verses naturally is to think from or in time and space and so the natural mind will understand the phrase end of the age as referring to a future time. Angels will be understood in terms of entities or beings who serve to carry out the will of God and the righteous and the evil will be understood in terms of two groups of people one of which, classed as evil, will find themselves subject to terrible punishments. The problem with thinking naturally or from the literal sense about these things is that they immediately become understood in terms of us and them, the righteous and the evil for – ‘If we are those kind of people who are going to heaven, then it must be those others who will suffer torment’. This kind of thinking deflects our attention away from applying what we are reading to our own states of life and directs it towards the states of others instead.
Now there is a clear connection between this parable and the parable of the wheat and the tares, so in a sense we have come a full circle. Both deal with a gathering up of what is useful and what is not, and then a process of sorting and separation occurs. You might recall that in the first parable, the key principle involved allowing the wheat and the tares to grow together until the harvest after which the tares could be separated from the wheat. This teaches us that some of the things which we see in our lives that we may want removed, can’t be taken away until there is a state of readiness for this. It shows us that we need to be gentle with ourselves and trust the process of where the Lord as the Word takes us in our work rather than forcing our own agendas on what we think needs to be worked on or sorted out. For to attack evils from the proprium, from our own intelligence in what we think needs removing, rather than from the Word, stems from an unhealthy preoccupation on our short comings which is characterised by being caught up in guilt and self-condemnation. Through parables like this, the Lord gives us what we need to understand the process so that we can work with Him lest in our self righteous zeal to be purified we consequently also uproot the capacity for expressing goodness. For guilt and self condemnation are forms of ownership of the life that flows in, of what belongs to the Lord.
We see this same principle re-emphasised in the parable of the dragnet, only this time rather than the future harvest of wheat, we are given the imagery of being in the act of harvesting fish. In actual fact there is no mention of fish specifically in the Greek text, it’s assumed from the context, but we get the picture. There are important principles here concerning our experience of the operation of the principles of the kingdom of heaven in our living of the spiritual life. The first thing is that the net is all encompassing and doesn’t discriminate as to what is accepted into it. The net itself represents what can draw together all of the affections for natural ideas which we have swimming around in our minds, like a great sea of knowledge.
So, we are taught here that the principles of the kingdom of heaven work like a net cast into the sea as they become established in our life. As we learn spiritual principles we gain the means by which our thinking can be gathered together and reorganised into a new framework. For as spiritual things begin to take a higher priority in our lives then everything that we have taken into our minds begins to be understood and assessed in a new way. The things in our mind are drawn into the net of the spiritual doctrine that we making one with our life.
So the first state is one of building up our understanding. In this period we cast our net, our mind, far and wide and draw in all kinds of information. For example, if one of the strands of our net is the idea that God is love then we will gather from the Scriptures the stories and facts that support this idea. Another strand might hold that God is a stern judge who condemns the wicked to hell, this strand will be sensitive to everything in the literal sense of the Word that supports that idea. Maybe another strand believes in a literal coming of Christ and a final battle of good against evil in the world called Armageddon and so that strand organises pieces of information in the Word and knowledge about world events in support of it.
When this process of ingathering reaches a certain point we come into a new spiritual state of life. This point of change in our state is described by the words when it was filled, or if you like, when a point of fulfilment or completion had been reached. We are then told that it is being drawn up onto the shore and then sitting down, the sorting process begins. For if any of these knowledges are to have a useful application to our spiritual life, they have to be understood from a spiritual perspective. This means that our thinking with them needs to be elevated from what is natural, that is, from what is based in person, place, time and space – into what is spiritual, to what these knowledges mean regarding the life of our thoughts and affections. This is captured in the statement of the net being drawn up, that is, it is drawn up higher toward things more internal onto the shore, after which there is a sitting down to examine what is present. And this is a state of spiritual practice, of self examination, of using spiritual principles to examine the quality of what is present in our mind. These spiritual principles or truths give us the ability to look into our minds and evaluate what things are useful and what are not; what is worth holding onto and what is irrelevant or even resistive in the service of a supporting the spiritual life.
The end of verse 48 says that at this point the good is gathered into its containers or vessels. This teaches us that the end of this process is to have what is genuinely good and useful from a spiritual perspective placed within its proper vessels. It’s a process in which goodness is adjoined to its own truths as containers, these being ideas and concepts in our minds that can give good, the Lord, an expression or presence in our life. What this means is that as we look to the Lord as the Word with a desire to apply what we understand, we start to gain insights into truths as they relates directly to our life and so see what concepts are worth placing in containers and what ideas we have been carrying that we see now are actually falsities. The latter of course can not serve the spiritual life because they are rotten at the core and so must be thrown out.
We can now see this very transformation in our own understanding of this parable. What is merely hypothetical or speculative falls away, and what is real, that is, what is good, shines forth in a new understanding of those passages of Scripture that before seemed so harsh and unforgiving.
Again, the kingdom of Heaven is compared to a drag net thrown into the sea, and gathering together of every kind; which, when it was filled, drawing it up on the shore, and sitting down, they gathered the good into containers, and they threw out the rotten. So it will be in the completion of the age: the angels will go out and will separate the evil from the midst of the righteous, and will throw them into the furnace of fire; there will be weeping and gnashing of the teeth.
The doctrines for Spiritual Christianity state that the first of charity is to resist evils as sins against the Lord. At first glance this may seem a little strange, surely charity is doing good. But the teaching is that the life of the Lord is goodness itself and that this flows into every one of us. The problem is not the absence of goodness but the presence of evils, so that when life from the Lord enters into a human mind that is steeped in what is selfish and false, the inflowing life gets turned on its head and is expressed as its opposite in various forms of selfishness. Our minds, when unregenerate, are filled with inappropriate concepts and ideas that resist and therefore can’t give expression to the goodness flowing in from the Lord. The problem is not that the good isn’t present; it’s that our state of life gets in the way of it being expressed appropriately. Thus our job is to work with the Lord as the Word in order to have the obstacles to this goodness removed through self-examination and repentance so that genuine truths can be built up in our mind. So if we remove the ideas, that is, the fish, that hold importance on reading the Text literally and instead use those which state that to think spiritually is to think above person, space and time, then when we look at the phrase ..the evil in the midst of the righteous, we no longer think about two groups of people, but instead two aspects within ourselves.
Likewise, the natural mind immediately jumps to thinking of the end of the age as some point in time in the future but the spiritual mind recognises that the phrase end of the age refers not to some outcome in time but to a state of life right now. This phrase refers to the end state of mind towards which our spiritual life is being directed as we look to the Lord in His Word. The end the Divine Love has is for the salvation of what is human within each of us so that we might come into and know the kingdom of heaven. So the process by which this occurs is one of examining ourselves to discover what obstructs the Lord’s love. What the Lord gives us to support this process are the angels which are spoken of in this parable. Every time we gain an insight into some aspect within us that blocks the Lord’s love being expressed we are in the company of angels, which are truths from the Word. This is what angels are, they are affections for truth. When these are active in our minds we are given the ability to discern the evil and separate it out from …the midst of the righteous… or what is of the Lord in us.
Once we truly recognise those things within us that separate us from the Lord, their hold over us is weakened. That’s because we begin to see them in the light of truths from the Word, and so see them for what they really are. It is in this seeing that they are cast into the furnace of fire. The power of evil is stripped in the very act of our seeing that they are from hell and therefore have no place in us. It is then that we are given the power to reject them, and in the act of rejecting them they are cast back into the hell from which they came. People often mistakenly read the next part of the verse as applying to those in hell – that those thrown into the fire will be the ones weeping and gnashing their teeth. But this is not what it says here. When you look at the verse more closely you will see that it is a statement referring to the whole process. Let’s read it again…
…the angels will go out and will separate the evil from the midst of the righteous, and will throw them into the furnace of fire. There will be weeping and gnashing of the teeth.
This last part of the statement can be read as our own struggle to let go of what stands in the way of the kingdom of heaven coming more fully into our lives. Isn’t it the case that as we are confronted with selfish attitudes that need to be removed, or when we feel like we have not lived up to our own expectations that we feel like weeping? That in this struggle called the spiritual life we often feel frustrated and unable to move on, that we feel distant from the Lord? But all of this is part of the process of having internal things sorted and placed in order. The sense of self that has spent its life understanding things from sensual appearances will resist and struggle, will weep and gnash its teeth. Again, the freeing of this is in the seeing and the seeing is the Word active within us showing us what we need to see. So our hope is forever in the Lord and to remember His end in view for us. To remind ourselves of this we can refer to an earlier verse in the chapter, very similar to this one, where the Lord comments on the parable of the wheat and the tares, but with an additional statement. In verses 41-43 we read this…
The Son of Man will send forth His angels, and they will gather out of His kingdom all the offences, and those who practice lawlessness. And they will throw them into the furnace of fire; there will be weeping and gnashing of the teeth. Then the righteous will shine out like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. The one having ears to hear, let him hear.
May we hear the Word of the Lord…
No man, spirit, or angel ever has any life from himself, thus neither can he think and will from himself; because in thinking and willing is the life of man, and speaking and acting is the life thence derived. For there is one only life, that of the Lord, which flows into all, but is variously received, and indeed according to the quality which a man has induced on his soul by his life. Hence with the evil, goods and truths are turned into evils and falsities, but with the good they are received-goods as goods, and truths as truths. This may be compared to the light of the sun flowing into objects, which is modified and varied in them diversely according to the form of the parts, and thus is turned into colors, some sad and some cheerful. While a man lives in the world he induces a form on the purest substances of his interiors, so that it may be said that he forms his soul, that is, its quality; and according to this form is received the life of the Lord, which is the life of His love toward the universal human race. (Arcana Coelestia 5847)