6th
after Pentecost / Proper 11 — 20 July 2014
RCL1: Gen 28:10-19a
| Ps 139:1-12,23-24 | Rom
8:12-25 | Matt 13:24-30,26-43
Let both of them grow together until the harvest. [Matt 24:30]
The whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now. [Romans 8:22]
The whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now. [Romans 8:22]
I have never really been much of a gardener. Oh, at various times I’ve grown some
vegetables — tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, corn when I had room for it. But it hasn’t really been “my thing.” And in our present house, the shade trees in
the back yard have made growing tomatoes virtually impossible. Wendy is a bit more of a flower gardener,
which she does very well. Especially
hostas, which love all the shade! But I have
found that, after many years of living in rectories, and then in rental
housing, since we have ad our own houses I have a somewhat different attitude
toward lawn and garden issues. This
ground is now mine! And I take the presence of weeds as a
personal insult.
Some weeds are pretty obvious. In the lawn, for instance, dandelions show up
pretty readily, and are relatively easily controlled, and so far I have been
generally victorious in this battle.
Crabgrass is also fairly obvious but less easily controlled, and by the
end of the summer the war is something of a stalemate. Creeping charlie is always kind of a tossup,
though I have made some progress.
Garden weeds are something
else, especially in the spring if you are planting from seed. It takes a while before you can be sure
whether these little green sprouts are what you planted, or what The Enemy
planted! And so you have to exercise a
bit of care.
What you don’t
do, whether you’re growing flowers, or vegetables, or a field crop like wheat
or corn, is let the weeds grow up with the crop until the harvest. One, it makes the flowerbed look all ratty,
and although aesthetics is not exactly the point of farming, there is something
really lovely about an absolutely clean field of soybeans, and something tacky
about a beanfield full of scraggly volunteer cornstalks and pigweed. Two, and more important, weeds draw away
moisture and nutrients that should be going to the crop. (I see that herbicide-resistance is now
bringing back the annual summer teenage task of walking beans!)
All of this was just as much true in the first century as
it is today, and a Galilean farmer hearing Jesus tell this story that we call
the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds (or the Wheat and the Tares, though most
of us wouldn’t recognize a tare if it grew in the middle of our geranium pot. Actually, “tares” are probably darnel, a weed
that looks a lot like young wheat) — a Galilean farmer hearing this story would
have said, “Whattayou crazy? You're a carpenter, obviously not a farmer!” I think this is one of
those stories that Jesus tells that we have “scripturalized” and tamed so that
it no longer occurs to us how much it really runs counter to common sense. Even the earliest Christians had trouble with
this — if the consensus of New Testament scholars is right, and in this
instance I think it is, the second half of today’s Gospel reading, in which
Jesus is depicted as “explaining” the parable, is actually an addition by the
church a generation or so later, who felt a need to come up with some plausible
religious interpretation of what is actually a very difficult and troubling
story. (A lot of us think that Jesus
never “explained” his parables. Either
we get them, or not. Often not.)
And so we read this story as
an allegory of the last judgment. Well,
I don’t think that’s wrong — part of
the point of parables is to suggest a variety of interpretations — but I think
that what the story is really about is (what we call) the problem of evil. And what it says is not really what we want
to hear.
We naturally and understandably assume that God is a God
who fixes things for us. (And there is a
sense in which that’s true, though what God fixes is not so much “things” but us, if we will let God’s grace work in
us.) But I think that Jesus is
suggesting to us in this story that God is not a “fix-it” kind of God. At least not always right now. Ultimately, all shall be well and all shall
be well and all manner of thing shall be well (as the Lady Julian says). But in the meantime God lets the weeds grow. And
furthermore, God has to let the weeds
grow for our sake. Pulling the weeds up now would destroy us
too. But I’ll come back to that in a
minute.
(When I say God has
to do something, of course I don’t mean that there are any external constraints
that can compel God to do a thing or prevent God from doing another thing. God is, after all, God! But God
is who God is, as God told Moses at the burning bush, and in that sense God
cannot contravene God’s own nature. God
must be true to God’s own self. And in
relation to us, God’s creation, God must act consistently with the purpose and
destiny of the creation. I’ll come back
and pick this up again too the next time around.)
We need to approach this issue with some care. There are a lot of people out there, and
maybe some of you in here, who have been hurt very badly in one way or another
— themselves, or people they love — and they asked God to fix it, and God
didn’t fix it, at least not the way they wanted, and so they are dealing with
pain, or anger, or despair, or all three, and that’s all very real. And it simply won’t do for us to say, “Well,
that’s how the world is, that’s how God is, suck it up.”
Because that’s not
what God says to us. God says, “My
grace is sufficient for you [2 Cor 12:9], if you will receive it and let it
change you, let it change your life, and thus change your world. I cannot just pull up the weeds for you. But I can do this — I will do this — I have
done this: I will come and be with you,
and I will bear on myself all that the world’s weeds can do, and I will live,
and in the end I will gather you to me at harvest-home.” And that is how we in God’s Name must be with
those who hurt. Not everything can be
fixed, but we can be there to share the hurt.
Here’s the hard truth:
the necessary condition of the possibility of freedom is the possibility
of evil. In order for love to be
possible, hatred must be permitted. God
could have created a universe of robots in which everything is precisely
programmed. And maybe in some alternate universe
God did so. But that’s not the universe
we have been given to live in. God
created us in the divine image and likeness, to share in the work of building
the world, to share with one another the love of God for us and to freely
return in that love to God. God does not
make us grow, God lets us grow.
And the corollary is that God has to let the weeds grow
too, else we would no longer be free, we could not be what God created us to
be. If God pulls the weeds, it destroys
us as well. So the weeds have to be
allowed to grow too.
But only for a time.
Not forever.
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