Matthew 13:24-30 and 36-43
He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven
may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while
everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then
went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared
as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did
you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’
He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you
want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds
you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together
until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the
weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my
barn.’.
Then he left the
crowds and went into the house. And his disciples approached him, saying,
“Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” He answered, “The one
who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world, and the good
seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil
one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the
age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are collected and burned up
with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his
angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all
evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will
be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in
the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!
Do we have any gardeners in the congregation?
My wife is the gardener in our house and she takes full responsibility
for the wonderful oasis which is our back garden. I’m responsible for the front
which has a pocket-handkerchief sized lawn: I am at war with dandelions. Some
weeks ago I noticed how many we had and set about digging them up. The problem
was that the more I looked the more there were and what I thought would be a
small task ended up as several hours of weeding. The lawn was left in a mess
and I wished I hadn’t started. I looked at the lawn again this week and there
were more dandelions. It’s a never ending task and it’s so disheartening.
My own poor gardening skills came to mind when I read this
passage again.
“Let anyone with ears
listen!” says Jesus. Parents,
grandparent and teachers in the congregation will recognise this phrase: it’s
shorthand for, “Are you concentrating? Have you got it?” There’s a big
difference between listening and hearing and between hearing and understanding
isn’t there? In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus is often recorded as saying this, “Let
anyone with ears listen!” and it usually seems to be an exercise in hope and
expectation over experience because, more often than not, while those he was
speaking to may have been listening they hadn’t been hearing or understanding.
I can ask you to show you’ve been listening by repeating it back to me. That
doesn’t guarantee you’ve understood it.
So, it was with the Disciples and we join them today in the
middle of listening to a series of parables. The disciples are often
characterised, although less so in Matthew’s Gospel, as being a bit dense. More
often than not we read that they had to have a special tutorial with Jesus
because they hadn’t understood the nature of the parables and, of course, these
are parables that are so familiar to us that we might be tempted to feel a bit
sorry for Jesus as once again his most trusted friends and followers struggle
with what to us seems so obvious.
Isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing?
We look at the parables today - and this may just be me, of
course, - but they lose something by their familiarity: “Oh yeah, I know that
one.” And we return to our usual state of happy indifference and pay less
attention. “Nudge me when he’s finished.”
The parables of Jesus are stories of their time and reveal
the culture and concerns of the people of Jesus’ day. Jesus wrapped up his
teaching in examples from everyday life that people could identify with. He
talked about family life because everyone was, or had been, in a family; at a
time when people built their own homes, he used building as an example; when
most people were subsistence farmers, Jesus talked about agriculture, as he
does in today’s passage; he used cooking as an example and on other occasions
he talked about housekeeping or about buying and selling. “The Kingdom of God
is like this ….” By using simple examples from everyday life Jesus made his
message more understandable. That impact may be to some extent lost on us today
because we aren’t fishermen or subsistence farmers and we don’t build our own
houses but we mustn’t underestimate the impact those stories would have had then.
So, the thing about parables, and today’s is no exception, is
that they were designed to make people think because they have two levels of
meaning: there’s the obvious literal meaning with a frustrated farmer
struggling to harvest a crop which had been sabotaged by his enemies who had
sown weeds amongst the seeds. Now, I’m thinking that you might have to be
pretty dense not to wonder why Jesus chose to tell this story if there wasn’t
more to it and there is, of course, but the point is that his listeners were
supposed to realise that and struggle to work out the other level of meaning –
the moral – of the story for themselves and Jesus didn’t always provide an
explanation.
This time he did and it’s quite a challenging message.
“The Kingdom of Heaven is like this …..” and in symbolic
terms Jesus goes on to describe the world that we live in: a world that in
different ways could be identified by every generation who read this passage; a
world where good and bad survive side by side. Then Jesus delivered the
surprise to those who wanted to rush out into the field and do a bit of serious
weeding, “Leave it alone.”
Why?
Well, perhaps that’s the wrong question. Perhaps, instead, we
should be asking “who?” as in who was Jesus talking to? We know the disciples
were there but at the start of chapter 13, Matthew tells us that great crowds
had gathered around him so there were clearly many more people there than the
inner group of Jesus’ faithful followers. We know, too, that by this stage in
his ministry Jesus was attracting the attention of the religious authorities
who, not being quite sure what to make of him, but feeling on the back-foot,
were monitoring his every word and action. We can assume that the Pharisees
would have been there too, not only listening to Jesus but gauging the reaction
of the crowd to what he said.
There’s an obvious difference between grass and dandelion but
not so with the weed Jesus was describing, a weed that as it grew, looked
indistinguishable from the wheat it grew beside. We know the weed as Darnel, an annual grass
with long, slender bristles that looks very much like wheat. It would be VERY easy
to mistake it for the real thing and in a frenzy of weed-pulling, we run the
risk of pulling up the wheat with the darnel because they are so intertwined.
Given that parables usually have more than one level of
meaning, let’s consider for a moment that in the natural world the weed is the
norm. It is the wheat in this story which doesn’t belong. It’s the foreign
species introduced and deliberately planted. We know from The Parable of The
Sower earlier in this chapter, that the seed represents the word of God and its
function is to grow and bear fruit, thirty-fold, sixty-fold, a hundred fold. In
the parable of the Sower, though, the weeds grow up around the wheat and
strangle it.
So, I ask again, who was Jesus speaking to? The answer is the
Pharisees not the Disciples, so we can forgive them their confusion and need
for a separate explanation. In his parable the Pharisees are the weeds and it
was into their established environment that God sowed his word, the word that
Jesus spoke.
The Pharisees were the ones charged with the spiritual
welfare of the Jews of Jesus’ time – and they were getting it wrong. Jesus
railed against the worst of their approach to religion for being inflexible and
hidebound in tradition and for having outdated practices from which the love
and compassion of God was all too often obscured if not lost completely.
That’s O.K. then. We don’t need to pay too much attention
here because we aren’t the audience for Jesus’ words. We’re the faithful
disciples after all, not the Pharisees.
Aren’t we?
The issue is that when it comes to matters of judgement, left
to our devices – and seemingly from the best of motives - we can still get it
wrong: there’s a bit of the Pharisee in all of us, and let’s not pretend that
today’s church is so different from the Judaism of Jesus’ day. It isn’t and we
face many of the same problems. The Kingdom of God, this side of the grave, is
messy. Much as we might want it to be so, there is no perfect church and history
is littered with examples of religious groups who have sought to create one by
setting themselves aside from what they perceive to be the religious corruption
and error of their times. Those attitudes still exist and in the attempt to
define pure and incorrupt religion its members inevitably draw up check-lists
of what they believe to be acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, attitudes and
beliefs and as they create those criteria they leave others behind or outside
the club. If you don’t fit their criteria you’re out. “You’re a false
Christian” is one of the most appalling phrases of modern church life. “You’re
a false Christian because you disagree with my interpretation/my church’s
interpretation of God’s word.”
We see it today in the worst excesses of religious expression
and, judged by some of these criteria, you and I are most definitely on the
outside looking in, judged as unworthy by those who have decided on our behalf
what the limits of God’s grace are. Such judgements lead to exclusivity, not
inclusivity and that’s against the teaching of the Gospel because when we tell
someone they aren’t accepted we’re putting the first barrier in the way of
their coming to an understanding of the full and inclusive nature of God’s love
for all his creation. The message becomes, “God loves everyone, but not you so
much.” That’s a perversion of the Gospel.
Let’s be honest: we’re human and we’re open to the same
impulses as all other people so we’re advised to be cautious. The church is embroiled
in all kinds of wrangles: “You’re not a real Christian if you’ve not experienced
a baptism in the Spirit, or speak in tongues; if you don’t accept the Virgin
Birth; if you’re gay; if you don’t accept the bread and wine as the true and
literal body and blood of Jesus; if you don’t believe in an interventionist
God; if you don’t believe that Peter was the first Pope; if you don’t believe
that every word of scripture is literally the revealed word of God; if you
don’t believe that everything that happens to you is part of God’s sovereign
plan” and so on.
Do you ever think the church would be better off without
those other people who are so clearly wrong and argumentative and with whom you
passionately disagree about important matters?
I do, and if you’re like me in that, you’re part of the
problem because, like me, you’ve tapped into your inner Pharisee.
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once put it: "God's
purpose is not wrathful judgment. God's purpose is redemption, and the road to
redemption is by way of reconciliation. Only in that way will the world finally
be saved." Today's parable warns us against relying on our human capacity
to know fully the mind of God. It also suggests that what might appear to be
good and pure to us might not necessarily be so at all.
Look at it from the other perspective: there’s something
deeply reassuring about being in the in-crowd. What if you’re not? There are
many Christians who have experienced bad religion at the hands of others. They
talk of the pain and hardship they experience, of the psychological distress –
sometimes damage – that often godly, loving Christian people wittingly or
unwittingly inflict upon those they disagree with and who can’t see the
distress they cause, leaving those who suffer to feel excluded, abandoned and
driven out with no-one to talk to because they fear their pain will be
interpreted as disloyalty to a particular church, a member of the clergy, a friendship
group or even disloyalty to Jesus himself. We talk of God’s unconditional love
but often find that strings have been imposed on that love by others who seek
to define the limits of God’s grace. “You can’t be a proper Christian if ….”
Who is the wheat and who is the weed? Can we really tell?
Don’t all our innate prejudices – and yes, Christians have them too – get in
the way of objective judgement? We’re just like the Pharisees Jesus told this
parable against when they were at their worst but we need to remember that not
all the Pharisees were bad people. Yes, they get a bad press, but many were
faithful followers of the God of Israel and were, as Jesus often said, “close
to the Kingdom of God” and not beyond the scope of his grace. Much good was
done by the Pharisees and that’s why it would have been so damaging to go on
some sort of crusade to root out the weeds.
This parable is a warning against that. At the end of the
parable we are told clearly that it is God who separates the wheat and the
weeds.
So, what are we to do?
I think, firstly, we look out for those times when our inner
Pharisee gets the better of us: it’s not for us to decide who has God’s favour;
who’s in and who’s out. Reconciliation doesn’t come by demonising or
ostracising. Our job is to leave the conviction of what is right and wrong in
the church to the Holy Spirit, knowing that truly loving our Christian
neighbours as ourselves is the way to dialogue and potential change.
The Kingdom of God is like this. Let anyone with ears listen.
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