In my new home, each condo owner has a little bitty patch of grass out in front of his courtyard, and it gets mowed every week by the condo association. Every time I look at that little bitty patch of grass, my heart leaps with joy, because I think of the great big yard at my old house that I no longer have to mow, treat, rake, or otherwise worry about. What freedom! What delight I find in that little bitty patch of grass! But then last week I came home from church, only to find two of my neighbors out in front of their little bitty yards, sweating in the heat to put down new sod. “It’s these weeds,” they said to me in exasperation. “This grass is just so full of weeds that you can’t even see the grass anymore. It looks just awful,” they complained. Their eyes then drifted disdainfully over to my little patch of grass. “You know, you’re going to have to do something about your grass, too,” they said. “All of your weeds are going to blow their little seeds over here in our yards and get them all re-infected. And we can’t have that. You need to get rid of those weeds,” they warned. I looked at my pretty little patch of green, where weeds and grass were growing peacefully and freely together on a little bitty piece of soil that I didn’t have to rake or mow, and I sighed a deep, inward sigh.
Today’s Gospel lesson, however, gave me some renewed hope! Is Jesus telling me that I don’t need to remove the weeds from my little bitty patch of grass? Can I go next door and read it to my neighbors for proof? Should we just let the grass and the weeds alone, confident that all will turn out right in the end? Do I really need to weed my yard, my heart, or my community? One blogger thinks that I do. Danielle Schroyer challenges our parable, implying that it is advocating a harmful, laissez-faire attitude. Is Jesus saying, she asks, that “If you have a terrible sore festering right alongside your healthy skin, just leave it alone, untreated, because by remedying it you might kill some of the good skin, too [?!] Try telling that to someone with a terrible sore … Weeds. Festering sores… Even deep-seated anger. We don’t tend to advocate inactivity in any of these cases. Any good gardener, doctor, therapist, or friend will tell you that the best approach is to confront a problem and do what you can to change it. Trim back the weeds. Treat the illness. Talk out the problem. Nobody in their right mind would say to leave it alone until some undisclosed future time when someone else will come along to fix it for you… [At least] Can we be proactive, even if we can’t be reactive? Can our doors have locks, our gardens have gates, and our bodies have probiotics and vitamins? … [If I’m going to follow Jesus’ advice,] I’m wondering if it would just be easier to sit vulnerably in the middle of a street and wait for a car to run me over.”[1]
Danielle’s confused and outraged reaction is probably the reaction of the slaves in our parable, as well as the reaction of the Galilean farmers to whom our parable was first addressed. Scholar Ulrich Luz thinks that this strange parable, found only in Matthew’s Gospel, is a response to the similar parable found in Mark 4.[2] Here, Mark’s Jesus says, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how… But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.” “Wait a minute,” we respond when we hear Mark’s parable about the kingdom, “it doesn’t work like that!” What about the presence of evil? The grain just doesn’t come up all perfectly. The grain ripens full of weeds! Just look around in my community, in my heart! How can we have a good harvest, if bad and good are all mixed up in there?
Scholars are pretty sure that the word translated “weeds” in our Gospel is really a plant called “darnell,” a wheat look-alike common in the Middle East that usually carries a poisonous fungus along with it, a fungus that will sicken all who mistakenly gather it up with their wheat and turn it into bread. Good farmers in the Holy Land know that they need to recognize that noxious weed, and they would indeed usually root it out early, before it can run the risk of getting mixed in with the wheat at harvest time. Darnell does not prevent the wheat from growing, but it does hurt the people who mistakenly feed off of it.
If you were a slave going out into the wheat fields one sunny morning and found that the field where your master himself had planted good wheat seed was suddenly full of poisonous weeds, you would be afraid of a beating. As a helpless slave, you would wonder if you were going to be blamed for the disaster. You would sigh in despair over all of the work that would be expected of you in weeding out all of the bad plants in the field. And then when the master told you that, “No, this time we are going to leave the wheat and the weeds alone. You won’t even have to do the reaping. I’ll bring someone in from the outside at harvest time, and they will take care of it,” you would shake your head in confusion at the change in practices, at the master’s new generosity toward you and at his new slovenly way of farming. “If I had my own land,” you would probably grumble to yourself, “I would put up a big fence around it, with guard dogs to keep the enemies out. I would make my slaves root out those weeds before some of that fungus got mixed in with my wheat, and no one would ever want to buy my grain again!” You would think that your master had lost his mind.
Jesus loves to make us think that God has lost God’s mind, because Jesus is trying to transform our minds. We react to evil in our hearts and in our communities just like the slaves react to the darnell in the wheat field. What do you say when you wake up to find sin in your soul? Do you think that you can root it out on your own? Do you blame God or another human being for its presence? “Master, aren’t you the one who planted that wheat?” cry the slaves. What about when you wake up one morning to find dissension at your workplace or in your family or in your church? Do you start blaming those who disagree with you, thinking, if not acting on the thought, that the community would be a better place if the poisonous people could be rooted out? Do you attempt to gather those who agree with your position into neat bundles of wheat? Do you start ripping at the soil of your heart or your community until the ground lies dead and barren? Jesus knows this is how we all react. Jesus also knows that the old proverb, “What you sow is what you reap,” is not always true in this world. Jesus knows that in this world, even in this world into which his kingdom is dawning, we can sow love and still reap death on the cross; we can sow goodness, and still reap condemnation.
No, our parable does not advocate sitting back and letting the weeds destroy us. The weeds in our parable do not harm the growing wheat. But our parable wants to help us avoid wasting our time judging parts of ourselves or parts of our community as dispensable. Our parable wants to free us from games of blaming and judgment and gossip and shunning. I heard a wonderful quote this summer from a contemporary Swiss theologian who said, “If there is a final judgment, it is to keep us from doing it ourselves.”[3] Our judgments only lead to paralyzing guilt, destruction, violence, or hatred. Barbara Brown Taylor tells the story of a group of European knights who came into an Arab town somewhere on their way to the Holy Land during one of the early Crusades. They immediately killed every supposed heathen in sight. Later, when they turned the bodies over, they found crosses around most of their victim’s necks. Explains Taylor, “it never occurred to them that Christians came in brown as well as white.”[4] The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., someone who certainly did not shrug or sit back and give up in the presence of evil, understood the gist of today’s parable. “All I’m saying is simply this,” he wrote. “That all of life is interrelated, that somehow we’re caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”[5]
Well, maybe my neighbors are right. What we really need is new sod. But for now, grass and weeds share the same sod, with roots inseparably intertwined in dark, invisible places. Let’s not tear up the little bitty green patches that bring us, and God, such joy, in order to seek a perfection that they cannot sustain. Let’s not starve our hearts to eliminate the evil within them. Let’s not render sterile our communities in order to make the people in them perfect, either. The harvest belongs to a generous, loving God. As we work the fields of the Kingdom together, that’s all we need to know.
No comments:
Post a Comment