What do we do when we find fault? That question has stayed with me all week as I’ve reflected on the Parable of the Weeds (Matthew 13:24–30, 36–43), while the Warwickshire wheat fields have been turning wonderfully white for harvest.
Have you noticed how we’re all expected to be experts these days?
We review restaurants. We rate hotels. We comment on politicians. We analyse football managers. We critique television programmes. We even write reviews of the products we buy.
Blimey. We even have to review our recent experience at the dentist and how we were treated in our call to TalkTalk – all of which is recorded for training purposes!
When did we suddenly become experts in all of these things? When did I become an expert on education, politics, liturgy, the church, other people’s motives. It seems we have become opinionated about everything. We’ve been trained to be critical and even unhappy about this, that and the other.
We’ve become Fault Finders,
When did that happen?
We all know the answer to that.
It began in the beginning.
It was then we found fault and someone to blame. Long before Jesus, there’s always been fault in our stars, even in the Garden of Eden.
Jesus tells a story for people like us. The Parable of the Weeds is for Fault Finders.
it’s the farmer’s servants who are the Fault Finders. They find fault in the field. The fault in the field is the weeds that had come up just when the wheat sprouted and started to grow ears. “Do you want us to dig them out?” the farmhands asked the farmer.
The farmer, who had been sowing and harvesting for years, since Adam was a lad, says, “No. Because when you dig the weeds up you’ll also uproot what I planted.”
It’s as simple as that.
He told it as a parable of the Kingdom. He even begins it with the words, “The kingdom of heaven is like …..” so that those with ears may hear and understand that this is the way of the kingdom of God trusting the Farmer while wheat and weeds grow together until the harvest.
For those with ears to hear, Jesus is offering a new understanding, a new way of being in a world at fault, with others in whom we find fault.
It is the seed of an idea God scatters in the field of our imagination. It is a seed of an idea that has to grow in the crowded field of our imagination, alongside fear, disappointment, bitterness, anxiety,
The farmer is teaching his servants to see things differently, and Jesus, in telling this story, is teaching his disciples to see things differently.
It isn’t wrong to notice faults.
The servants were right. There were weeds in the field.
Jesus isn’t asking us to pretend that evil isn’t real, or that wrong doesn’t matter.
The question is not whether we see faults. The question is how we see them.
The servants saw the weeds and could see little else.
The farmer saw the weeds too. But he also saw the wheat. He saw the harvest. He saw the damage that impatient judgement would do.
The servants wanted to solve the immediate problem. The farmer wanted to protect what he loved.
Perhaps that’s what Jesus means when he says, “Let anyone with ears listen.”
Learn to see the field as the Farmer sees it.
Learn to see faults with the eyes of love.
Not denying them. Not excusing them. But keeping them in the larger field of grace.
The Church has been learning that lesson for two thousand years, and it shows in the genius of our liturgy.
Every Sunday we acknowledge the faults we’ve found in ourselves.
We don’t ignore them. We don’t excuse them. We confess them.
Not privately, but together.
In the hearing of our brothers and sisters.
I have always loved the Roman Catholic confession:
I confess to almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters…
It is wonderfully honest.
It tells the truth.
It doesn’t minimise our fault.
But neither does it linger there.
The confession is brief. Grace is long.
We hear words of forgiveness. We exchange the peace. We’re even entrusted with the gospel. We gather around one table. We eat and drink together— the same Jesus who was criticised for eating with tax collectors and sinners still feeds sinners today.
The Church has learnt something from the Farmer.
The question is not whether we see faults. The question is how we see them. Do they become the whole story?
Or do we see them in the larger field of grace? Because the Farmer sees the weeds. But he also sees the wheat. He sees the harvest.
And he teaches us to look with his eyes.
To look at those we find fault with… and to refuse to let their faults become the whole story.
To remember that they too are standing in the same field, under the care of the same Farmer, nourished by the same rain, waiting for the same harvest.
Every one of us will leave church today and find fault with someone. That isn’t difficult.
The question is what we see next. Do we stop at the fault? Or do we ask the Farmer to lend us his eyes?
Eyes that see the larger field of grace. Eyes that see what he has planted. Eyes that trust the harvest.
This is a sermon for the 7th Sunday after Trinity, inspired by Jesus’s so-called parable of the weeds, which is also his second parable of the sower. The text, Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43, is at the foot of this post.
The Sower at Sunset by Van Gogh. He painted over 30 pictures of The Sower. As a missionary he perhaps saw himself as a sower. He loved the land, its people and their commitment to their toil in soil. These parables meant a lot to him.
There isn’t a word of today’s gospel which is impossible for us to understand, is there? Jesus is talking to Jewish peasants as a Jewish peasant of things they knew well. This is the second parable of a sower and one of several parables about seeds.
Last Sunday’s gospel was the parable of the sower who sowed seed – even as we heard the gospel, some of it will have fallen on stony ground, some among thorns, and some in good soil where it might have rooted through the week. Come next week and we will be celebrating the gospel where the kingdom of heaven is likened to a mustard seed, the smallest of all the seeds in the mind of Jesus.
The language is simple, and the meaning is simple. Jesus explains: the sower is the Son of Man, the field is the world, the good seed are the people of the kingdom, the weeds are the people of the evil one and the evil one is the devil. That is how Jesus explained it then.
Van Gogh’s Sower in the background. He painted over 30 pictures of The Sower. As a missionary he perhaps saw himself as a sower. He loved the land, its people and their commitment and love of the daily toil. These parables meant a lot to him.
These parables are simple – and small. They’re for us to dig into.
The sower might be anyone who sows the seeds of faith, hope and love. The field could be more specifically our field of work, or our field of study. The field could be anything, anything we are folded into, society, family etc (fold and field are the same word).
The enemy could be anyone – even our very selves. Sometimes our biggest enemy is ourselves. We get the word enemy from a Latin root – the en of enemy means not, and the –emy ending is where we get the name Amy, meaning friend. So the enemy is anyone who is not friendly, the unfriendly
The weeds may be the enemies’ effect. Those weeds may be injustices, insults, prejudice, condemnation, curse – anything that nips hope in the bud. They may be temptations and cravings, or the unfriendly voices we replay in our minds, or the way of thinking we return to when we are tired or have worn ourselves out. It could be pain we suffer. It could be personal assault or it could be something more systemic and societal like the phobias such as xenophobia which affect our attitudes to the extent we become the un-friendly ones. The weeds may be so many things. They grow around us and they grow within us.
It is so hard living like this, particularly when we are hard pressed on every side, and particularly when so many weeds grow within us. There is never a time when we are not vulnerable.
It is hard being, as it were, the seed planted by the sower in a field where the weeds threaten to overwhelm and throttle us. And it’s hard for any sower to see weeds growing where they have planted so carefully. So much so, that the perennial question is “what shall we do about the weeds?”.
The weeds are the big question at the heart of the parable. What are the weeds? Where did they come from? What should we do about them? This simple parable goes to the heart of what we find most difficult. How can we live with our enemies? How can we live with such unfriendliness? How can we live with these weeds?
This parable may be simple, but the challenge Jesus makes is so difficult and demanding and so countercultural.
What shall we do about the weeds? In our world, where nothing is perfect, where there is so much wrong, where we have so little control, where we are exhausted – how shall we live like this? What shall we do with the weeds to ensure a crop yield of hope, dignity and righteousness?
What is the gardener’s answer? It is interesting that our scriptures begin in a garden, and here we are in a garden with Jesus hearing the question, what shall we do with the weeds?
The gardener’s answer is surely, “get rid of them”, “pull them up”, “poison them”, “cut them down”, “kill them”. Our default position is to cut the enemy out of our lives, to hate them and have nothing to do with them.
But Jesus’s answer is to leave them, because killing them may uproot the good seed. His concern is to protect the roots of the good seed, the people of the kingdom of heaven. If you listen carefully to the language of the gardener it is all violent – poison, cut, kill, eliminate. It is actually the language and practice of the terrorist, and all those who want to make a short cut to their final solution.
Jesus is teaching us to live with trouble, at a time we have little control, when we are surrounded by the effects of so much that is un-friendly. This has always been the way. God’s people, God’s seed, have always been in the world where there is so much wrong, cohabiting with weeds of unfriendliness. Sheep amongst wolves, Jesus described us. Jesus’s teaching was only ever for the poor and the poor in spirit – for the good seed planted in a field of unfriendliness and the effects of enmity.
And he wants to protect us, his seed, so that we develop strong roots of righteousness and grow a harvest of blessing. He is teaching us to live with enemies including the many times when the enemy turns out to be ourselves.
The violence of “poison, cut and kill” not only makes victims of our enemies, but also undermines the roots of righteousness. Jesus is teaching another way. That way he stated plainly in the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:42-45). He exemplified it on the cross when he prayed for those who were killing him.
Jesus is teaching us a new way to live with our enemies.
Another teacher, and another example of the good seed planted in a field:
Howard Thurman was a black American preacher born in Florida a year after Van Gogh painted The Sower – in the heyday of white supremacist rule. He had a profound effect in the civil rights movement. In that sense he was “good seed” – a person of the kingdom. He was brought up by his grandmother, Nancy Ambrose. She had been a slave on a plantation in Madison County, Florida. She was a woman of great faith and a member of Mount Bethel Baptist Church. Good seed again. But listen to how the seed was planted in her and how she planted the seed in her grandson – and listen to the language of farming in what Thurman wrote:
Thurman’s whole life was dedicated to those “whose backs were against the wall”, as one whose back was against the wall. He says that the question of all those whose backs are against the wall, whose life and identity has been stolen, is “Who am I? What am I?” His awareness of being a child of God was drilled into him (notice the language of seed drilling) by his grandmother.
“The idea was given to her [planted] by a slave minister who held secret religious meetings with his fellow slaves. How everything quivered in me with the pulsing tremor of raw energy when, in her recital, she would come to the triumphant climax of the minister: “You – you are not niggers. You – you are not slaves. You are God’s children.”
That’s how that man found out who he truly was in the eyes of God. It was drilled into him by his grandmother who had the idea planted in her by other good seed in that slave plantation of hostile racial bigotry. And roots of righteousness grew, and spread through the words and teaching of Thurman, through the seeds he transplanted to the book I have just quoted – a book which Martin Luther King always carried with him because of the good seed it contained.
Who can measure whether the seed of the slave minister, Nancy Ambrose, Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King and all their seeding yielded a crop hundred times, sixty times or thirty times what was sown?
Have you noticed how small everything is that Jesus uses to teach his disciples? He keeps using seeds, which even by his own admission can be choked and lost, probably thinking all the time of his own life and the lives of his disciples which could at any time be choked and lost. He is simply teaching us the hardest lesson of all, about how to live with enemies.
And he uses seeds to do that. In a world ripping itself apart in an arms race, where we are dominated by size, Jesus is pointing us to a new way of being – small. That’s the way. It’s not by acting big. The people of God don’t kill their way out of trouble. They don’t do away with the enemy. They live vulnerably with the enemy, all the time growing roots of righteousness and discernment.
This parable is like a seed planted in a field. It has so much energy to grow. It’s not about weakness. It’s about strengthening disciples for their life in the field. It’s not about submission, but is preparation for mission of those, like good seed planted in a field.
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared. “The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’ “‘An enemy did this,’ he replied. “The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’ “‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot 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.’” Then he left the crowd and went into the house. His disciples came to him and said, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds in the field.” He answered, “The one who sowed the good seed is the Son of Man. The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the people of the kingdom. The weeds are the people of the evil one, and the enemy who sows them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels.“As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Whoever has ears, let them hear.
Grits and Grains 