Gnashing of Teeth
July 26, 2026 • Proper 12 • Year A
1 Kings 3:5-12 • Psalm 119:129-136 • Romans 8:26-39 • Matthew 13:31-33,44-52
Most of you don’t know I had a dental appointment this week. (Two of you saw me in the waiting room.) I had a good check-up, but I got the usual question: “Have you been wearing your occlusal guard?”
I grind my teeth in my sleep. The top layer of enamel is long gone from a couple of molars. My “occlusal guard”—which, for the record, I have been wearing—buffers the damage.
It’s no wonder, then, that I wince at the phrase “gnashing of teeth.” That’s too bad, because the phrase pops up a lot in Matthew’s gospel. In today’s passage, we heard that the “bad” fish, who get thrown out of the full-to-bursting net, signify those who will be separated from the righteous and thrown into the “furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
Last week, we heard that the weeds that grew up with the wheat—their roots entangled—and that were collected and burned at reaping time, signify the “causes of sin and all evildoers,” who’ll be thrown “into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt 13:41-42).
In Matthew’s version of the parable of the wedding banquet, filled with guests invited right off the streets, one guest gets kicked out “into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt 22:13).
In two different parables about masters and servants, one servant who slacked and helped himself to food and drink while his master was away will be “cut . . . in pieces and put . . . where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt 24:51); and another servant, who buried his master’s money because he was afraid to invest it, gets called “wicked and lazy” and is to be thrown “into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt 25:30).
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I propose that these proclamations about a future time and specific place, “where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth,” say more about the preoccupations of Matthew than about the good news of the kingdom of God revealed through its Messiah, Christ Jesus.
The “Matthew” I’m talking about here isn’t Matthew the apostle. Matthew the apostle was apparently a tax collector who accepted Jesus’s invitation to follow him (Matt 9:9-13). That Matthew joined other tax collectors and sinners at banquets with Jesus.
Matthew the evangelist, though, is the person—or maybe team of people—who put together what we call “the gospel of Matthew.” Some memories in the gospel of Matthew might have a special connection to Matthew the apostle. There’s lots about gathering together the righteous and the unrighteous into one field, one net, one banqueting hall. But it was someone else’s job—an anonymous someone we call “Matthew” for convenience—to piece together the memories, writings, and other fragments into a gospel, trying to make sense of these materials in the process.
We might get a small glimpse of this behind-the-scenes Matthew in today’s gospel passage. It concludes, “every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”
Matthew the evangelist fits the bill of a scribe trained for the kingdom. More than other gospels, Matthew’s gospel takes pains to include “what is old.” Matthew’s Jesus came to not to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill them. Matthew’s Jesus is like Moses himself, teaching God’s laws on a mountain and raising the bar for true, heartfelt righteousness (5:17-20).
Matthew’s gospel also adds quotes from the prophets where other evangelists don’t. To a story also found in Mark, Matthew adds a quote from the prophet Hosea—“I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (Hos 6:6). In Matthew, Jesus tells his critics to go and learn what that verse means.
Not every Christian in the early centuries after Jesus agreed with Matthew about holding onto what was old. Some thought Christians should leave behind the Old Testament completely—or at least cut down on some of those commandments.
Matthew also thought that a scribe trained for the kingdom of heaven should bring out things that are new. These “new” materials might be the teachings of Jesus. But for Matthew, “what is new” also seems to include new and bold interpretations.
For example, in Matthew’s story about the birth of Jesus, he quotes another verse from the prophet Hosea but gives it a new application. When the prophet Hosea spoke the words, “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Hos 11:1), he wanted to remind all Israel of God’s consistent love for them in ages past. A Hosea put it, God lifted God’s people to his cheek like an infant, taught them to walk like a toddler, and would never give up on them. Through the prophet Hosea, God says, “my compassion grows warm and tender,” “I will not execute my fierce anger.”
But Matthew also turns the prophet’s words, “Out of Egypt I called my son,” into a prophecy about God’s son Jesus, fleeing to Egypt to escape King Herod and then returning to settle in Galilee, when the coast was clear. Matthew changes the words “Out of Egypt, I called my son,” from a recollection of Israel’s past into a prediction about their coming Messiah.
Another one of Matthew’s new moves is to give Jesus’s teachings a sharper apocalyptic spin. In Matthew’s hands, the mysterious parables turn into warnings about a coming Day of Judgment, when the righteous and the wicked will be permanently separated, and wrongdoers will get what they deserve.
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But parables, like teeth, are sharp yet fragile. They’re multi-layered. They’re worth chewing with again and again.
The more I ponder it, the less I think the parable of the good and bad fish really was about the future separation and punishment of wrongdoers. I mean, if the so-called “good” fish are about to be cooked and eaten, aren’t they the ones bound for “the furnace of fire, where there will . . . gnashing of teeth”? I’m not sure I want to be a good fish. I’d rather be thrown back into the ocean.
But Matthew did know something very important about being a scribe trained for the kingdom of heaven: Matthew knew he had a responsibility to sift through his treasury, and to work with both the old and the new.
We don’t get to choose what ends up in our Scriptures. And in the Episcopal Church, for the most part, we don’t get to choose what Scriptures we hear on Sundays. Like our DNA and our personal family histories, we don’t choose them—we inherit them.
But in the kingdom of God, we, like King Solomon himself, have some freedom to choose what we’ll inherit and what we’ll lay aside. Like Solomon, we can ask for a discerning heart, so that in the treasury entrusted to us, we can separate the good from the bad—and maybe take bold, speculative risks with some of its gems. We can find the hidden treasures and invaluable pearls.
Things that are a little too fishy, we can release.
~The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh