Wisdom of Solomon 12:13, 16-19, Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
The Sixth Sunday after Trinity, 19th July 2020
Clapham, Eldroth and online
Jesus gives out terrible farming advice. In his Parable of the Sower the sower apparently did nothing to prepare his field. He didn’t clear any rocks or pull any weeds; he didn’t plough the soil to soften the earth and bury the remaining weeds. No, he simply went out into a field with a lot of rocks and weeds and trampled down, hard ground, and flung the seed to the four winds, so much seed, happy for it to land anywhere. Jesus’ scene of ordinary rural life contains this bewildering action, so ridiculous that it can’t be about real farming; instead, it must be about the extravagance of God, who from now on we can call The Prodigal Sower, who generously sows his seeds of love, peace and grace without prejudice or privilege, without bounds. [1]
Yes, Jesus is a ridiculous agriculturalist. Listen closely to his parable about the wheat and the weeds, the one which follows-on from the story of the Prodigal Sower in Matthew, which is framed as one of those apocalyptic rants so beloved by those whose religion is toxic and based on harsh judgementalism and enmity. Listen closely like a farmer would, to the detail. And what you’ll hear is one line which jars, because once again it’s Jesus giving out terrible farming instructions.
“Let the wheat and the weeds grow together until the harvest.” - he says. There in Verse Thirty. Now, this is comical agricultural advice. And it is knowing, subtle, subversive teaching, which runs the risk of being misunderstood.
Here, in apocalyptic tones, Jesus is re-telling the oldest story ever told among humankind, the story which always goes like this: “We are the wheat and these others, over there, they are the weeds - and for being weeds, we’re condemning them to hell”. This story is what holds groups of people together - we identify ourselves in opposition to others. “We are the upright ones because we’re not like those degenerate others.” In Jesus’ context the wheat were his people the Jews; the weeds the Samaritans: or the Romans, or collaborators like Zacchaeus who collected taxes for the enemy - each of them judged to be ‘weeds’ by the self-righteous ‘wheat’ who condemned them to hell.
“Let the wheat and the weeds grow together until the harvest.” That one line in Jesus’ story subverts the whole thing - it undermines the whole passage, making it all seem unbelievable. It has the same sort of effect as the way that one man’s recent actions - a trip to Barnard Castle - subverted the government narrative which to that point almost everyone had faithfully followed: ‘Stay Home - Save Lives’; that little twist in the government’s tale so undermined its credibility that the following weekend the beaches were full. [2]
What point was Jesus trying to make by undermining the old antagonistic human story? Those who worked the soil would understand that if you let weeds grow up among the wheat then there will be no harvest - no harvest of any worth, anyway, for how can you separate wheat and weeds at harvest-time? It’s an impossible task for the reapers. The whole long summer’s work has been for nothing. Is Jesus saying that there can be no harvest like the apocalyptic harvest so beloved by toxic religion? Is he teaching that the idea of wheat and weeds being separated at the end of time is not at all what God has in mind?
If this is his intention then he is drawing on the deep wells of his own scriptures, and ours. Listen again to the words of the psalmist in Psalm 86, which come across as the words of someone who other people, regarding themselves as ‘wheat’ have judged to be one of those condemned ‘weeds’:
O God, the proud rise up against me and a ruthless horde seek after my life; - he says -
they have not set you before their eyes.
But you, Lord, are gracious and full of compassion,
slow to anger and full of kindness and truth. [3]
And listen again to the Wisdom of Solomon, whose reflections on the nature of the Divine One lead him to conclude that:
There is no other god besides you, whose care is for all people,
to whom you should prove that you have not judged unjustly;
For your strength is the source of righteousness,
and your sovereignty over all causes you to spare all.
Though you are sovereign in strength, you judge with mildness,
and with great forbearance you govern us. [4]
What do we make of this message, that God does not after all spend his energy angrily separating people into two camps to subject one to violent judgement, but rather rules the world in compassion and kindness, for his instinct is to spare all? If we had taken it to heart from the beginning then two thousand years of Christian enmity and bloodshed, crusades and death camps, slavery and rancour, might have been avoided. If we take it to heart now, we needn’t be troubled about what an angry God will do to us at the end of our days, and instead can spend our days enjoying the fellowship of a God who truly, madly, deeply, loves us and is all for our care?
This is not to deny us the opportunity to resist evil when we see it at work in the world - it’s an invitation to do so by other means than resenting and fearing and judging others: by reaching out to a broken world in compassion and care.
Think of the effect on our broken communities and conflicted world if we take to heart the teaching that we are all wheat and we are all weeds - that no one group of people is any more or less perfect than any other, or any more loved than any other, in God’s eyes. That all lives truly do matter to God, of every race, class and creed, formed to live together peaceably. [5] What sort of society could we create if we acted on the Sermon on the Mount: “Judge not - and be not judged”, “Love God - and love your neighbour as yourself.” [6] Jesus’ resurrection power makes it possible. Surely this is the good news which saves us.
(As Solomon says,) You have taught your people that the righteous must be kind,
and you have filled your children with good hope, because you give repentance for sins. [7]
In the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds Jesus invites us to turn away from our fixation with the wrongs of others, to put aside our instinct to judge, our dreams of annihilation. And to embrace others in love in the power of the resurrection, for this is the way of the kingdom of God.
Jesus points us away from judgement into joy. By his Spirit we can change our understanding; change our direction, in openness to the reality that God is doing a new thing in creation and human society, and has a place for us within it.
“Let the wheat and the weeds grow together.” It is awful advice for farmers. But it is the joyful way of the new life which God in Christ, every day, invites us to live.
Notes
Drawing on a previous sermon Jesus the satirical gardener on the road to the future of God, Somerset, 2017, and with grateful acknowledgement to Paul Nuechterlein for this interpretation of The Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds in Girardian Lectionary, Notes, Proper 11A.
[1] See my previous talk, At sea with the elemental Spirit of Christ, 12 July 2020.
[2] Faye Brown, Trust in government has collapsed after Dominic Cummings scandal. Metro,1 Jun 2020
[3] Psalm 86.14-15.
[4] Wisdom of Solomon 12.13,16,18.
[5] ‘All Lives Matter’ emerged as a heavily racalized statement owing to its use in reaction to the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement. See eg. Arianne Shahvisi, The philosophical flaw in saying “All Lives Matter”. Prospect, July 3, 2020.
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