There's a great scene in the 1939 Ernst
Lubisch comedy Ninotchka. Greta Garbo plays a Soviet envoy who
has come to Paris on a diplomatic mission. The dour bureaucrat is
greeted by three fellow communists at the train station who ask her,
“What is the news from home, Comrade?” Garbo, with a brilliantly
dead-pan comic delivery, responds, “Wonderful news, Comrades. The
last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer
but better Russians.”
Of course, the audience in 1939
understood this line as a darkly humorous jab at the violence of the
USSR under Joseph Stalin. The dictator's recent “purges” had led
to the execution or incarceration of countless Soviet citizens on the
grounds that they did not adhere to the purity of Communist Party
doctrine.
But is there ever anything really
“pure” in this sinful world? The history of the Christian Church
might be just as notorious as Stalin for trying to “pull the
weeds.” Whether it was the Holy Inquisition or the mass defection
from the ELCA following the 2009 Churchwide Assembly, we Christians
have usually done ourselves more harm than good when we've tried to
separate the evil from the good.
Jesus' parable of the “Wheat and the
Weeds” (Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43), which serves as our Gospel lesson
for the Sixth Sunday of Pentecost, must have been quite a shocker to
the early church. It's pretty much accepted that Matthew's community
was living under persecution. When the heat was on, some of those
first Christians sucked it up, stood firm, and suffered the
consequences of being part of an outlaw religion in the first century
of the Common Era. Others may have equivocated a bit. I wouldn't
doubt that the ones who suffered were pretty disappointed with the
ones who chickened out. Nevertheless, the parable taught them that it
was not their place to judge who did or did not belong to Christ's
church. It's not our place, either.
I'd like to point out that, in my
research, I noticed the smart old boys of the Jesus Seminar (those
clever professors who are always trying to figure out which sayings
in the gospels are legitimately the words of Jesus and which were
added by the evangelists) don't believe that Jesus really gave the
disciples the allegorical interpretation of this parable found in
verses 36-43. They suggest that this explanation may have been added
later to address the situation in Matthew's community since it
doesn't appear anywhere else in the gospels. Okay. I'm cool with
that. I think Matthew's interpretation is just as valid as any other.
Basically, he's telling us that Jesus says it's not up to us—puny,
myopic, mortals—to declare who or what is good or evil in this
world. Such an explanation opens the parable up to a whole bunch of
new allegorical situations.
Think about it: Can you “weed out”
the good and evil times in your life? Would you really want
to? When you consider all the crap you've been through, didn't it
make you a wiser, more mature, and stronger human being? If you could
avoid all of the hard times, difficult relationships, tough choices,
and suffering—would you really be living? Wouldn't
you be pulling the wheat out with the weeds?
Or
think about the people God has placed in your life. I consider my own
parents. To be honest, my “Greatest Generation” folks had a few
flaws. Chiefly—and how shall I put this?—their views on race,
particularly as pertaining to African Americans, were somewhat less
enlightened than I would wish them to have been. Nevertheless, these
were the people who took me to church, taught me the gospel, and
raised me to be a responsible adult. I can't discount them in
totality because of their deeply flawed opinions in one area—however
wrong these opinions certainly were.
Sometimes,
we just have to let the weeds grow with the wheat. We can't condemn
an entire life because of a weak moment. We can't lock our hearts
away because we fear being scorned or abused. We can't give up on the
faith because some ignorant and arrogant people have called
themselves Christians. It is a very lucky and merciful thing to
realize that we are not called to be the gardeners of our own lives.
God
bless you, my fellow weedy sinners. Thanks for dropping by!
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