I thought about this passage a lot earlier this summer. You see, my wife and I bought a house in the city of Lancaster last year. It’s a great place: plenty of room; it’s not too old, so everything works; great location; great mortgage. The whole nine yards.
But the young couple we bought it from didn’t know very much about maintenance. They did the day-to-day stuff, but seemingly never invested the time to go beyond that. So we had a lot of scrubbing to do inside, and a lot of weeding to do outside. We’ve been working at it little by little.
Well, I don’t want to kid you. I’m no farmer. I don’t even know that much about gardening or lawn care. I like to think of myself as a putterer, meaning I waste a lot of time in the yard pulling weeds and muttering darkly.
It’s a hobby.
It’s more than a hobby. It’s an obsession. I’ll get out there and spend three hours weeding the same ten feet of lawn. I want to make sure every stinking little weed is gone. Meanwhile, the borders aren’t edged, the grass isn’t cut, and all I can talk about are the ding-danged weeds, and how they’re everywhere…my wife thinks I’m nuts, for good reason. The only trouble, of course, is that the weeds really are everywhere, which gives me plenty to be obsessed about.
The upshot is that between having a lot of stuff that needs to come out and somebody who really, really wants to make it come out, there’s plenty of holes in our yard. Big, ugly brown spots, just bare earth. And the question becomes: what do we put there?
One spot in particular was giving us trouble, where we’d pulled up a dead bush. We’re thinking and thinking, and then one day in K-Mart, we see a tube of wildflower seed, and the lightbulb goes on. I mean, what the heck. It’s only $3.99, and anything looks better than what we’ve got. So I sprinkle it on, and we get lucky: it rains for a couple of days. Then it’s sunny and warm, and voilà! We’ve got sprouts coming up… At which point, my wife looks over at me and says: “How do you know which ones are the flowers, and which ones are the weeds?”
The answer of course is that I don’t. Wheat and tares, dear, wheat and tares. You just have to wait until it starts to be obvious. Even then, as Jesus points out in his parable, it’s no easy matter separating the two. Sometimes you reach down to snake out a weed, and you come up with a handful of roots from the very plant you’re trying to save.
Weeding, of course, is not just something that people do in their flowerbeds or their wheat fields. It’s something that we do in our communities, as well.
Who among us has been a part of a community, and has not been tempted by the thought that if person X or Y were no longer also a member, how much better off the community would be? There are people who just plain don’t get it, and it’s only human nature to want to avoid having to deal with them. So if we could just fire this person, right? Or if that person would just move away, we’d be okay! It doesn’t matter where you are: it could be at work, it could be at home, could be at church. Wherever there’s a group of people, some of them will be grumbling about some of the others not pulling their weight, and from there, it starts.
Sometimes it’s necessary. We’ve all known situations like this: somebody needed to be fired at work, or thrown off the football team. Sometimes, they’re just not meshing with the rest of the group. Other times, they’re actually causing problems, and need to be removed for everyone’s benefit. It’s no use worrying about how situations like this arise; they just do, like weeds popping up in the lawn. The weeds crop up, and you deal with them, because you have to. That’s simple.
But the danger in that simplicity is that it’s also human nature to want to know right now who’s a weed and who isn’t.
It’s as if we see all the little sprouts, and we can’t be patient enough to wait to see which one is which. We want to get down to weeding immediately, and have it all taken care of. Which of course means that we want to be the ones making the decision. We want to be the wheat. We want to be the good seed. We want to be the righteous, and shine like the sun in the kingdom of our Father.
We rush to judgment, in other words, because we are concerned about the outcome. We want to make sure that we make it in with the wheat, instead of being cast out with the weeds.
Jesus’ parable is a caution about just such a rush. As he points out, it is not ours to judge. That comes at the end of time. Make no mistake about it, the judgment is coming–but not just yet. And because it’s not coming just yet, we need not be anxious about the outcome. It will happen in God’s time, which is to say at the right time, and the judgment will fitting, whatever the circumstance. Whoever is in, will be in. Whoever is out, will be out.
We don’t need to worry about it.
More obviously, it can be destructive to judge too quickly. Sometimes we need that particular stalk. Sometimes we need that particular person. Put things up–or out–too soon, and you could be wasting something of great value.
And for what? To assure ourselves that we too are things of great value?
Jesus’ cautions to us couldn’t be more relevant today. In particular, I think of them as I read about the decision made at the UCC’s General Synod to affirm same-sex marriage.
For, whatever you think of that decision, whether you agree or disagree, it seems only prudent to stop and listen to what our Lord and Savior has to say here. Even if you believe that same-sex marriage and those who would advocate for it are the one and only Enemy, even if you believe these things are the biggest stumbling blocks to salvation in all the Christian church, even if you believe them to be singularly weedy, and deserving of fire at the end of the age, you must recognize I think that we will not do the judging, and it may not shake out just the way we expect it to.
In that light, Jesus’ advice to take it slow and easy on the weeding seems only commonsensical. “In gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest.”
Now, just so we’re clear: I am not here to tell you that you must or should do or believe anything. You will have to discern for yourselves how to react to the situation.
All I can tell you is that as you make that discernment, you need to take Jesus’ words here seriously. A rush to judgment on this or any other matter has the potential to pull up the wheat along with the weeds, and He seems to feel that that would be a real tragedy.
Nor should we allow this caution to overshadow the other message of the story, which is that being too concerned with judgment can take our mind off where it needs to be. If you look at the stories that surround this parable, they are filled with people (and things) living life simply and joyously, free to take risks without fear or anxiety. But if all you can think about are the weeds–which really are everywhere–it’s pretty difficult to do that.
And really, who needs it? Who needs to live life in a constant state of suspense about who’s “wheat” and who’s “weed”? Who needs to spend all their time worrying about who’s in and who’s out? Especially in church. Haven’t we had enough of that?
It’s better, I think–and I believe the gospel bears me out on this–to spend our time living from love at our centers than fear at our edges. Because the danged weeds will take care of themselves. Our job, according to Jesus, is just to do the best we can with what we have, and to be confident enough in ourselves that we can allow ourselves to step back every once in a while and enjoy the flowers blooming all around us. Amen.
