SERMON
Pentecost 9 Year A 17 July
2005
Loving God, open our hearts and minds to your call to us.
Amen.
So if, as Christians claim, Jesus has fixed everything up,
why is the world in such a parlous state? Why does evil flourish? Why do people
still blow other people up? Why do we let other people starve? Why do we torture
animals to test cosmetics? Why do we allow our greed to compromise the
well-being of future generations? Why is the church, the community of those who
follow Jesus, torn by divisions: denomination against denomination, faction
against faction? Why, in short, is there so little evidence for the claim that
in Christ all is made right?
Today’s parable, the story of the weeds among the wheat,
has a shot at this. The first part – the story itself – speaks to the
reality of life as we experience it. Here, in a few short verses, we have what
seems to be a description of the potent fusion of good and evil that we
encounter day by day in our lives.
The life-giving, nourishing wheat and the poisonous weeds
grow together. The householder allows them to grow together because of the risk
of uprooting the wheat along with the weeds. The Greek text makes it clear that
the weeds are darnel, Lolium temulentum, a plant which, botanically, is
closely related to bearded wheat, and hard to distinguish from it in the early
stages of growth. It is only at the very end of the growing season, at the time
of harvest, that the two are separated.
And indeed, this image of the good and the bad flourishing
together strikes a chord with our experience. For just as some people work great
evil, others work great good. In the midst of the bomb blasts in London, we saw
altruism and courage flower as people went to the assistance of strangers and
risked their lives to go into the blown up trains in search of survivors. In the
midst of the rampant greed that creams off millions of dollars from third world
economies, we see sacrificial work amongst the most disadvantaged people on the
planet – the work of the Fistula Hospital in Africa, the work of leprosy
missions.
Wherever humans gather, good and evil abound. We are indeed
in the middle of the field, where both wheat and weeds are flourishing. So far,
so good.
But it all becomes a little more problematic when we come
to the ‘explanation’. New Testament scholars tell us that, as far as they
can tell, this explanatory text and others like it, are later additions to the
stories. In other words, they are interpretations by Jesus’ followers, rather
than by Jesus himself. Joachim Jeremias, one of the great parable scholars,
argued that the early church applied Jesus’ parables in various ways to
particular situations, frequently using allegory to reinterpret the parable.[1]
In their original settings, the parables themselves were probably told as
open-ended stories, with some of the ambiguity of life itself.
We will probably never know whether the explanation we have
of today’s parable is original to Jesus or whether it is a later attempt to
force a particular meaning onto the parable. However, whichever it is, it flows
conceptually from a very different world view to the one we hold today. The
thrust of the interpretation, though, is one of future fulfilment – in times
to come, all will be sorted out, good and evil will be separated and the good
gathered in, while all that is not good will be rejected. There is clearly an
eschatological path we could take here, a reflection on what might be meant by
the end times, but I want today to backtrack a little and ponder on the image of
the field of wheat and weeds, to reflect a little on the here and now.
It is tempting to think of individual people as being
either wheat or weeds, and the ‘explanation’ tends to lead us down this
track. Indeed we could each probably draw up a list with two columns, one
labelled ‘wheat’, one labelled ‘weed’, with our favourite people on one
and those whom we dislike or despise on the other. All very Gilbert and
Sullivan. Suicide bombers, perhaps, on one; Nelson Mandela on the other.
And much of the history of Christianity has been marked by
people who felt they had the inside running on who was ‘in’ and who was
‘out’, who was wheat and who was a weed. Regrettably, this is still the case
and texts such as this are used to justify the actions of those who want to
differentiate, divide and dismiss. Such strategies feed on the human tendency to
want to make ourselves feel better by demonising people who are different in
some way from us – a tendency which is alive and well, as we have seen
graphically in recent times.
But Jesus himself warned us against such characterisation.
What is the parable of the good Samaritan about if it is not about rejecting
blanket judgments about people? Or, as the modern saying goes: one person’s
terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. We may seek to differentiate,
divide and dismiss but Jesus did not.
One of his fundamental teachings is the radical equality of
all humanity. We are all the children of God, it’s just that some know it and
others don’t. There are no outsiders and the use of texts such as these to
argue that some of us are wheat and others are weeds is a pernicious misreading
of the Gospel message. It is a reading which cannot be supported by the context
of Jesus’ ministry and teaching.
What then do we do with this text? Well, we really
shouldn’t try to push this parable too far. And we certainly should not use it
to justify discriminatory, divisive points of view that run counter to the main
thrust of Jesus’ inclusive, compassionate and subversive teaching. But perhaps
it can help us to acknowledge more openly that both wheat and weeds flourish in
our lives. For life is not like a spaghetti western where the heroes, usually
dressed in white, are all good, and the baddies, usually dressed in black, are
all bad. It simply is not that clear-cut. If we follow the colour-coding of
spaghetti westerns, ignoring for a moment its implicit racism, we could say that
most of us are a patchwork of some white, some black and lots of shades of grey.
As the parable suggests, the wheat and the weeds can be hard to distinguish and
ultimately it is God’s task to sort out which is which, not ours. If we try,
we run the risk of destroying some of the wheat, along with the weeds.
May we have the humility always to acknowledge our own
limitations and not seek to judge others. Amen.
Sarah Macneil
July 2005