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Our Mixed-Up World |
Over the past couple of weeks I have been supposed to be on Study Leave at home. Work commitments inevitably intervened somewhat, of course. They nearly always seem to when a minister tries to take time off in the city. But I did manage to get some other things done. I made some progress on my doctoral dissertation. We also got caught up on some of the things that needed doing around the house. But one of the jobs that I never quite got round to was gardening. As I've shared before, I actually don't mind yardwork, although I've never had what others think of as "green fingers." But something that I can find really challenging about looking after a lawn or a flowerbed is identifying the weeds. With some, it's easy, of course. You can just tell! But I once got into terrible trouble when I was given responsibility for a friend's garden while he was away on vacation and he had to return to six-foot high weeds, because I had no idea what to nurture and what to cut back. Yet even when you're not hortologically challenged, like me, and you can recognize the weeds for what they are, they're not always easy to get rid of, are they? Having battled with a particular bramble bush behind our house for over 15 years now, I can also confirm that from personal experience. The fact is that gardening can be a constant struggle, where we never fully eliminate the weeds from our midst. The Christian life is described in similar terms in the New Testament. And nowhere more clearly than in our gospel reading for this morning, from Matthew 13, where Jesus tells and explains what has become known as the "Parable of the Weeds." So this passage has some important things to teach us about the realities of existence in our beautiful, but fallen world. There's a tale about a man who went into the appliance section of a department store looking for an electric can opener. He scoured the shelves until he found one, and then when he got to the cashier, he asked to have it gift-wrapped. "It's for my wife," the man explained. "It's her Christmas present." The cashier was a little taken aback at being asked to wrap up such an item. So she asked "Why? Is it a surprise?" "I'll say it is," the man replied. "She thinks that she's getting a fur coat!" Jesus' parables are also full of surprises, and we need to be careful not to take them too literally. We can't always pick out different aspects and say exactly what Jesus had in mind with them, because sometimes he seems more interested in asking questions than answering them. But in the case of the "Parable of the Weeds," we have Jesus' own explanation and we can go with that. The story itself is quite simple. A man plants good seed in his field, and then while others are sleeping, an enemy slips in and sows weeds among the wheat. We aren't told why this happens, although it was apparently quite a common act of revenge in those days. And the immediate result is obvious. For when the wheat springs up, so do the weeds. The man gets a "mixed bag," as it were. The surprise really comes - for us at least, when his servants approach him and ask if they should pull up the weeds. Because the man says "no." We might have thought that the obvious response would have been "of course." After all, who wants a wheat field full of weeds? But "'no,'" he says in verses 29 and 30. "'because while you are pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned, then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.'" I'm not fully qualified to comment on the agricultural pros and cons of this strategy. In some ways, the farmer sounds like a man after my own heart! But I can say that there was apparently more than mere laziness in his decision. If the weed Jesus had in mind was darnel, which it probably was, and there was a heavy infestation of it, selective weeding would have simply been impossible with the resources then available. So in that sense, the story of the "Parable of the Weeds" is very true to life. But there's more to it than that, of course, as we learn in verses 36-43. Our Mixed Up World - pg. 2 | |
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(This page is maintained by Rev. Dr. John Oakes and Kirsten Oakes .) |
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