Proper 11, Year A 7-20-08
©Holly Lyman Antolini
Lections: Isaiah 44:6-8; Ps. 86; Romans 8:12-25; Matt. 13: 24-30,36-43
In all things we are more than conquerors, through you who loved us, O Christ. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor thing to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, [NOR WEEDS,] nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in you, Christ Jesus our Lord. AMEN.
Today we get to ponder the little matter of GOOD and EVIL. And in Matthew's Gospel we get MORE seeds in yet another parable, to help us do the pondering.
Of course the irony is, I spent a good deal of time last week exhorting all of you to get your gloves on and PULL ALL THE WEEDS OUT of our front beds along Massachusetts Avenue. And yesterday I was up in Maine for the second time in a week, tearing out the thistles and dandelions and assorted other varmints competing for water and nutrients with my beloved perennials and colonizing the beds I intend for my autumn lettuce-and-greens sowing. So just WHAT does the Holy Spirit MEAN by throwing THIS PARTICULAR parable at me NOW?
The realm of Heaven, says Jesus, can be compared with a householder who sows a bunch of good seed in the field. (I can see them: the slender black ones for Red Deer Tongue lettuce. The white ones for Buttercrunch. The reticulated carbuncular ones for spinach and red chard. Except that it turns out later in the parable that the good seed is WHEAT. OK, whatever... Back to the story.) Everyone turns in for a well-earned rest after the planting and along comes an unspecified "enemy" in the night and sows weeds. (Not just any weeds, by the way: zizánia weeds, translated in the King James Version as "tares," or in modern English, darnel, which is a kind of annual grass that has long, slender awns or bristles that look very much like wheat.) The "enemy" sows the weeds and departs. But the deed is done: up come the weeds all intermixed with the wheat.
We gardeners all know this phenomenon well, don't we? I remember vividly the year I got distracted at the wrong moment in my kitchen garden's growing cycle and didn't keep up with the weeds sprouting in my onion bed. By the time I got out there with my gloves on, ready to tackle them, the weeds were big enough that it was hard to determine exactly where the onions were. And the weed roots were all wrapped around the struggling little onion roots so that to pull on the one was to uproot the other.
In Jesus' parable, the first question the slaves of the householder pose to the householder when they find the weeds in the field is the eternal theological question, isn't it? "If you sowed GOOD SEED, WHERE DID THESE BAD SEEDS COME FROM???" WHY DO BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE? Why does a GOOD GOD allow EVIL IN THE WORLD???
The householder's answer is hardly satisfying, "An enemy has done this." Sorry, folks: as much as we all LONG for a good answer to that abiding question, "WHY EVIL???" the Bible's basic answer is this one. No definition of exactly WHO "the enemy" is. No attempt to reconcile it with a good God. Whatever its many gifts to us, the Bible is NOT "systematic theology." You can throw yourself on the spikes of your outrage as often as you like until you're bloody with the exercise, but it's not going to get you very far. During the era when the plague, The Black Death, killed a third of the population of Europe, 14th Century mystic Julian of Norwich was saved from a life-threatening illness in her 30's by a vivid and transformative vision of Christ's suffering on the Cross. She spent the whole second half of her life as an anchorite sealed up in prayer in a single room off the sanctuary of her church, where she could receive the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist through one wall and counsel the distraught and the prayerful out in the street through the other, trying to make sense out of that experience. Her question paralleled that of the householder's slaves, "God, why WOULD you let your child SUFFER SO on the CROSS, if you are a LOVING GOD???" Finally, in her great theological treatise, The Showings - the first work of theology ever written by a woman in the English language - she admits that she simply had to GIVE THE QUESTION UP, because, she acknowledges, it was going to drive her crazy. She decides, instead, to throw herself on the mercy of God and simply TRUST in God's wisdom in this matter. And AT LAST, she reports, in the mystery of God's grace, consolation came to her in abundance.
So back to the story. The slaves, like Julian, move from the unsatisfying intellectual to the practical. Brandishing their hoes and clippers, they growl, "Want us to go GIT THOSE EVER-LOVIN' WEEDS OUT OF THERE???
It's the world's ever-recurring answer to the problem of evil, isn't it? "LET US AT ‘EM!!! THE MORE NUKES THE BETTER!!! A FEW NIGHT GOGGLES, A FEW LEGISLATIVE COVENANTS, A LITTLE MORE HIERARCHY, A LITTLE MORE SWORD-RATTLING AND WE'VE GOT ‘EM, THOSE AXES OF EVIL!!! WE'LL JUST ROOT ‘EM RIGHT OUTA THERE!"
But the householder replies, "No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let them grow together until the harvest..."
Of course, whatever wisdom the householder has from a SOTERIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE (that is, the perspective of SALVATION), this advice makes absolutely NO SENSE from a FARMING PERSPECTIVE! I can tell you what my onions looked like when harvest time came. They were pathetic little items, a quarter the size they would have been if they had had all the water and nutrients those weeds sucked away from them!!! Delicious, mind you. But tiny! If I'd been a Pilgrim relying on them for nourishment, I would have needed a tribe of savvy Native Americans DESPERATELY by Thanksgiving season!!!
Which is why you had BETTER NOT take PARABLES AS LITERALLY as you do gardeners like ELIOT COLEMAN!!!
But from a PARABOLIC PERSPECTIVE? Well, we already know from Jesus' FIRST telling of the parable to the crowds that the story takes place in the context of THE HARVEST, which in Biblical imagery is associated with THE CULMINATION OF ALL THINGS, THE END TIME. And that at the END TIME, ALL WILL BE WELL. The weeds will finally get burned and the WHEAT WILL BE GATHERED INTO BARNS.
The second telling of the parable is provoked by the disciples, verses later in the Gospel, after Jesus has retired from more seed-story-telling with the crowds. In the house, the disciples, like the slaves - and like MOST OF US! - are still worrying about the WEEDS. To them, Jesus intensifies this focus on the END OF THE AGE, playing out the imagery of the harvest with angel reapers and the incineration of what the New American Standard Version of the Gospel translates more accurately as "all stumbling blocks - skandala, in Greek - and those who commit lawlessness."
But PLEASE NOTE a couple of important things in Jesus' second telling: FIRST, whatever "weeping and gnashing of teeth" Jesus references, he doesn't amend what he has already taught in Matthew Chapter 5, verse 19, in the Sermon on the Mount:, where he says that these same skandala, lawless stumbling blocks, who break the least of these commandments, and teach others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven..." NOTE: "least" in the realm of God, but not OUT of the realm of God!
And SECOND and EVEN MORE IMPORTANT: in the second telling, Jesus doesn't change the central focus of the parable's first telling, which is that FOR NOW, THE WEEDS MUST BE SUFFERED TO GROW TOGETHER WITH THE WHEAT. The verb is áphete - to let, to permit, to SUFFER. At least, that's how its root word aphíemi is translated. But its close relative, aphiénai, when applied to debts, trespasses, sins, and the like, is translated "to FORGIVE." As in: áphes, "FORGIVE us our sins" as we aphíemen "FORGIVE those who sin against us."
Here is the Holy Spirit's great PUN: the householder tells us that "malice, evil, badness ... is not to be dealt with by attacking or abolishing the things or people in whom it dwells; rather it is to be dealt with only by an áphesis, by a LETTING BE that [is] a FORGIVENESS, that [is] a SUFFERING - that [is] even a PERMISSION - all rolled into one." [Robert Farrar Capon, The Parables of the Kingdom, p. 107].
Do we WANT to hear this??? BY NO MEANS! We want to root evil out as effectively and expeditiously as POSSIBLE. We hope earnestly that we ARE THE WHEAT, and we DO NOT want to have to rub shoulders with those WEEDS who CLEARLY do NOT BELONG IN OUR FIELD, any more than my onions enjoyed it!!!
And it PRECISELY THIS IMPULSE TO ROOT OUT EVIL that that frustratingly unspecified "enemy" exploits to the UTMOST. The enemy, it appears, has only to "depend upon the forces of goodness insofar as the enemy can sucker them into taking up arms against the confusion the enemy has introduced to do its work." All the enemy has to do is "sprinkle around a generous helping of darkness and wait for the children of light to get flustered enough to do the job for it. Goodness itself ... if it is sufficiently committed" to what theologian Robert Farrar Capon calls "plausible right-handed, strong-arm methods will in the very name of goodness do all and more than all that evil ever had in mind!" [The Parables of the Kingdom, p. 102]
As Capon points out, "Since good and evil in this world commonly inhabit not only the same field but even the same individual human beings... the only result of a truly dedicated campaign to get rid of evil will be the abolition of literally everybody." [The Parables of the Kingdom, p. 102]
In the nuclear age, the thought is profoundly unnerving. In the first week of the Lambeth Conference at Canterbury Cathedral, with all the ways in which we've been scurrying around trying to uproot evil in the Anglican Communion, and with the all-too-evident effect such internicene conflict has on the ability of outsiders to trust the testimony of church members when they seem so preoccupied with their internal squabbles, Capon's assertion is dismaying.
Jesus' parable BEGS US to LEAVE THE HARVEST OF GOOD AND EVIL TO GOD and GOD'S REAPER ANGELS at the END OF THE AGE. For us here and now, the task is far more difficult: it is to tolerate the weediness along with the wheatliness of ourselves and each other. It is to SUFFER different people's definitions of "good" in HIGHLY UNCOMFORTABLE PROXIMITY. It is to "love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, so that we may be children of our God in heaven, [that singularly INDISCRIMINATE GOD] who makes the sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous." [Matthew 5:44-45]
For, as Paul so eloquently testifies in his Letter to the Romans, the whole creation is STILL WAITING "with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God..." still imprisoned in decay, still "groaning in labor pains," just as WE OURSELVES, despite all the promises of God, still "groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies." We do not LAUNCH THE ATTACK ON EVIL, says Paul. We WAIT IN HOPE, HOPE FOR WHAT WE DO NOT YET SEE. We WAIT, knowing "that all things work together for good nor those who love God..."
And in the meantime, rather than worrying about how to get rid of weeds, we focus on SUPPLYING WATER, NOURISHMENT, CULTIVATION AND SAFETY TO ALL THE SEEDS OUT THERE, as the Millenium Development Goals suggest. AMEN.