“Let both of them grow together until the harvest…” (Matthew 13: 29a)
The
South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham passed away last week and the
media has been full of tributes to the senator’s storied career. You may have
divined that the late senator and I might not have been in agreement on some
issues; nevertheless, the reminiscences of his senate colleagues seem to
suggest that—politics aside—old Lindsey was a pretty good dude. Republicans and
Democrats alike testify that he was mostly friendly and apparently blessed with
a tremendous sense of humor which made him great company. I certainly admire
the fact that he served in the United States Air Force, and after tragically
losing his parents at a very young age, he took charge of his little sister and
raised her himself. That’s pretty impressive and certainly worthy of praise. We
all have our opinions and we don’t all get along all the time, but rarely do we
encounter anyone who is 100% saint or 100% jerk. We’re all a mixture of wheat
and weeds.
As
a pastor who does a lot of neighborhood funerals, I’m always amazed when I pray
over the remains of talented, intelligent, sweet, caring, sensitive people are
also alcoholics or drug addicts or who have taken their own lives. Why is it
that those who have been blessed by God with so many gifts also cause the ones
who love them so much pain?
Shakespeare
famously wrote, “The evil that man do lives after them; the good is oft
interred with their bones[i],” but, in my experience,
the opposite has been true. It seems people are far more forgiving, far more
ready to give the benefit of the doubt, far more willing to cling to the
virtuous wheat of our lives and cast the uncomfortable weeds into the fire.
I
think that’s the takeaway from the Gospel Lesson for Pentecost 8, Year A in the
RCL (Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43). If we take this reading on its face, we may
superficially summarize it as “Someday there will be a Day of Judgment and good
people like me will go to Heaven, and bad people will go to Hell.” I think we
need to dig a little deeper into the text. Smart Bible scholar guys think
Matthew, our Gospel writer (whoever he was), was writing to a community of
early Christians who were living under some real nasty persecution[ii]. Some members of the
community might’ve felt the pressure to abandon this Christianity stuff and
accommodate themselves to the local culture. You know. They chose to go along
to get along. You can’t really blame them, can you? I mean, if someone told you
to abandon your faith or lose your life or go to jail or get fired from your
job, what do you think you’d do? We all think we’d choose martyrdom, but if it
came right down to it…?
Scholarly
dudes[iii] point out the parable of
the wheat and the weeds appears in Matthew and also in the gnostic gospel of
Thomas. Thomas, which may be an older source, doesn’t include any explanation,
so we wouldn’t be blamed if we guessed that Matthew made up the gloss in verses
36-43 to speak to his own community. You can imagine the burning question this
nascent church had about its members. “If someone denies the faith, do they go
to Hell? If that coward turned his back on our community, should we ever let
him back in? Are there people in our church we can’t trust?”
Matthew
uses the parable of the wheat and the weeds to remind his folks that there will
always be good folks and not so good folks living together, but it’s not our
place to say who is worthy and who isn’t. Any crusade to root out the
slimeballs from the devout is only going to ruin the community. Playing ecclesiastic
gestapo is the surest way to destroy a church.
I
don’t think the parable need be only about the community of believers. The
wheat field could relate to our own lives. Each of us has good and bad growing
side-by-side. We know Luther’s doctrine of simul justus et peccator—simultaneously
righteous and sinner. Even Luther himself had his own emotional weeds growing
among the wheat of his intellect and compassion. He was a gifted teacher and
theologian who deeply cared for the souls of his people. He could be extravagantly
generous and at the same time short-tempered, caustic, stubborn, and obnoxious
when people didn’t see things his way.
The
parable encourages us to be a little more charitable in our judgments, but it
also offers us the promise that a day will come when God will erase every flaw
sown by our sinful nature. Someday our guilt will be absolved, our sin forgotten,
and our defects burned away. Every cause of shame and everything we hate about
ourselves will no longer burden us. It will all be forgiven when we enter into
the Father’s glory.
I
may not have agreed with Lindsey Graham’s politics, but when the day comes when
I meet him, I’m sure we’ll get along just fine.
Peace
be with you, my friend. Please come and see me again.
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