19 July Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43
Last week we looked at good seed wasted on poor ground, and I argued that our job is to improve the ground, not to stop sowing seed. It is a very practical parable – and so is this week’s.
There are few things more vexing to a gardener than the weed or unidentified plant that pops up on your vegetable patch. The picture that Jesus paints is a very familiar one. You have weeds among your plants but if you try to remove them you may damage the plants. And the explanation that Jesus gives of his parable is quite straightforward. But what is its application for today?
Back in 2020 an American Jesuit priest, Fr Mitch Pacwa, wrote a book called “Wheat and Tares”, and as you can imagine it is based on this passage. But it isn’t about gardening. It’s about the scandalous behaviour of priests. I can’t summarise an entire book in a few minutes, but Pacwa argues that congregations have been scandalized by the failings of priests and the weakness of the hierarchy in dealing with them. Pacwa will be 77 years old next week; he just celebrated 50 years as a priest. Looking back on those 50 years he observes that priests have always had failings. Some drank too much, some were cranky or irritable, some could not be trusted with money, and some could not be trusted with women or choirboys. But he thinks something changed in the 70’s and 80’s; in a society that increasingly came to believe that anything goes, priests caught that bug. Some let their behaviour slip. Let’s be clear; Pacwa isn’t saying that permissiveness in the world caused priests to behave badly. At most, they saw standards slipping in society and let their own slip too. I don’t know Fr Pacwa personally. I’ve seen him many times on television. He comes across as an old-style family priest, and he has no time for any excuses about bad behaviour in the clergy. Safeguarding is necessary because you will always have these people among us.
But then he reminds us of a key point. The church will always contain sinners. It will always have people who failed. The apostles failed. Some of the early Christians failed. The biographies of plenty of bishops and archbishops could make you cringe. They were human, and they sinned. There will always, he says, be tares among the wheat. They may thrive among us; they may escape punishment for a long time; they may never be uncovered in this life; but there is always a reckoning. In the end, God will deal with them, and since they have never been faced with their wickedness, they are unlikely to have confessed or sought absolution. It will go badly for them.
That does not mean that we do not try to identify the weeds now. But just as we can try to make the stony ground into good ground, we can convert tares into wheat. We can encourage everyone, including us, to stop sinning. Of course, they must pay for their past sins; they cannot just be wiped out. Pacwa is scathing about any attempt to cover up offences. Quietly shifting priests to other parishes is unchristian and cowardly. But Jesus came to save sinners, and that is the church’s work. We have to try to turn weeds into wheat.
God cannot be tempted. What could be offered to Him that He could not give Himself? But when Jesus became man, he began to understand human temptation. He withstood it, but he experienced it. The temptations in the wilderness would have no point if he was not capable of being tempted. In this, as in so many things, Jesus showed us what people could be.
Safeguarding is simply identifying the weeds. They were always among us and I am sure that they always will be. We all grump about safeguarding training, but it is necessary. It is not restricted to PCC members, by the way; it would be good if everyone took at least the basic awareness course. It would take about 45 minutes of your life but that investment could make a world of difference to someone whom you spot being abused or manipulated.
Perhaps more importantly, it helps us examine our own behaviour. When you tell your children “Because I say so” that’s using your status to determine their conduct. There has to be a better response. It may not be abusive, but it’s getting close to it.
The picture in the parable is an instructive one. There will always be weeds among the wheat. Let us try not to be one of them.
12 July Matthew 13:1-23
The word parable has the same root as the word parabola. It means something “thrown alongside”. When a Greek teacher had something complicated to explain, he would give the explanation but then try to find a parable which would be simpler and from which an analogy could be drawn. The parable would provide the key that would unlock the more complicated or general saying. Aesop’s fables could be used as parables. The tortoise and the hare explain why steady plodding may be better than fast action; the fox and the grapes tells us that greed may cost us even what we already have.
Jewish rabbis used parables too, but commonly they didn’t provide the complicated or general answer. They left the student to work it out for themselves. Let me give you one of my favourite stories, that of a rabbi who knew that some of his flock were in great need, so he went to the better-off members of his congregation to ask for donations. When he came to the richest of them all, the man said he was sorry, but all his money was needed for his business. He didn’t have any spare cash to give away. “Look out of the window,” said the rabbi. “What do you see?” “I see people,” said the merchant, “lots of people.” “Now look in the mirror. How many do you see?” “I only see myself,” said the merchant. “Yes, it’s amazing what a difference a little bit of silver can make,” said the rabbi.
Maybe that parable needed no explanation, but the one Jesus tells here does. You heard the explanation, and I do not need to repeat it,
I have no argument with the parable, but I do have a disagreement about one of the conclusions that some have drawn from it, so you are now about to hear a rant. A controlled rant, I hope, but still a rant.
I have now been your priest for just over two months. I have been overwhelmed by your response so far. I see volunteers coming forward, I see loose ends being tied together, I see parishes supporting each other, I see people being willing to try new things. Now, this is happening against a backdrop of turmoil at the top, historic safeguarding failures, bishoprics that can’t be filled, financial pressures and dioceses like my old one in Truro pretty well abolishing parishes to form benefices with 17 churches and two or three clergy. But we ignore that. We sow in our little patch of ground. Whatever happens elsewhere, we plough our field. We prepare our allotment; because local people generally draw their view of the church and the faith from the people they meet.
Nationally, the church has followed the parable of the sower very closely. Money goes to the good soil. If you are a fairly affluent parish or fresh expression, you get more money given to you. The church spends its money on what is already successful. But what about the stony ground? Don’t the people there really need the gospel, even if they don’t know it?
I know we can be misty-eyed about the past, but I think back to my childhood. I grew up in a district which was predominantly Roman Catholic. A lot of our neighbours lived a hand to mouth life. Yet on Sundays they would file into St Hilda’s in their best. I dare say that among the better off, religion played a smaller part in their life. It was the stony ground that needed the Gospel.
If you are one of the long-term unemployed, a single parent with children to care for, a drug addict or one of those who sits on the steps of a building all day with a bottle of cheap cider, you need a message of hope. You need to be welcomed somewhere. You need proof that God loves you, that you count. You need the church – so the church had better be there; and we will be.
You see, nowhere in the parable of the sower does Jesus tell us to stop trying to sow amongst the thorns or on rocky ground. He tells us that it might not work, but that doesn’t mean that we stop sowing there. It means that we dig out the rocks, pile on the manure and do all we can to make that soil good soil too. That is our mission here. I have a five-year appointment, and perhaps most of that time will be spent cultivating the stony ground for the next sower. So be it. But we abandon no-one, and nowhere.
It will be hard work, but it is our work. Remember that when you bring someone to a coffee morning, or make them a cup of tea, or tell young mums about Little Lambs or Teddy Club you are cultivating that stony ground before I try to sow there. I am very aware that however good a sower I may be, without the land being tended first, we will not have much success. But let us work on our bit of land. Never mind what is happening over the hedge, or many miles away. We plough our fields, and then we scatter the good seed. And in God’s good time, it will grow.
28 June Matthew 10:40-43
I don’t know if any of you are ardent readers of the Court circular that appears in some of our newspapers each day telling us what the Royal Family has been up to. To give you a flavour of it, on one day the King visited Grimsby, met various charities and went to the Grimsby Town football stadium (though it doesn’t say why). Meanwhile the Prince of Wales was in Norfolk naming a blood bike and using it to deliver blood to the Air Ambulance base, while the Princess Royal was visiting the docks in Edinburgh (I know which of those trips I’ve have chosen). Then after lunch she was back in London to open a student residence and preside at a gala dinner at St James’ Palace. I wonder whether she ever thinks she’d prefer to just get a takeaway and watch a rom-com in her pyjamas.
Among these appointments there are regular meetings with ambassadors who are coming or going. There are many more independent countries than when I was a boy, and therefore many more ambassadors, but they must all be given their twenty minutes with the King. It may be that they are fascinating individuals with whom the King would like more time. There may be others who cause his heart to sink as soon as he sees them; but they are all ambassadors and all represent their Head of State.
That gives us some insight into our short gospel passage this morning. The essence of being an ambassador is that you represent the Head of your state, and you should be treated as if he or she is there. The disciples are being reminded that they are the ambassadors of Christ, and should be treated accordingly.
However, it is unlikely that the powers that were in those days were going to respect that – but this passage is not really aimed at them. It is directed rather more at us. It reminds us that those disciples were not at our door as Peter, or John, or Andrew in their own right, but as emissaries of Jesus Christ. Jesus is watching how we react to them, but this is not about punishment for doing wrong. It is about reward for doing well.
The first verse is clear enough: Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. The next verse is a little more puzzling: Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous.
First let me point out that prophet here does not mean a fortune teller. Prophets do not tell you how things will definitely be; they tell you how things will be if you don’t change what you are doing. They tell the future, but it is not an unchangeable future. In this light Jesus regards all his disciples as prophets because the gospel message is one of the need for change. Anyone who preaches the gospel is asking people to repent and change.
The idiom “in the name of a prophet” needs some explaining. To welcome a prophet in the name of a prophet means acknowledging them to be a prophet – awarding them the title of prophet. It doesn’t mean saying “Hello, Isaiah!” to everyone. And when it says you will receive a prophet’s reward, it means that you will be blessed by receiving the teaching of that prophet. He or she will pay you in the best way they can, by giving you their teaching. In the same way, a righteous person will reward you for what they receive by giving you their blessing and by praying for you. What more could you want?
Above all, this passage is an affirmation of the apostles as ambassadors for Jesus, entitled to speak on his behalf. I imagine that, like many of us, they felt unworthy for the task given them. But all the tasks Jesus has for us will have to be done by people who might think that they are unworthy. The antidote to this is to remember the words of Pope Francis that every human being is a child of God, with the inherent dignity that comes with that, and the guarantee of God’s love because of that. When your self-esteem is slipping, remember that. He loved Peter, who denied his Son three times; he loved Paul, who persecuted him. God made you, and he loves everything that he has made. Everything, and everyone.
21 June Matthew 10: 24-39
From our Gospel today, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace but a sword.”
“Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, look upon a little child, pity my simplicity, suffer me to come to thee.” Words, I suspect, many of us recited in Sunday school. Lovely poetry but, I would venture to suggest, total rubbish and possibly more than a little offensive when talking about the radical teacher and activist that was Our Lord. Anything but meek and mild!
I suspect that the Gospel reading for today is one that most of us dread preaching on. At first sight the message seems to be at odds with the messages of love, peace and healing that is the Kingdom of God on this earth, that Jesus teaches elsewhere in the Gospels.
We sometimes tend to overlook the fact that Jesus was human, with human emotions. Who had annoyed or irritated Him before this? To say that the passage is hard – hitting is somewhat an understatement. Indeed, Matthew’s telling of the story is somewhat moderated from the other Gospel writers’ interpretations. While Matthew suggests that, “Those who love their families more cannot be his disciples”, Luke actually suggests that they should hate their families.
So, what is this all about? Well, we need to look at the verses of the Gospel preceding our reading today to realise exactly what was happening at the time. Jesus was sending his followers out into a hostile world, “Like sheep into the midst of wolves.” Their task was to preach to the people a new way of living and being on this earth. They were given the authority to cast out unclean spirits, and to heal every disease and sickness. The Roman and religious authorities clearly did not like their radical messages. It will be a challenging ministry and they will be ruthlessly attacked for their beliefs. He points to a time of unavoidable conflict between two different viewpoints and reminds them that their ministry will confront many of the economic and vested interests which tolerate neglect and abuse head on, challenging social structures and beliefs of the time.
Their world was a difficult place for the poor, the marginalised and the sick. The Kingdom proclaimed new values. Concern for the widow, the orphan, the refugee. A divinely directed population disrupts the false peace maintained by the empire and the state. Heavily patriarchal households were the norm. You disobeyed or disagreed with your father or your grandfather at your peril. Marriages were mostly for economic purposes rather than for love. Forced marriage was, and still is in some societies today, almost the norm. Cast your mind to the story of Lot and his daughters in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. As such this provoked opposition from those with vested interests, inherited privilege and others who out of fear and self-interest blindly followed the status quo. This includes not only the authorities but also members of their families and probably so-called close friends and acquaintances. To set a man against his father, mother and siblings is simply Jesus realising the grim reality of the situation. His talk about swords and family division is, most certainly, not advocating or resorting to meeting violence with violence or engaging in self-harm. It is acknowledgement that solidarity with the marginalised will bring conflict with not only oppressive structures but with those close to you.
Interestingly, Matthew quotes Jesus using authentic Judaic prophetic and wisdom traditions. Sayings like, “lose your life to find it”, it is more important to be faithful to God than to be alive, had strong resonance with the Jewish martyrs.
And, “To take up the cross and follow me”. The cross was, of course, an instrument of torture and execution used for rebels, subversives and deemed enemies of the state. It is not simply a statement of devotion but a dangerous pledge to follow another more radical path and declare allegiance to another ruler; that is to God.
But, before I consider the lessons for us today, I quote from our Old Testament reading from the prophet Jeremiah as, I believe it has relevance to where we are in the year of our Lord 2026, “I am weary with holding it in and I cannot. For I hear many whispering that terror is all around. Denounce Him, let us denounce Him. But the Lord is with me like a dread warrior. Therefore, my persecutors will stumble and they will not prevail.”
Jeremiah regrets his unpopular message of Babylonian captivity. He wanted to stop delivering it but could not. The word of the lord burned like a fire within him. He overheard his friends plotting against him but committed his cause to the Lord. At times he is confident but at other times he is so discouraged he wishes that he had never been born.
And does any of this seem familiar to you? Consider what is going on in the world and our land today? Are we prepared to stand up for Jesus’ teachings and values of peace, love, reconciliation and forgiveness in the face of opposition and abuse from many including family and friends?
We are suddenly confronted with the dreadful philosophy of so-called Christian Nationalism. This appears to be linked in with extremist politicians who are promoting racism, bigotry, prejudice against those on the margins of society. Refugees, immigrants, LGBTQ + and other minority groups all come up against the hatred that these people promote, supposedly, in the name of Christianity. Let us be quite clear about this. Their beliefs do not reflect the teachings of Jesus. The Bible tells us to feed the hungry, help the poor and look after and respect the stranger in our land. Jesus tells us to love God and love our neighbour, a neighbour who, incidentally, maybe any inhabitant of this planet, and to love our enemy. The likes of Stephen Yaxley Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson) and his followers and certain extremist politicians, whatever they may claim, cannot in any way be considered to hold Christian beliefs.
I believe that it should be one of the functions of the church to call out government, the institutions and others who subscribe to these obnoxious views and it is up to us, as individuals, to challenge and stand up to others wherever these views are expressed.
But it is not easy. The violence that happened in Belfast last week demonstrates the problem. No doubt, as Jesus taught the disciples when he sent them into the world as individuals we may lose friends, alienate family who hold opinions contrary to the Gospel message, just as Jesus told His disciples in our readings today. How many times have you heard the term, “Woke” used as an insult to those who, basically, are proclaiming the inclusive message of Jesus. A term which, I believe, is a compliment not an insult.
Through all this, the message of Jesus message, however, is “Do not be afraid”.
No, we should never be afraid to preach Jesus’ words of love and inclusion to a hostile world if we desire to bring the Kingdom of God to our world and to our land. Amen
14 June Matthew 9:35 - 10:8
I read a lot, and sometimes I need to think something over before its importance becomes clear to me; then, of course, I can’t remember exactly where I read it. That happened to me a fortnight or so ago, when I read something that suddenly seemed very relevant to today’s gospel. It’s a complicated argument, but I’m not going to hold back. You can take it.
First proposition: Jesus Christ is not created, he is “begotten, not made”. A bishop called Eusebius of Nicomedia, in Bithynia, caused uproar at the Council of Nicaea in 325 when he tried to suggest that Jesus came along after God. Orthodox bishops pointed to the start of the Gospel of John to prove him wrong, and then there was a punch-up (there were several at Nicaea) during which his speech was torn up. The council declared that there was never a time when Jesus was not; that is, he existed alongside or within God from the very start of time. And that is still conventional Christian teaching.
But then you have to ask why. Why was Jesus created in the first place? God doesn’t do anything for no reason, so why did he do it? What is Jesus for? We know why we have a Creator, and we know that the Holy Spirit exists to help faithful men and women, but why do we need Jesus? To save us by exhibiting God’s love is a good answer. So, if he existed from the start, he had that purpose from the start, so God always knew that Jesus would have to be sent some day. With me so far?
That visit to us ended with the Ascension. It was unreasonable to expect Jesus to live here eternally. So, in God’s plan, what happens when Jesus is gone? And the answer to this, as we see in Acts and the Epistles, is that we need people to make a church through which the Holy Spirit can continue to work. Thus Jesus found twelve disciples, young men, and took them with him as he toured the cities and villages, preaching, teaching and healing. This leads us to a key lesson; that we achieve more outside the church than we do inside. We need to get out into the world to spread the word.
There is another lesson coming up. Jesus saw the crowds and said that they were sheep without a shepherd. I am not wise in the ways of sheep, but I doubt if they realised that they lacked a shepherd. They just carried on eating grass and living for the moment – a bit like so many people today. And that is our great opportunity. The potential harvest has never been so great.
But then Jesus identified a problem to his disciples. ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few’. What would Jesus say if he were here today, I wonder? The potential harvest has never been greater, so many people know nothing of God, and the labourers have never been fewer. Not only that, but all too often the response to a decline in numbers has been to take away some labourers, or make them part-time. And here’s a giant paradox.
In our Truro days, the Diocese made the bishops’ diaries available to all. You didn’t need to be too acute to realise that we had organised the bishops’ diaries so that they spent nearly all their time meeting people who were already Christians. Spreading the Gospel has to be a local job; and for that, we need more labourers.
Our rotas are thinning. We need more people to read Lessons, to lead our intercessions, to serve the Chalice during communion. Please think about whether you could do any of these things, because they keep the worship lively. Yes, I can do it all myself; no, you would be bored out of your skulls if I did, every week! But we also need more churchwardens and PCC members. I’m not asking for any commitment now, but next spring it would be good to welcome some new blood. Talk to me about what is involved; it is not as frightening as you think.
Most of all, spread the Gospel in the hours when we aren’t at church. Invite people along at the very least. Sit with them when they’re new and don’t know what is going on here. I can’t cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers or cast out demons. But I can proclaim the good news: the kingdom of heaven has come near. Proclaim it with me. Please think about the role you could play in gathering in that harvest. For the harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few.
7 June Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
I don’t think we’re meant to have favourite bits of the Gospel, but if pushed I will admit that this is very high on my list. Our Gospel this morning takes two pieces of Matthew 9 and places them side by side. If the compilers of the Lectionary have done this, it means that they see a connection between the two passages that should command our attention; but actually there are four stories here; there is the calling of Matthew, the questioning of the disciples, the death of the daughter of the leader of the synagogue and the healing of the woman with a flow of blood. And there are multiple connections.
I think the first part speaks for itself. Jesus is clearly a commanding figure, because Matthew does not hesitate when he is called. I don’t suppose tax-collectors got many invitations then. Maybe they don’t now, either; I admit I’ve never invited one to dinner. But in the Roman empire they had an awful reputation. The Romans farmed taxes. That is, they sub-contracted their collection. They would look at a district like South Cleley and calculate how much tax might be due. Let’s say for the sake of argument that it comes to a thousand pieces of silver. They would then put the collection out to tender. I might offer 850 pieces. I pay them the 850, and I collect as much of the thousand as I can, and I keep the difference. I have the law behind me, so I can threaten and bully those who don’t pay, and I might recalculate the tax owed and discover that actually they owe 1100 pieces, and there is very little the population can do about it. No wonder tax collectors get a bad reputation.
Sometimes people suggest that Jesus was criticised because tax collectors were unclean, but that isn’t really the point here. After all, rabbis often note that everyone eats with unclean people sometimes, because nobody can know the state of purity of everyone in the room. But Jesus is with the tax collectors because he wants them to change, and he can’t move them to repentance if he doesn’t talk to them. In effect he is telling the Pharisees “you don’t need my company; these men do.”
Now we come to the third element, and let me note in passing that the tangled nature of these stories makes me think that this is a true account. If they were made up, surely they would be tidier, less jumbled.
They are interrupted by a leader of the synagogue who asks Jesus to lay his hand on his daughter, who has just died. The leader thus shows great faith in Jesus; he does not say “She might live” but “She will live”. Jesus responds to his faith, gets up and goes. Note that the man rushed in, despite all those sinners. Some things are more important than purity laws, even in those days.
As he goes through the crowd, Jesus is followed by a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years. I want you to pause there to imagine what her life was like. The women here can perhaps imagine how she felt. She would be anaemic. I think she would be permanently tired and weak. I expect that she would be depressed too; a period that never stops must be very debilitating.
But she is also socially crippled. A woman is unclean until her period has stopped for 24 hours, then she has a ritual bath. If her period starts again before its due time, she is unclean until it has stopped for a week. She is zavah. During that time nobody can eat with her, nor eat food that she has touched. They cannot sit on a cushion that she has sat on. They cannot take anything from her hand. They cannot hug her. And this poor woman has had that for at least the majority of twelve years. But she has faith, faith that just touching Jesus’ cloak can heal her. So she does, and Jesus feels it. He knows who has done it and he tells her ‘Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.’ And this is why I love this passage.
You see, generally when Jesus heals someone he makes little of it, and sometimes even instructs them to say nothing. But that won’t work for this woman. She has to be declared to be clean, or people will go on shunning her. Only Jesus and she know that she is healed, and the normal process of proving you are no longer zavah is humiliating. You have to submit to sleeping on a white towel which other women will inspect every day for a week. They will check your bedding and your clothing, and they will report publicly on what they have found. But Jesus, a respected teacher, simply declares her healed. It is not enough that she is made whole; she has to be pronounced whole by one who knows. Jesus not only heals her, he heals her in the way she needs to be healed. Given that degree of understanding of women’s lives, it is not surprising that so many women became followers of Jesus.
Then Jesus goes on to the house where the dead girl is, and shoos away the flute-players and wailers – Jewish custom required two flute-players and one wailer at every death, even of the poorest person. This was so important that they were even allowed to employ non-Jewish flute-players if that was the only option. But they are not needed if the girl is not dead, and when he takes her hand, she rises.
So what ties the stories together? Two are about the need to redeem even the worst sinners; two are about response to true faith; and they also remind us that Jesus has a special concern for the outcast, and so should we. The story of the woman with a flow of blood reminds me that we need to put ourselves in the position of those who need our help. I can barely imagine what her life was like; perhaps the women here can. And if they can, I bet they wouldn’t like it.
31 May Matthew 28:16-20
“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations… Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” Do you see a theme here?
When I was a boy, the Catechism was all the rage. Someone would fire a question at us, and we had to repeat a specified answer. Sunday School really was a school. Somewhere along the line that fell out of fashion; well, perhaps that was a good thing. There are better ways to teach children. But somehow a generation grew up for whom feeling and sentiment, heart rather than head, was the key to the Christian faith. We were invited to sing happy songs and enjoy the warm feeling that being a friend of Jesus brings.
There is nothing wrong with that as one component of coming to faith, but, just like a taxi driver, we still need “the knowledge”. If you climbed in a black cab and asked to go to Euston Station, and the driver invited you just to feel how lovely and cosy you feel in his cab but admitted that he didn’t actually know how to get to Euston, you might feel that was an unsatisfactory relationship. More seriously, you might decide to have nothing more to do with black cabs.
The need for teaching is, I hope, obvious. No doubt if you think hard you can bring to mind good Christians who had some funny ideas of their own. Some of them may even have been priests. A major part of the work of a minister is to teach the faithful. We try to do this through homilies and sermons, but also through the systematic reading of scripture. The traditional offices of Mattins and Evensong – Morning and Evening Prayer if you prefer – were the method by which the church ensured that the bible was read through and explained. It seems to me that churches that neglect these are not serving their people well, so expect a bit more attention to these over the next five years. Bible reading is important but so is the teaching element. Think of the Ethiopian man whom the apostle Philip encountered in Acts 8:30-31.
So Philip ran up to the chariot and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ He replied, ‘How can I, unless someone guides me?’ And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. Reading and teaching go together.
I arrive here with a clear instruction to teach the faithful, so far as lies within my power; and you, in turn, will teach others. That way we multiply the message like the best kind of chain letter. And the aim is simple; it is that when asked ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ the person replies ‘Yes!’