Gracious God, take our minds and think through them;
take our hands and work through them;
take our hearts and set them on fire.
Amen.
This year, for the first time since moving to Maryland, we planted a garden. It’s not very big – two 4×4 connected raised beds – but it’s enough to have some herbs, a couple rows of bush beans, and four tomato plants.
It’s crowded and wild – the plants overflowing what was once a tidy rectangle – and it’s beginning to come into its harvest time. I have lots of green beans and handful of tomatoes everyday – with enough coming on the vine that I know soon and very soon my kitchen island will be covered with them. The joy of abundance!
That’s summer for you though, that time of year when the farmer’s market is bulging at the stalls and our lectionary is offering up fresh Gospel parables nearly each week.
The thing I love about parables is that they are just so roomy – holding so many possible ways of understanding God and God’s mission in such little stories. The Gospel writes of course add explanations, showing how they hoped their community would understand them – but they are never that simple.
Preacher and writer Barbara Brown Taylor offers this view: parables are not stories that answer the questions we have directly and clearly; instead, they deliver their meaning in images that talk more to our hearts than to our heads.
Well that’s good to hear because our parable this week, our next installment of what might be called Gardening with God on HGTV, is one of those that my mind struggles with.
It’s a garden full of the kingdom of heaven, the devil, and the eschatological sorting of the good and the bad at the end of times. It’s one of those weeping and gnashing of teeth passages that can be hard to reconcile with an all loving God. But experience has taught me that when I’m uncomfortable by the challenge of a parable, I’m probably getting close to its heart, and that means there is something important to pay attention to.
In today’s parable we get the image that the kingdom of heaven is like when the enemy sows weeds among the good wheat. The evil is mixed in with the good. By this account I think it’s safe to say we are living in the kingdom of heaven now. We live in times, just like Matthew’s community, when there is evil all around. Why? And what are we to do?
Unfortunately this parable doesn’t address the question of WHY the enemy came and sowed the weeds, or WHY the evil exists. Instead it focuses on God’s, and the church’s, response.
When the workers of the household ask the owner whether they should go and pull the weeds from among the wheat the owner says no – let both of them grow together until the harvest.
What an astonishing answer. Let the weeds grow? Don’t pull them? Let them soak up the water and nutrients and sunshine alongside the wheat, possibly choking it out? What kind of gardener does that? Is there some wisdom in there that that isn’t readily apparent?
It would have been in Jesus’ day – though it can get lost in translation for us. The word we have translated as weed can also be translated tare. Tare refers to the bearded darnel plant common throughout the Near East. In its immature stages it looks almost identical to wheat. Only when the tare puts on its seed can you distinguish it from the wheat.
That little botanical fact makes all the difference in this story. It, in fact, makes the eschatological sorting – the weeping and gnashing and furnace of fire – easier to deal with in some ways. Because it points us back to something in the passage we are likely to pass over.
We’re not the ones called to do the sorting, God is. Because only God can really know the difference between the wheat and the tares.
We don’t know the plants well enough to know which ones need to be pulled and which ones don’t. Only God does. As the Gospel says: for in gathering the weeds you would also uproot the wheat along with them.
In our exuberance to rid the world of evil, how often have we hurt the good as well? In our flawed human attempts to deliver what we see as justice, how many innocents have been caught up in our judgments?
So often we see what we want to see – instead of what God sees.
There is a story told about one of the first crusades. Knights from western Europe blew through an Arab town on their way to the Holy Land and killed everyone in sight. It was not until after the battle, when they turned the bodies over, that they found crosses around most of their victim’s necks. It never occurred to them that Christians could look different than themselves.
We’re not the ones called to do the sorting, God is. Because only God can really know the difference between the wheat and the tares.
This does mean that, whether we are comfortable with it or not, our Christian heritage tells us there will be a time for God’s judgement – and that’s actually good news.
In Bishop and scholar NT Wright’s book, Surprised by Hope, he writes that this judgement is good news because the one through whom God’s justice will finally sweep through the world is not a hard-hearted, arrogant, or vengeful tyrant, but rather the Man of Sorrows, who was acquainted with grief; the Jesus who loved sinners and died for them, the Messiah who took the world’s judgment upon himself on the cross. Of course, this also means that he is uniquely placed to judge the systems and rulers that have carved up the world between them….
This is good news. Though the kingdom is rife with evil now, there is a time coming when all death and decay, all injustice and tears, will be wiped away.
But what is made easier when we realize that God is the one called to do the sorting, is still not easy – because it means we have to confront other things. This parable points to our inability to judge, quite possibly our frustration over God’s timing rather than our own, and just maybe our unwillingness to trust in God’s own judgment.
But remember, this parable doesn’t address the problem of evil, it focuses on God’s, and the church’s, response to it.
Just as the difference between the tare and the wheat isn’t known until they put on their seed, we too will be known by our fruits. Our response, our mission, is not to sort the weeds; it is to bear good fruit. It is by our fruit that we will be known.
That may not sound like much in the face of all the evil in the world, but is it what we are called to do.
Again, listen to Barbara Brown Taylor: What God seems to know is that the best and only real solution to evil is to bear good fruit. Our job, in a mixed field, is not to give ourselves to the enemy by devoting all our energy to the destruction of the weeds, but to mind our own business, so to speak – our business being the reconciliation of the world through the practice of unshielded love. If we give ourselves to that, God will take care of the rest….
Wow. Could it be that this parable about sorting out the good from the bad is not so different than the extravagant gardener who sowed seed everywhere last week? Could they both be pointing us in the direction of simply trusting God – trusting in God’s abundance, in God’s wisdom, and in God’s time?
In this day and age, when so many of us are more at home in this world than ever before, and much less interested in the world to come, I think this parable reminds us that what we do now does matter. It is by our fruits that we will be known. We and the systems in which we live will be judged. And it is by trusting in God’s abundance, wisdom and time – the fruits of God’s grace – that we will truly know God in the end.
~ AMEN ~