I’m not a gardener, Lord knows I have tried. I’ve bought every tool – every book and watched loads of PBS and YouTube videos, I’ve managed to keep an herb garden alive for a few years, and a few little patio tomato plants but alas I was not gifted with a green thumb, as my husband Bill will attest to.
But I do have a warm hand that reaches out to hold people in need of comfort, friendship, and prayer. This Gospel today though, is a parable all about gardening, oh but it is.
Jesus tells a story that compared his church to a garden that was infested with weeds. Wow! Infested – that is a pretty strong world, so I am figuring that he meant an overwhelming number of people in his church showed some weediness. Sometimes there may be people in the church that don’t really belong. They do and say things that aren’t very loving and they don’t seem to believe in what the Bible teaches. They sometimes say even go so far as to say hateful things about other members of the church and try to hurt them. They are like the weeds in the garden.
They don’t often know what goes on in other people’s lives. They do not know the burdens other people carry around with them. Yet we all think we know enough to make instant judgements of others and take swift action, usually with our mouths.
The Indian poet Tagore told of the day his servant arrived at work late. Like so many of his upper class, Tagore was helpless when it came to menial things, or he made himself helpless because as a member of the upper caste he considered himself above these things.
An hour went by and the servant hadn’t arrived. Tagore was getting angrier by the minute. He thought of all the punishments he was going to inflict upon his servant when he finally arrived. Three hours passed. Now he no longer thought of punishments, he knew that he would fire him when he got there.
Finally, noon arrived. The servant came to work and without a world, proceeded to do his work. He picked up his master’s clothes, began to make a meal and do other chores around the house. Tagore watched all of this in silent rage. Finally, he said, “Drop everything and get out of here. You’re fired.” The man kept working, quietly, diligently. Tagore said, “Get out of here.” The man said, “My little girl died this morning.”
The farmhands/servants in today’s parable are anxious to run out into the field, pull up all the weeds they see mixing in with the crop of wheat, because they are certain that the weeds will end of choking off the good wheat. However, when the Landowner returns and tells them to leave the weeds where they are, they are puzzled by his apparent lack of concern for the mess his crop had got into.
Upon hearing this story, the disciples are puzzled too: Why shouldn’t they get rid of the weeds. They ask Jesus about it.
Jesus explains that the farmhands/servants are told not to pull the weeds up because sometimes it is impossible to tell the weeds from the wheat. And when they pull up the bad weeds they will uproot some good wheat.
They are told not to because making the judgment about which is a weed and which is wheat is not the job of the farmhands. That judgement is best left up to the owner. That is why the owner in the parable cautions “Don’t act too quickly. Don’t jump to conclusions.” We know God is the landowner and only God can make the judgement on people … who is wheat and who is weed.
When the servant in the parable ask, “Master did you not sow good seed in your field? Where have the weeds come from? We’d like to know the answer to that one too. We would like to know why there is evil in the world. The parable doesn’t explain to us: why evil exists; why good things get corrupted; why some kids get messed up; why bad things happen to good people. Why it seems the innocent suffer most. Parables rarely answer our questions directly. Their meaning is much more illusive. That is why each time we read them, we tend to see and hear something new.
And as the parable implies, we often fall into the trap of seeing individuals as wheat or weeds: either all good or all bad; rather than having the capacity for both good and bad. Using the language of the parable, people are not either/or; they have the capacity for hope, love and joy which is born of God, and the capacity for destruction and bitterness which is born of the evil in the world. When we try to separate the world into good guys and bad guys, inevitably the seedlings of hope, love, joy which were growing quietly in the lives of those we condemn are crushed underfoot.
Matthew’s parable this week is in one sense a warning. Lest we think we have it all figured out how to judge evil from good, moral from immoral, right from wrong, virtuous from unvirtuous, think again! According to whose authority do we think we can make the judgement? When? In what contexts? By what standards? Oh it is easy to call Hitler evil or even Charles Manson, how about other despots. So far it’s been easy, but what about certain political leaders or political movements? Where do we draw the line at what is evil versus what is mentally ill or just opportunist?
When we start going down the road of making our lot in life deciding what is good and evil, we may very well discover that others will make similar conclusions about us.
Good and evil coexist. Though it’s almost always easier for us to recognize the evil in others than it is to see it in ourselves.
Some time ago the U.S. News & World Report ran article about how Americans often are not civil to each other. The article reported that in a survey, 90% of all Americans said that the loss of civility was a serious problem in their country. But that same survey found that 99% of all Americans say that they themselves are civil. In the survey only about 1 person in 100 was willing to admit that they were part of the problem.
When we are honest with ourselves, we can identify with the words of the Apostle Paull. Referring to his own struggles, he says: I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do”. (Romans 7:19)
Those of us who grew up Catholic, were never allowed to forget that we are sinners – and by the way, don’t forget to feel guilty about it – Martin Luther used the Latin phrase “Simul Justus et paccator’, we are saints and sinners at the same time.
As the old saying goes:
‘There is so much bad in the best of us,
And there is so much good in the worst of us,
That it hardly behooves any of us,
To speak any ill of the rest of us!”
Nevertheless, we are often quick to judge others who we consider the weeds in this world.
The owner in this parable calls for caution and patience. He tells us not to go into the field ripping out what we thing are weeds least we inadvertently uproot the good wheat that the same time. Be slow to judge for you just never know.
The wonderful writer and preacher Barbara Brown Taylor has written a re-creation of this parable and we can learn more about the benefits of living with weeds. She writes: “One afternoon in the middle of the growing season, a bunch of farmhands decided to surprise their boss and weed his favourite wheat field. No sooner had they begun work, however than they began to argue – first about which of the wheat-looking things were weeds and then about the rest of the weeds. Did the Queen Anne’s lace pose a real threat to the wheat or could it stay for decoration? And the blackberries? They would be ripe in just a week or two, but they were after weeds – or were they? And the honeysuckle – it seemed a shame to pull up anything that smelled so sweet.”
Taylor continues: “About the time they had gotten around to debating the purple asters, the boss showed and ordered them out of his field. Dejected, they did as they were told. Back at the barn the boss took away their machetes from them, poured them some lemonade and made them go down where they could watch the way the light moved across the field. At first, all they could see were the weeds and what a messy field it was, what a discredit to them, and their profession, but as the summer wore on they marveled at the profusion of growth – tall wheat surrounded by tall goldenrod, ragweed and brown-eyed Susans. The tares and the poison ivy flourished alongside the Cherokee roses and milkweed and it was a mess, but a glorious mess, and when it had all bloomed and ripened and gone to seed the reapers came.
And Taylor concludes: “Carefully, gently, expertly, the reapers gathered the wheat and made the rest into bricks for the oven where the bread was baked. And the fire that the weeds made was excellent and the flour that the wheat made was excellent and when the harvest was over the owner called them together – the farmhands, the reapers and all the neighbours – and he broke bread with them, bread that was the final distillation of that whole messy, gorgeous, missed-up field, and they all agreed that it was like no bread any of them had ever tasted before and that is was very very good.”
The Good News is that God is able to make something great come out of this whole, glorious mess of intermingled wheat and weeds. God somehow miraculously takes this mess of ours and brings forth from it both excellent flour and excellent fire to produce life-giving bread.
Sure we get frustrated and discouraged with the weeds in our lives but that than becoming dispirited or impatient with the weeds, the parable reminds us of God’s promise that the good seed has been planted in all of us. It is growing and is being nurtured. In each grain God sees the beginning of the realm where peace, respect and love can flourish. Lest we get anxious and desperately start trying to pull out the weeds, we are reminded that God is in the midst of working with us. Weeds and all. Now stay around for the best bread ever.
Amen.
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