Our gospel reading introduces us to a gathering to hear Jesus: “The tax collectors and sinners were all gathering round to hear him.” That is the gathering we join, and we do that alongside Paul, who in our first reading names himself the worst of all sinners, an ex-blasphemer, persecutor and violent man.
That is the context of every worshipping community. In our gospel, it caused trouble for Jesus. The Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered their opposition: “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
So Jesus told them two parables. Luke pairs them: a man’s story and a woman’s story. A shepherd leaves the ninety-nine to search for the one lost sheep. A woman lights a lamp, sweeps the house, and searches carefully until she finds her lost coin. Luke underlines the quality of their searching. They both show “immense patience”, a patience that refuses to give up, a patience that never says “it’s not worth it”. The shepherd goes after the sheep until he finds it. The woman spares no effort until she finds it.
They are finders.
Jesus tells these parables against those who were muttering.
The tax collectors and sinners gathered to hear Jesus were also finders. They had found in him the word of life. Luke even arranges his gospel so that this gathering follows immediately after Jesus says: “Let anyone with ears to hear listen.” Who is it that comes to listen? The tax collectors and sinners. They are the finders. The Pharisees and the teachers of the law are also within earshot, but they refuse to listen. They just scoff.
Luke keeps staging this confrontation. The tax collectors and sinners are outcasts – lost by the systems of the world governed by the rich and powerful, represented here by the Pharisees and lawyers. The Pharisees and lawyers are respected, secure, and honoured. In the kingdom of their own making, they are the winners. They have the best seats. They decide who is in and who is out.
But Jesus sees them differently, not as winners, but as losers. They lose people. They’re dismissive of those who don’t fit.
And isn’t that the way of the world? We keep losing people through contempt and neglect, through systems that write off the poor, the dishonoured, the inconvenient.
These two parables aren’t just about a sheep and a coin, but about everyone lost in the games of the rich and powerful.
We live in the kingdom where scoffing, exclusion and arrogance are normalised. But we live for the kingdom where the winners are seen as losers, and the lost, the last and the least become finders.
And here we are: gathered, like them, not by merit, but by the word of Jesus, finders of the way.
The church is the fellowship of the found: found by Jesus, founded on his word.
I don’t know whether any of you are watching the new series of Freddie Flintoff’s Field of Dreams. He sets up cricket teams in some of the most deprived areas. He visits a pupil referral unit in Liverpool, boys permanently excluded from school, written off as trouble. Lost boys. And he makes a team of them.
Flintoff refuses to let them stay lost. With immense patience, he works with them, coaxes them, encourages them, hoping they might find purpose, dignity, hope.
If one man can give such patience to boys dismissed by the system, how much more will Christ Jesus seek and find the lost?
That is what Paul says in our first reading. He calls himself “the worst of sinners”— a blasphemer, persecutor, violent man. If anyone was beyond hope, it was him. Yet Christ Jesus showed him mercy, so that in him the immense patience of God might be displayed, the patience of the shepherd, the patience of the searching woman magnified in Christ’s patience for us.
Paul is proof that no one is too far gone, no one is finally lost to God.
And that is why we are here. We may feel small, even overlooked, like a congregation easily written off. But in Christ’s kingdom, no congregation, no gathering is lost, and no person is forgotten.
We are not the society of the scoffers, drawing lines and writing people off. We are the fellowship of the found, found by Christ’s immense patience, gathered by his mercy, called to practise the same humility and hospitality: ready to search, to welcome, to rejoice whenever one who was lost is found.
Jesus still eats with tax collectors and sinners. He still makes room for the poor, the marginalised, the left-behind.
And here we are, the ones he has found, gathered at his table. Here we are, the fellowship of his patience, the people of his joy.
Every welcome we give is a share in heaven’s joy.
Every time the overlooked are honoured, the lonely embraced, the written-off given a place, we join the joy of the finders of God and the joy of God in the lost God has found.
A reflection for the 3rd Sunday in Lent (Year C)focusing on the parable of the fig tree. The readings for the day are Isaiah 55:1-9 and Luke 13:1-9
The gospel writers give us two parables of Jesus featuring fig trees. He may have used more. The two we’ve got teach different lessons. In one, the fig tree is cursed. In the other the fig tree is spared. The fig tree (featured in Mark 11:12-14, 20-25 and Matthew 21:18-22) is cursed by Jesus for not bearing fruit. In the other, from Luke’s gospel, the parable which is our good news for today, the fruitless fig tree is given a time of grace.
Our other reading from Isaiah (55:1-9) culminates with these words of the Lord: “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways”.
How are we going to bring these two passages of scripture together and bring them to life today?
“My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.” A good question for us to be asking is “How?” How do my ways differ from the Lord’s ways? How does our thinking differ? These are good questions for self-examination, particularly during Lent which is a season given us for repentance, for changing our minds, attitudes and behaviour.
There is a distinction drawn. “My ways are not your ways …..”
The distinction is graphically illustrated by Jesus in today’s parable. It’s our Lord telling a story about another lord, a landlord – and we can read between those few lines of the parable the thought of the Lord: “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
Let’s look at the difference between one lord and the other and try to unpack a parable which takes up so little page room that it is easy to skate over it. But small is beautiful and less is more – such is the rule of God’s kingdom.
The difference is in their respective responses to fruitlessness, and their different relationships to the fig tree.
The owner of the vineyard, the landlord, had a fig tree growing in the vineyard. He keeps coming back to the vineyard to see if there were any figs on the tree. Time and time again he did this. For three years he kept checking up, and then he ran out of patience. Cut it down, he said.
Here is a man with authority who can say to his servant, do this, do that. He gives the orders. He doesn’t dirty his own hands. His servant is the one who took care of the vineyard. He is the one who does the work. If there’s cutting down to be done, he’s the one who will do it – the owner isn’t going to get involved in that dirty work.
So, here the picture is building up of this landowner-boss, who comes from time to time to check up on his investments, to check up on his interests. His interest is what matters to him. It’s all about him. It’s his vineyard, but he’s away from it most of the time. His is a remote control. He’s distant and disconnected. It’s his fig tree, and it’ll be his profit if the fig tree were to give a fig.
We won’t blame the landowner. We won’t call him wicked. His behaviour is normal. This is what happens in the real world. His order makes perfect sense to our thinking.
Of course, we are not surprised that the landlord wants to cut the plant down. We know that is the way of the world governed by money, profit and vested interests. We are seeing that in our current economic crisis with cuts to welfare. The way of the world is to cut down the fruitless and profitable, so that the fruitless and unprofitable make way for something that will be productive. The ways of the world measure us in productivity and fruitfulness. The less productive and fruitful we are the more vulnerable we become to cuts.
But is this the only way? Must fruitlessness always be met with destruction and condemnation?
There’s the landlord.
Now let’s explore how different the one who actually took care of the vineyard. We need to make a judgement between them otherwise Jesus has told the parable in vain.
In the words from our Isaiah passage we can play the question whether the thoughts of the caretaker are the same as the thoughts of the landlord. Do they think the same? Are the ways of the caretaker higher than the landlord? Is his thinking higher than the thinking fo the landlord – “as the heavens are higher than the earth”?
The one who took care of the vineyard is the caretaker. He is the one who is always there, working the vineyard day to day, spending his time and energy, rooted in the earth and tied up with the vines, the figs and all the challenges they face. He’s the one who takes care of the vineyard for the landlord who takes care of his pocket.
(If you want to play with words again, our word care, originates from the Old English caru and cearu (meaning “sorrow, anxiety, grief”), ultimately stemming from the Proto-Germani karo (meaning lament, sorrow) and potentially tracing back to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to cry out, shout”. Just ask Google!
The word cure came to us through French after the Norman Conquest, and ultimately derives from the Latin word cura, meaning care.
The caretaker, the one who takes care of the vineyard, is the curator. I’m labouring this point because you are in your vacancy of praying for a new priest – someone the Book of Common Prayer calls curate who will have the cure of souls in these parishes, a curate who will spend her/his time and energy in the day to day care for the vineyard round here, someone who will join you in caring for those around you, someone who will sorrow and grieve with you for how things are for those who are hurt and suffer the cuts of those who don’t care so much, someone who will join you in lament, crying out and shouting about pain, injustice and suffering, someone like the caretaker in Jesus’ parable who speaks up for the doomed fig tree,
someone who knows better ways for the world, someone who will think differently to the world …
Through the caretaker’s pleas we see the heart of our Lord Jesus. Where the world rushes to judgement, Jesus intercedes for grace. Here’s the difference between the landlord and our Lord. The reason Jesus was sent into the world was to save us, not condemn us. God is slow to condemn – with God there is always the period of grace, another season for the caretaker to do his work.
So, which lord will we follow? Will we stand with the landlord in judgement, or with the caretaker in mercy?
Jesus wants us to follow him. He wants us to join him to save the world He wants our ways of thinking and our patterns of behaviour to be passionate in our care during this hard won season of grace.
If we follow Christ we will see the fruits of his patience. We will see lives restored and hope rekindled, and after the season is done, the caretaker, our Lord will say to the landlords: “See this, the fruit of your planting, the harvest of this season of grace. See the compassion, see the harvest.”
Here’s a sermon for the 3rd Sunday after Trinity focusing on Jesus’s parables of the seed growing secretly and the mustard seed. They speak of uprisings and encouragement, perseverance and patience.
June 16th 2024
Our scriptures are the creation of a bruised and battered people, treasured and passed on by bruised and battered people for the sake of other bruised and battered people. It is a troubled people who have chosen the scriptures we inherit, and who have handed them on.
I keep saying this to remind myself whose these scriptures are and to remind myself to read the scriptures from that point of view.
Today’s gospel features a couple of parables used by Mark to end a sermon by Jesus. The sermon is given from a boat, to a crowd of people on the shore.
Their place on the shore is significant. Jesus and the crowd are from poor peasant communities, subsistence farming communities pushed to the edge by the taxation policies of the temple and Roman authorities. They were clinging on to life in any way they could. Jesus is one of them.
His sermon was particularly for them, the least and the frequently lost in the kingdoms of the world. Appropriately, for an audience of the least Jesus uses what is the least to make his points. Today, he picks a seed that grows secretly, and a mustard seed, “the smallest of all seeds”, which amazingly grows to be the “greatest of all shrubs” – and that picks up the prophecy of Ezekiel in our first reading.
Ezekiel points us to a “lofty tree”. In his mind it stands for empire and the highness and might of emperors and kings and all those who problematically lord it over others. Ezekiel sees God cutting a sprig from the lofty top and planting it on a high mountain so that it produces boughs, fruit and shelter for all kinds of bird. He calls this a “noble” tree rather than a “lofty tree”. What makes the lofty tree is its highness, whereas the nobility of the noble tree rests in the shelter it gives.
Jesus is the sower.
He sowed seeds in his preaching – seeds of faith, hope and love – seeds of imagination which would grow in the hearts and minds of those poor enough in spirit to have the ears to hear and the eyes to see Jesus’ meaning of love in these parables.
They will have loved his talk of the seeds for him highlighting the smallest of things as being full of life. They will have known that about themselves though generations of occupation, foreign rule and religious oppression will have eaten at their self belief.
Jesus takes two seeds. That in itself reveals so much about the kingdom of God, namely that the rule of God focuses on the smallest of things, the miniscule, on the least. When did you last hear an emperor, or a Mr Big, or a gang leader wondering about the smallest and least in creation?
Jesus casts the mustard seed as the smallest seed, which grows to become the greatest of shrubs giving shelter, shade and blessing to all the birds of the air. His hearers will have loved that. This is what can become of us is what Jesus is leading them to imagine. This is what can happen to the least of us. The least of us can become the most hospitable. The least of us can be the shelter, shade and blessing for so much and so many.
These are parables for the poor in spirit, for the weary, for the belittled.
They encourage us to believe life will change for the better for the least, the lost and the last – that the little, least, lost are great in the eyes of God and come first in his kingdom,
They remind us that the seeds of the kingdom are already embedded in the world by Jesus the sower, in our own paths and ways a seed in edgeways
And those seeds have a life of their own. We don’t know the effect of them – and we can’t control the effects of a kind word, or affirming gesture.
And they make small beautiful.
Small is beautiful in the eyes of the one who puts the least, the lost and last first. We don’t need to lie about how little we are or what little we have when Jesus sees the kingdom in a seed.
These parable have always encouraged the church, particularly encouraging us these days when the church is struggling, when you’re feeling like there is so much to do with fewer and fewer people – in a vacancy as well we can love being small, being the unlikely seed of the kingdom, for ever unsure how it’s going to turn out, just going day to day with our small seed of faith our small seed of hope and our small seed of love, sprigs cut from the high and mighty, cut down to size and carefully planted to be noble in the kingdom.
These parables encourage us to persevere with patience, to carry on scattering seed in our small ways along the paths of our lives, never put off by the idea of a harvest we will never see, to carry on with those small things that come naturally to those with a joyful heart: a smile, a touch, a word of welcome, small kindnesses in all our ways scattered like seed.
There was a song Jesus heard at home. He’d heard his Mum singing it. We know it as the Magnificat. It goes like this:
Her song praises the work of God showing mercy on those that fear him from generation to generation, scattering the proud in their conceit, casting down the mighty from their thrones, lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry with good things, sending the rich away empty.
This is the song that seeded Jesus’ imagination.
It is no wonder that he turns to the smallest in his preaching, to seeds to show us faith, hope and love. The seed growing secretly and the mustard seed represent an uprising – an uprising of the least, the tired and the broken.
Mark 4:26-34 He also said, ‘The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.’ He also said, ‘With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.’ With many such parables he spoke the word of to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.
Ezekiel 17:22-end Thus says the Lord God: I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of a cedar; I will set it out, I will greek a tender one from the topmost of its young twigs; I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain. On the mountain height of Israel I will plant it in order that it may produce boughs and bear fruit, and become a noble cedar. Under it every kind of bird will live; in the shade of its branches will nest winged creatures of every kind. All the trees of the field shall know that I am the Lord. I bring low the high tree, I make high the low tree; I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish. I the Lord have spoken; I will accomplish it.
Thinking through the parable of the talents for the 2nd Sunday before Advent I wondered what sort of life the cast of Jesus’ parables had in his mind and whether they featured in his other parables, and whether the same happened in the mind of Jesus’ hearers.It did for me and led me to preach this. The text of the parable of the talents is printed below.
Who does the one who hid his talent remind you of from the gospels?
While the parable of the talents is deadly serious there is something jokey about it.
There were three people walked into a parable. One was given five talents. The second was given two talents. And the third was given one. It’s the classic: there was an Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irish man ……..
There is a light-heartedness in the parable as you would expect from the one who preaches from the heart and who is the light of the world. He uses exaggeration and the absurd to create a comic effect to engage and challenge us, his hearers and disciples.
We’ve misheard the parable if we think it’s about the sort of talents which make Britain’s Got Talent. The talents Jesus is talking about here is a unit of measurement used for weighing silver. We have our strange units of measurement too. Like a yard of cloth, or a pint of beer. Here we have talents of silver.
Three people walked into a parable. Each given a weight of silver. Here’s the funny bit. A talent weighed 80 lbs (about half my weight) and was worth 6000 denarii. How would you even carry it?
Typically one denarius was the wage for a day’s work. So one talent was the equivalent to 20 years labour at a denarius a day for a six day week. Five talents of silver was worth 100 years labour, two talents was worth 40 years labour. The slave given the one talent wasn’t given a little. He was given less but it was still a small fortune. He was set up for life.
Jesus gives us something here that is hard to imagine because it is so preposterous. The slave with the one talent hid it. Where can you hide so much? How deep do you have to dig the hole to bury it?
So, who does he remind you of, this one who walked into a parable and was given a talent of silver?
He reminds me of the labourers who worked the whole day in the vineyard only to find that the landowner paid those who worked the last hour the same as them. In that parable the landowner hires workers throughout the day – including some at the last hour. He instructs the manager to pay the last first and to pay them all the same. They each get their one denarius. The ones working the longest, and used to being paid the most, complained. But they could have been delighted that the last and least chosen had, for once, been paid what they needed.
These disgruntled ones were probably always used to being the first chosen. There are those who are used to coming first. Coming first is beyond most of us. It requires hard work: the greasing of palms, the pulling of strings, the favour of friends in high places, the use of elbows to stay ahead of the game. They were ahead of the queue on the labour market and the first to be taken on by the landowner. But then they got nothing more than the ones who came last.
Is the one who is given the one talent one who is used to always being amongst those first chosen – and one of the complainers that the last chosen and the least chosen are paid the same? Is he one of those who complain about the state of affairs in the kingdom of heaven where the last always come first and the first always seem to come last?
Something has happened to make him misjudge the master. Something has happened to make him afraid. He says: “Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground.” Whatever led him to think he was a harsh man? There must have been something that made him disgruntled and that coloured his judgement. Was he amongst those used to being first who now were last?
That’s who he reminds me of – of all those who misjudge God, who fear his judgement, rather than loving his judgement because it is full of mercy and love for the last and the least and for those who have suffered the wrongs of how things are.
The Psalmist wrote this into what became the prayer book for millions, including Jesus: With the loyal you show yourself loyal. With the blameless you show yourself blameless. With the pure you show yourselves pure. With the crooked you show yourselves perverse. (Psalm 18:25-26)
However kind, generous or good the master is, the crooked will always have a perverse view of him. Often, when we read this parable we say we don’t like the sound of the master. What I am suggesting is that this fearful one has got the master wrong. He isn’t actually a harsh man, reaping where he has not sown and gathering where he has not scattered. And that is particularly so if the master is actually God, as he has been for so many who have heard this parable. We surely don’t share in this perverse view of those who complain about the master and are afraid of him.
If we’re not like him then we are like the other two who walked into the parable: those given so much by a generous master who trusted them with all that he had. He trusted them with his life, and his generosity and trust were their stock in trade. That is what makes me think that the one who knew the master to be a harsh man had got him so wrong. He was anything but harsh.
I read this parable with a group of residents of a fairly prosperous retirement village this week. One of them had found it difficult to adjust to a life where she was no longer so high profile and where she was limited by health issues. Being of a similar age I sympathised with her, realising that our power dwindles as we age. We could say that we become less “talented”. But in the gospel where the least, the last and the smallest count for so much, even a little talent, a lightweight born from the thankful heart of a person is good enough for the kingdom of heaven.
Complaints and resentment, on the other hand, bury what little talent we may have ended up with.
I don’t know whether you’ve noticed that the number of talents match the number of loaves and fish with which Jesus fed the five thousand. There were five loaves and two fish. No one went hungry, and there was enough left over to feed a nation. In the right hands so much can be made of so little – a smile, a word, a touch, a seed. This is the currency of the kingdom, the currency of grace, our weight of silver.
There were three people walked into a parable, ourselves included because we have been given our weight of silver, our talent. We have been given enough to set us up for life. It’s not money, that would only be small change. It’s grace. That is what we trade in – unless, like the least talented in the parable we perversely fear God and God ceases to be gracious in our eyes.
Three people walked into a parable. And the punch line is that the worthless slave gets thrown into the outer darkness, the darkness that is beyond darkness, where there is no light, and where there is only the weeping and the gnashing of teeth of his fellow complainants.
But fear and threats is not what the gospel leaves us with. What we are left with is a generous spirit which goes to the heart of our lives. That is the talent given to the church. He sets us up for life to trade in the affairs of the kingdom of heaven, putting the last and least first and forgiving one another. No other talent compares to this.
We are his beloved. We are his trusted ones. He trusts us with his life. (We celebrate that when we receive his body in our hands at Communion).
We are the ones to whom God shows himself loyal, blameless and pure. For us there is nothing perverse about God. There is nothing for us to complain about. There is no reason to fear his judgement. His ways are not perverse, but straightforward love.
Matthew 25:14-30
For it as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. The one who received the five talents went off at once and traded with them, and made five more talents. In the same way, the one who had the two talents made two more talents. But the one who received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money. After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them. Then the one with the five talents came forward bringing five more talents, saying, “Master, you handed over to me five talents; see I have made five more talents.” His master said to him, “Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.” And the one with the two talents also came forward bringing two more talents, saying, “Master, you handed over to me two talents; see I have made two more talents.” His master said to him, “Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.” Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, “Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.” But his master replied, “Yu wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I do not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested your money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with ten talents. For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
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 