Proper 11 -- Wisdom
12: 13, 16–19; Psalm
86: 11-17; Romans 8: 18-25; Matthew 13:
24–30, 36-43
A homily by Fr. Gene
Tucker, given at The
Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Springfield, Illinois, on Sunday, July 20, 2014.
“PLANTING GENEROUSLY, REAPING GENEROUSLY”
(Homily text: Matthew 13: 24–30, 36-43)
We have
before us this morning Jesus’ parable about the wheat and the weeds. (The usual title which is applied to this
parable is “The Parable of the Wheat and the Tares”.)
It’s
appropriate for your preacher to make some admissions about this parable:
1. This isn’t one of your preacher’s favorite
parables.
2. Your preacher wrestles with the challenges it
presents, and its view of the nature of the kingdom of heaven.
3. This parable offends your preacher’s sense of
how things “ought to be”.
Now that
these comments are on the table, let’s look at Jesus’ teaching which is before
us this morning. In due course, we’ll
come back to the three admissions which were made above.
But first,
let’s link today’s parable to the one we heard and considered last Sunday,
which was “The Parable of the Sower”.
Both
parables are found in chapter thirteen of Matthew’s gospel account.
Both
parables make use of an agricultural illustration to teach something about the
nature of the kingdom of heaven.
Both
parables are supplied by the Lord with an explicit explanation of the meaning
and application of the parable. (We
noted last week that the Lord does not always supply such an explicit
explanation of His parables. We also
noted last week that, since He does supply us with an explanation of these two
parables, that perhaps He wanted us to know how important these particular
teachings are.)
As we turn
to the parable itself, let’s make an attempt to:
·
Understand just how it may have been understood
by Jesus’ first hearers.
·
Discern how this parable may have been
understood by the church to whom Matthew was writing.
·
Apply the meaning of this parable to our
circumstances as Christian believers in the 21st century.
Several
details of this parable are worth noting.
(Recall that we said, last Sunday, that Jesus is a master
storyteller! His parables are
masterworks of detail and interrelated parts.
They continue to show us more and more of God’s will as we study them.)
First of
all, Jesus draws a distinction, in this parable, with the seeds which are the
planting of the Lord, and those which are the planting of the evil one. The critical distinction between the two types
of seed and the resulting plants lies in the word which Jesus uses to describe
the bad seed: He uses a word which
usually refers to a wheat-like plant, known as “darnel” (or sometimes, as
“cheat”). This plant looks like wheat in the early stages of its growth, but as
it matures, the distinction becomes clear to see. Unfortunately, most translators do not use
the word “darnel” or “cheat” to translate Jesus’ comment, so this fine point in
the Lord’s teaching often gets lost.
Now, we
should notice that Jesus indicates that the growth of the good and the bad
plants has progressed enough so that the servants ask the master if they ought
to go out and pluck out the bad plants.
The
servants’ reaction is a commendable and normal one: Doesn’t everyone want to have a field made up
of nothing but a pure crop? (We’ll have
more to say about this in a moment.)
But – as is
quite common in Matthew’s gospel account – the final accounting is in
view: The master says that – at the end
of the age – the field will, indeed, be purified of all corruption and
impurities….the weeds will be gathered and cast into the fire, while the wheat
will be saved. Then, Jesus says, the
“righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”
Who might
Jesus have had in mind as He delivered this parable to those who had gathered
around Him?
A good
guess might be that the Lord had the Pharisees, the scribes and the Sadducees
in mind. For their opposition to the
spread of the Good News, which had been planted in the hearts and minds of
those who had responded to it, was being undermined by the opposition of the
leadership of the Jewish people in that day and time.
If our
conclusion is correct then, perhaps what Jesus is trying to convey is an awareness
of whether or not each individual person is a seed of the Lord’s planting, or a
seed of the evil one’s work. Put another
way, perhaps the Lord is asking each one, “Are you showing, by the conduct of
your life, that you have received the Good News of the kingdom of heaven, or
are you putting forth the fruits of evil?”
And what of
the situation that Matthew’s church was facing, perhaps late in the first
century in the area which is now known as Syria?
We may be
safe in concluding that Matthew’s church is dealing with a double problem: Continuing opposition from those who were in
Judaism,
and opposition from the outside, Gentile world.
Those
within Matthew’s church, if our assessment is correct, are being called, by
this parable, into a critical self-assessment, to see whether or not they are
putting forth fruits for the kingdom, or some other sort of fruit. For Matthew’s church, if they are facing a
dual threat from Judaism and from the Gentile world, they would need to be
aware of the characteristics of each in order to seek to conduct their lives
differently.
As we look
back over our shoulders at Christian history, we can see a long thread of
desire for the kingdom of heaven to be pure and totally free of any corrupting
influence.
The Church,
after all, is called to be a bearer of the kingdom of heaven (no, it isn’t the
kingdom itself, but is called to bring the kingdom into reality….this is an
important distinction to make).
So it’s no
wonder that many in the Church have sought to make it pure of all corrupting
influences.
Certainly,
that impulse is what drove the first hermits, who went out into the desert to
commune with God, in an age when many who claimed to be Christians behaved as
though they were still doing all the things they used to do before their
baptisms.
Following
in their footsteps, the monastic communities had much the same goal in
mind: To create a holy place where the
corruptions of the world were excluded.
In later
times, it was the Puritans (the ones we usually think of at Thanksgiving time)
who tried to “purify” the Church of England (hence the name given to this
group) of what were viewed as impurities and medieval corruptions.
In the
nineteenth century, a number of utopian societies sprang up, each with the goal
of creating a totally holy and spiritual community. I this regard, one can still visit the
cloisters at Ephrata, in southeastern Pennsylvania, or, closer to home, the
settlement at New Harmony, Indiana.
But you and
I don’t live – the great majority of us, anyway – in a cloistered environment
where the doors are shut against the ways of the world outside.
We live in
the world. We have personal interactions
and business transactions with people who live in the world, every day.
So what are
we to do? Are we supposed to shut out
the world and create a bit of heaven on earth?
Well the
answer seems to be “Yes”, we are called to be a holy calling of the Lord…that
is the essential meaning of what it means to be the Church. But we are not supposed to do this by
withdrawing from the world, but rather, by remaining in it. After all, an important point that Jesus
makes in today’s parable is the point that the field (the world) has value
because of the good crop which is in the field (the world).
Likewise,
we are to be seeds of the Lord’s planting, showing by the fruits of our lives
that we are giving the world around us meaning and purpose. Our is a redemptive presence, much like the
Lord Jesus Christ’s presence among us as one of us: He came to redeem humankind.
This sort
of business is often messy stuff….after all, we must admit that the roots of
the good plants and the undesirable ones are often intertwined.
That sort
of messiness makes its way into the Church.
Which
brings your preacher back to the opening admissions with which we began:
Speaking
personally now, I will admit to you that I don’t particularly like the
challenges that Jesus’ parable puts before me.
I’d much rather be a part of a clean and pure kingdom, a kingdom which
has already come in all of its fullness and completeness. I’d like to have a world in which all causes
of evil are done away with.
OK, don’t
we all want that sort of a world? It is
a glorious thing to hope and pray for.
It is a glorious thing to work toward, which is our calling as Christian
believers.
But – and I
think here lies the problem – I want to be the one to decide what is
good and pure and desirable, and what is not.
And, going a step further, I’d like to make the Church and those in it
into the image I have in mind.
(Put another way, the old adage “Be reasonable, do it my way!” applies
here.) But the Lord’s parable tells me
that it isn’t up to me. In fact, the
choosing between the good and the bad is many echelons above my ability to do. That is the Lord’s business. What I am called
to do is to be faithful to the Lord, and to do whatever I can to help bring the
kingdom into being in this world.
In the
meantime, I am called to know what good seed looks like when it is grown, and
to respond to the Lord’s leading in growing into maturity, so that the fruits
of my life resemble the desires of the one who has done the planting, the Son
of Man.
May that be
our prayer, as we – each one of us – work to bring the kingdom into reality in
this world.
AMEN.
