In the Gospel for next Sunday Matthew gives us three
parables – the Good Seed and the Weeds, the Mustard Seed, and the Yeast in the
Dough. They are all about growing. In the first of these we have a farmer sowing
good wheat in his field, but then, it says, while everybody was asleep, an
enemy came and sowed weeds as well.
The workers want to know, what shall we do? shall we go out now and pull up the
weeds? The master says no, Let both
of them grow together until the harvest.
Now, weeds and good grain growing together surely
makes for an untidy crop... just like the church. The weeds surely take some of the nourishment
that otherwise the good grain would enjoy.
The weeds also propagate and sow more weeds everywhere. And even I know that it would be easier to
pull up the weeds while they are small, rather than when they are mature and
seeding and deeply rooted. The master
points out the difficulty of pulling them up, anyway, without pulling up the
good grain also. And he says, let them grow together until the harvest. Well, I rather fear a lot of nonsense has
been preached about this parable, over the centuries. We immediately make a sharp distinction: Wheat is Good, Weeds are Bad. That may indeed be so in horticulture,
although I sense weeds have been getting a better reputation in recent times,
with roadside wildflowers, herbal remedies...
But we cannot apply such judgements to people. Saints are not all good, and infidels,
heretics and reprobates are not all bad, not even capitalists, communists,
tories or socialists. The point about
this parable, it seems to me, are the words together until the harvest. God is the harvester, we are not, and that
should come as a considerable relief.
Meanwhile, we belong together.
Benedict warned his monks not to think of themselves as holy before they
really are – Benedict’s quiet humour -- he knew that if any of them were indeed
holy, they would be the last to think of themselves that way.
So, if we pay attention to Jesus, we become more
reluctant to define good and bad, black and white... and we certainly start to
smile, or wince inwardly, about distinguishing ourselves from lesser breeds, or
assuming the moral or spiritual high ground.
Yes, society has some bad people – the church has some too. Jesus was not blind to that. John intriguingly comments how Jesus, in
Jerusalem at the Passover, experienced a flood of popularity... and John
writes: But Jesus... knew all
people... he himself knew what was in people.[1]
A few years ago, for various reasons, the churches
were seized with a need to be seen as safe, to cleanse themselves from
embarrassment in the sight of a judgmental and often hypocritical wider
society. Notices went up in the church
porches, clergy attended seminars, systems were set up for people wanting to
report alleged offences, memos were sent out about “Building Healthy Churches”... Pharisaism, in some respects, got a new
life. But then it was discovered, or
remembered, that we are not as righteous as we might like to think. I recall one of my colleagues, in high indignation
about all these righteous (he used a noun I won’t repeat here) forgetting what
Jesus said about cleaning the house only to leave it open to the entry of
demons worse than the former ones. The
wheat and the weeds, truth be known, are not that easily distinguished, we are
all broken and fallible, and growing together as it should be, until God sorts
it out in God’s own way and time.
I have
no doubt that in contemplative prayer and life we find after a while that we
are taking our time about rushing to judgement, we become more reluctant to
make sharp distinctions between people... because, perhaps, we are seeing
ourselves and others more clearly and accurately, kindly and lovingly.
No comments:
Post a Comment