When I was young my parents had a
vegetable garden in back of our house. It occupied an area about
twenty by forty feet. To me it looked enormous. The reason for that
was that my mother had decided that a wonderful activity for her
children during the summer was to weed the garden. She learned
through bitter experience that I was vegetatively challenged. I
could tell peas and beans and rhubarb from weeds, but I had trouble
with carrots and onions and potatoes. So my sister and I were
assigned to our appropriate sections of the garden.
I had uncles who were farmers. They
had a never-ending battle with weeds. They would drag a plow between
the rows of corn, or churn up the dirt between the bands of planted
wheat Anything to destroy the plants that would steal nutrition from
the money crop.
I don't think I've ever met anyone who
actually likes weeds. And most of us would gladly live in a
weed-free world, especially if we like to grow things. And things
were no different in Jesus' day.
But Jesus tells us about a farmer who
clearly doesn't understand the principle. Let the weeds and wheat
grow together? Clearly Jesus is not a great one for advice about
farming. Or sheepherding. After all, he commended the shepherd who
left 99 sheep to go find one. No shepherd would do that. Or how
about the master who forgives his servant's debt? What financial
wizard would do that?
But Jesus says, let the weeds grow
with the wheat; it will all be sorted out at the end.
That's why he tells the two parables
about the yeast and the mustard seed. They emphasize that the
kingdom of heaven is inevitable; it will happen; there's nothing we
can do to stop it, or for that matter, to make it come any sooner.
It's already here, growing and gradually taking over, even though it
doesn't always seem that way.
What should we take away from the
story of the wheat and the weeds? It doesn't mean we should be
passive in the face of evil. We should not just let things happen
knowing that God will win out in the end. Nor should we decide who
is wheat and who is a weed. During the middle ages Christians
decided other Christians were weeds, so they slaughtered each other.
And even during our so called modern age, we all tend to decide who
are weeds – and it's never us. It may be the Muslim lady dressed
in a black floor length outfit with a head covering. It may be that
guy pushing a shopping cart with all his belongings in it. Maybe
it's one of our fellow Catholics who is always out picketing the
abortion clinic. Hasn't he got better things to do? I think we all
have our weeds.
But maybe we should look at this
parable a little differently. One thing we have no trouble with is
seeing our good qualities. You have them, I have them. But where we
are really blind is seeing our sins. After all, if we thought we
were sinners, if we really believed that, we'd change our behavior,
wouldn't we? If we knew we were guilty of sin, we'd do everything we
could to get rid of our sins. But we don't see our own sinfulness.
Jesus said that we should remove the beam from our own eye before we
tried to remove the splinter from our neighbor's eye. When you read
the gospels, Jesus always has problems with the Pharisees. To the
average Jew, the Pharisees were paragons of virtue. If the law said
to do something or avoid something, a good Pharisee was on board.
They were not like the rest of men; in fact a really good Pharisee
had nothing to do with the rest of men, even fellow Jews. Jesus'
problem with the Pharisees, and perhaps with you and I, is that they
did not recognize that they were sinners in need of redemption. In
our age, though, we have lost our sense of sinfulness; our modern
teachers tell us that the only sins that matter are when we are
racist or sexist or islamophobic or homophobic. The Pharisees were
made up of both wheat and weeds, and so are you and I.
In the parable at the time of the
harvest the wheat and weeds are separated. The weeds are burned up
and the wheat is brought into the master's barn. In the parable, the
wheat was wheat from the beginning, and the weeds were weeds from the
beginning. There was no hope for the weeds. But in God's reality,
it's possible for the weeds to become wheat. If you had known
Dorothy Day when she was a young woman – an atheist, living with a
man to whom she was not married, having an abortion – you might
have thought she was a weed. But probably within the next twenty or
thirty years she will be declared a saint.
And that, perhaps, is another lesson.
God allows us all the time we need to become wheat. What someone
seems to be right now is not the final state of affairs. And given
that we are all in this together, a true Christian response to
someone who appears to be a weed is to try to nourish the tiny bit of
wheat that may be there. We owe it to our brothers and sisters to
help them on the path to holiness, not condemn or reject them.
So maybe on this Sunday we should
reflect on those three things; do we judge others? Do we pre-judge
people by their race or accent or the clothing they wear? Do we
recognize and mourn our own sinfulness, or have we convinced
ourselves that we are all right and have very little to work on? And
do we take seriously the responsibility to help the weeds among us
become wheat, with God's grace?
The kingdom of heaven is already here,
if we know where to look.
