If you are familiar with Bermuda Grass you
know how invasive it is, and how hard to eradicate. It spreads rapidly, sending out lateral
runners that quickly take root and send out new runners from there. But the underground rhizomes are worse. These also spread out in every direction, forming
a dense mat that chokes out other plants, and if you dig these out, one small
section of rhizome remaining in the ground is enough to propagate a new plant
and start the cycle over again. And did
I mention that at this time of year the Bermuda Grass is sending up slender stalks
with forked seed heads like devil’s pitchforks, and that the slightest movement
is enough to shatter them and scatter hundreds of tiny seeds onto the
ground?
I come from a long line of vegetable
gardeners, and one of the things I was really looking forward to when we moved to
the fine climate of Petaluma, and bought a little place of our own, was being
able to grow a bit of our own food. So
you can imagine how delighted I was to move into our new house and discover
that the yard is full of Bermuda Grass. I
considered various solutions to this problem, but all of them involved
expensive and ecologically-dubious inputs like black plastic sheeting, redwood
lumber, manufactured soil products, or herbicides. I also know from experience that such solutions
are temporary, and in the long run can create new problems that are just as
hard to solve.
So in the end I decided to just start digging
in the ground, and carve my vegetable beds out of the Bermuda Grass. Every spring I’ve dug a new one, and re-dug
the ones I dug before, so I now have three vegetable beds, and I think I’ll
stop there, at least for now, and work on clearing some ground for vines and
fruit trees. Each time I dig those beds,
and add compost and fertilizer, the easier the soil is to work, and the less
time I have to spend squatting down, picking out rhizomes of Bermuda
Grass. I haven’t eradicated it, but
I’ve accepted that I never will. And I
know that if I ever stop pulling it out around the edges of the beds, or
re-digging them every spring, it will take no more than a year or two for it to
reclaim my vegetable garden. But for
now, man and weed are in a tenuous balance, and that is good enough for me.
You can understand the story of my garden even
if you don’t have Bermuda Grass in your yard.
In the same way, when Jesus told the parable of the Weeds in the Wheat
it made sense to the people who were listening.
They would have appreciated the realistic agricultural detail in the
story, even if nothing exactly like it had ever happened to them. From their own experience they would have
been able to imagine it vividly—the perniciousness of the enemy who sowed weed
seeds in a carefully planted field, the dilemma facing the householder, and the
practical good sense of his solution.
And this correspondence with their own experience would have made it all
the more puzzling to consider this as religious teaching, and all the more
startling to hear that this is what the kingdom of heaven is like.
The parables of Jesus make sense as stories
about what really happens in the world, and so they are accessible to everyone. This is also what makes them subversive. The God whose kingdom is like the seed of a
mustard plant, or a woman kneading yeast into her dough, or a man whose wheat field
is full of weeds—this God is not the exclusive possession of religious
professionals. His word is not shut up
in sacred texts that are hard to understand, but it falls freely here, and
there, on the path, on the rocks, and among the thorns, as well as in the
fertile soil. Its harvest of liberating
truth is ripe and plentiful, as anyone can see, needing only willing laborers
to bring it in.
But the church by-and-large lost the common
sense of Jesus’ parables in a process that was already underway when the gospels
were written. Her authoritative teachers
began to read them in a way that Jesus himself likely never intended. Rather than offering them as open-source
images of the action of God in the world, they began to convert them into proprietary
code, where every figure and action in the story is the outward form of a hidden
religious idea. This soon became the
normative way of reading, and teaching, and preaching the parables of Jesus,
and remained so for hundreds of years.
It has only been in last couple of centuries
that New Testament scholars have developed the critical tools to make
convincing arguments for the way the gospel texts were put together. They have shown how the different authors
used their source material in different ways, and that not all of that material
came originally from Jesus. The Gospel
of Matthew, for example, has a particular concern for the problems of internal conflict,
order, and discipline in the faith community, and includes material, not found
in the other gospels, that specifically addresses those issues. With that in mind, it is not too hard to see why
Matthew is the only gospel to include the story of the Weeds in the Wheat. It also explains the addition of an
allegorical interpretation of the parable, making it about the future
destruction of evil and vindication of the righteous.
This type of allegory was common enough in
the 1st century, and it spoke particularly to people enduring
persecution because of their religious beliefs.
The historical-critical study of Matthew suggests that the gospel originated
in a Jewish-Christian community suffering in this way. But while this reading addressed the urgent concerns
of Matthew’s congregation, 40 or 50 or 60 years after the resurrection, it doesn’t
fit so well with Jesus’ own teaching on the Kingdom of God.
There was well-established precedent in Hebrew
scripture for talking about this Kingdom, but Jesus is unique for his claim
that it is not only the foundation of Israel’s identity as a people; it is not merely
the guarantee of the authority of the law and the prophets; it is not only the
promise of ultimate deliverance from evil and oppression and of the reward of
plenty and rest. For Jesus, the Kingdom
of God is most importantly a present power, visibly at work in the realms of
nature and human affairs, and impinging on the history of the world in a
decisive and unprecedented way in his own life and ministry.
So it might be more faithful to the mind of
Jesus not to abstract from this parable an allegory of the final judgment, but
to enter into the concrete situation it describes, to see what it shows us
about our present world and the choices we must make there. We dream of a world of order, of harmony and
perfection, where our mate loves and wants and needs the same things we do, and
on the same schedule; or of an ideologically and culturally homogenous nation,
where everyone, or at least everyone in power, agrees with us; or we imagine a
pure market economy, functioning perfectly without the need for political intervention;
or of fields where herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides have eliminated
every pest from the endless parallel rows of genetically-identical corn. But instead of this perfect order, we get
Bermuda Grass in the yard, Weeds in the Wheat, Muslims in the Middle-East, and Central-American
children on the border, a mixed-up muddled mess.
The frustration of our dreams of perfection
continually tempts us to take action to set things right. But Jesus’
parable puts hard questions to any corrective steps we might take: do we have the greatness of mind to
acknowledge the real presence of evil in the world, with all its destructive
effects, and yet also to see that God is this world’s true ruler, who is preparing
in the same place, at the same time, an immeasurable harvest of blessing and
good? Beyond that, do we have the
humility and the wisdom to admit that we are not able finally to discriminate
between what is of God, and what is not?
And most importantly, do we have the faith and the hope to hear the news
that the one who can untangle this
knot is here?
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