Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
13:24 He put before them another parable:
"The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in
his field;
13:25 but while everybody was asleep, an enemy
came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away.
13:26 So when the plants came up and bore
grain, then the weeds appeared as well.
13:27 And the slaves of the householder came
and said to him, 'Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then,
did these weeds come from?'
13:28 He answered, 'An enemy has done this.'
The slaves said to him, 'Then do you want us to go and gather them?'
13:29 But he replied, 'No; for in gathering
the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.
13:30 Let both of them grow together until the
harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first
and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my
barn.'"
13:36 Then he left the crowds and went into
the house. And his disciples approached him, saying, "Explain to us the
parable of the weeds of the field."
13:37 He answered, "The one who sows the
good seed is the Son of Man;
13:38 the field is the world, and the good
seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil
one,
13:39 and the enemy who sowed them is the
devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels.
13:40 Just as the weeds are collected and
burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age.
13:41 The Son of Man will send his angels, and
they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers,
13:42 and they will throw them into the
furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
13:43 Then the righteous will shine like the
sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!
In the summer of 2009 my brother Lucas and my sister Martha
were Vacation Bible School volunteers at Albion Free Methodist Church, the
church I grew up in. They were assigned to the Kindergarten class, running the
little ones around in camp games and distributing the dixie cups of fruit punch
and the Keebler elf cookies. They sang the camp songs, practiced the camp
dances, and ran the kids in laps around the (unairconditioned) sanctuary. Near
the end of the afternoon, with the horde of sugared children wound up to their
highest pitch, the team leader lined up the Kindergartners in front of the altar
rail and asked them in her most excited voice about some of the details of the
bible stories they had learned that day. And then, summing up another great day
of VBS, she asked expectantly, “And who is it that made you and named you
and loves you so much? His name starts with a ‘G’!”
To which the whole line of kindergartners eagerly shouted
out, “GEE-sus!”
I remember participating in those muggy VBS weeks and
sitting up at that same altar rail for children’s sermons, and the correct
answer always was “Jesus” or “God.” And you couldn’t go wrong with “Love”
either. Because Jesus was always the right answer to any question in any
children’s moment, something peculiar happened: the fact that Jesus of Nazareth
was a real man who really lived in an actual place at a particular moment in
history escaped me for many years. I knew his name was the right answer, but I
forgot that the name belonged to a real person, until that truth landed on me
with a startling bump.
The name “Jesus” for me, and for (I imagine) many others
who grow up in the school of flannelgraphs, had collapsed into an impersonal term
of unspecific beneficence. “Jesus” was the failsafe correct answer when your
youth pastor suddenly asked you a question when you weren’t paying attention. “Jesus”
was the magic word that transformed an otherwise secular pop song into
Christian contemporary music (and therefore safe for consumption) when inserted
in lyrics that were otherwise indistinguishable from hormonal teenage longing. “What
Would Jesus Do?” was the question (without having first asked any other
important questions about who on earth Jesus was) that became the simplified form
of the Categorical Imperative in moral philosophy. Whatever was the best thing
to do is was Jesus would do, of course…because Jesus was to us more an idea
than a person. He was a theistic principle, not a middle eastern looking man
with actual earwax. Asking what Jesus would do without putting any conscious
thought into who Jesus actually was led to buttering up pious grownups by
calling them Christlike. What a compliment, to say that someone is like Jesus!
But like Jesus how? In their being single? In their cagey
secrecy about their actual identity? In their open defiance of societal norms?
In their violent public outbursts and even more violent death? Their
manufacture of high quality wine?
So the name “Jesus” was then to me little more than what it
was to those VBS Kindergartners. A good answer to any complex question I couldn’t
be bothered to weigh properly. Starts with a G, I think. And even scarier than
the ignorance involved in such thinking was the subtle way in which I was
beginning to draw the outline of a man named Jesus who looked nothing like the
Jesus who appeared in the Bible. A white Jesus who reminded me of my favorite
grownups and who would fit comfortably at the center of my life’s religious experience
so far.
Now, two quick disclaimers. If there is a way to teach
faith to children without something like this happening, I don’t know how to do
it. All human beings make god in their own image to some extent, and the best
we can hope for is to be aware that we will be tempted to do so and then to
have the humility and humor to name it as it happens. Also, thank goodness for
those brave enough to attempt religious instruction of the young in our own
congregation—Carrie Dykes, you do an amazing job. If my kids think that that you
spell with Jesus with a G, or if they blankly volunteer his name when you ask
them a question they aren’t expecting, that isn’t on you.
The man Jesus, who really had earwax and blisters and
facial hair and fingernails, told over 40 parables in the gospels. Some of
them, like the Good Samaritan, are marvelous moral lessons. As an answer to the
question “Who is my neighbor?”, how could you possibly tell a better story? Other
parables, like the dishonest manager who reduces all the accounts in arrears to
his master so that he won’t have to dig ditches, are more obscure. Let’s get into
today’s parable. What I love about today’s parable, the parable of the
sower, is that we don’t just get the story. We get the story in verses 24-30,
and then in verses 36-43 we get Jesus’ explanation of the story.
And in explaining what he meant by the story, we get a window through which we
can look at Jesus himself. Jesus the man. Jesus the man whose voice had a real
timbre, Jesus the human being who would have had a preference between green
olives and black olives.
I’m particularly interested in what Jesus’ explanation of
his parable tells us about his worldview. A quick word on what that word
means—several of my friends and acquaintances were sent to Christian worldview
camps in their youth, which, from what I understand, were attempts to teach a
systematic Christian theology that could be used to critique modern American
secularism. No comment on whether or not that’s a good idea, but that
use of the word “worldview”—a system of philosophical beliefs--is not what
we’re interested in here.
What we are interested in are the symbols, praxis, stories,
and questions that taken together would allow a system of beliefs (or a system
of unbelief) to cohere. Worldviews, in other words, are not what we “look at”
intellectually when we think about the world. They are the eyeglasses through
which we “look at” or “think at” our problems, neighbors, enemies, work,
celebrations, crises, etc. The questions that form a worldview are “Who are we?”
“Where are we?” “What is wrong?” “What is the solution?” and “What time is it?”
Right away in Jesus’ explanation of his parable there is a
critical word in what he calls the children of the “kingdom”—basileia. Basileus
means “king” in Greek (the feminine-queen-is Basile), so it makes sense
to translate basileia as “kingdom,” just like king and kingdom are
cognate words in English. The children of the basileia are the children
of the kingdom. But in the Jewish context of Jesus’ day (and in the prayer that
he taught us to pray—may your basieleian come on Earth as it is in
heaven) the idea of God’s kingdom is neither a purely political nor purely
religious idea. It is the completion of a story, the story of God reigning on
earth (enthroned in the temple in Jerusalem) instead of the Romans, instead of
the false King Herod—putting to right all of the injustices since the
Babylonian exile, and fulfilling the promises that he made. Israel’s god
becoming king in this way is a vindication of all the suffering of the Jewish
people at the hands of every pagan polytheist who ever oppressed them.
When Jesus tells us to pray “may your kingdom come on earth
as it is in heaven,” the idea is more like the true king coming to sit on the
throne of Gondor (from Lord of the Rings) than of hoping for something good and
vaguely religious to happen. This is a promised real-world political shift that
will put right all the “What is the problem?” questions in Jesus’ worldview—the
problem is establishing God’s basileia. Jesus goes to great pains in his
parables to explain what this reign will be like—like a pearl, like a woman
with ten coins, like a lost sheep, like ten virgins with lamps, like a treasure
hidden in a field, like a mustard seed, like seed scattered on the ground. And Jesus’
story of about the being children of the basileia tells us where
we are too—God is supposed to be king here in this land, and of these people,
but something has gone wrong.
Against the children of the basilean are the children
of evil, or possibly the children of the evil one. The one who sows them is the
devil. Some religious traditions talk a lot about spiritual warfare, but in our
church the only time that we consistently mention that name is at baptism,
where we answer that, yes, we do reject the devil and his works. That bit of
language feels like something we’ve outgrown, a childhood terror that we’ve
realized we don’t need to take seriously—who is still scared of the cape and
the horns and cloven feet?
But in Jesus’ worldview the devil is a real player, and his
threat is credible. Jesus believes and consistently references a malignant dark
power actively and intelligently working against God’s purposes of establishing
God’s reign. In last weeks’ story, the parable of the four types of seeds,
Jesus suggests that the devil actually murders some of those who hear the word.
In today’s parable Jesus says that the devil has pulled off a trick—by planting
a weed known as darnel, or the cockle, or tares. Lolium temulentum is difficult
to distinguish from wheat until fully ripened. (Wheat will ripen into the
golden-brown color we all know, darnel ripens black.) Darnel is mildly
poisonous, causing symptoms of intoxication if ingested. “What is the problem?”
in Jesus worldview? It’s hard to tell the difference between the children of
the kingdom and the children of the devil. There is not only moral confusion,
but outright sabotage. An English king in the 11th century (probably
drawing from this parable) used this analogy of darnel among the wheat as an
excuse to massacre Danish nationals living in Oxford and suspected of being foreign
spies—indistinguishable from the other students but politically poisonous. (It
was 1002, the St. Brice’s Day massacre, and the king was Aethelred the Unready—we
may have improved dentistry and nutrition and infant mortality since the 11th
century, but they were better at nicknaming politicians.)
Our worldview, the glasses through which we see our world,
has passed through the deism of the Enlightenment. We are all familiar with the
idea (whether we believe it or not) of God as a clockmaker who wound the
universe up from far away, and who has set it up to run under the power of its
own mechanism of mathematically accessible physical principles. If that
worldview has little room for a devil, it has even less room for angels, except
as decorations at Christmastime. Again, however, they feature prominently in
Jesus’ worldview, not only as messengers, but as active participants in the
climactic events that Jesus regards as imminent. “What time is it?” Jesus
speaks repeatedly throughout the gospels of some climactic time being near, a
harvest needing to be gathered, and he calls out direful warnings to pregnant
women and nursing mothers. Jesus says it is the time for multiple heavenly
forces to intervene supernaturally in human affairs to bring about God’s
kingdom.
This worldview is apocalyptic—not in the sense that was
popularized in bad Christian fiction by bending the book of Revelation into
uncomfortable shapes, but in the sense that it presupposed an apokalypsis—a
climactic revealing event--was at hand. Jesus was not the only first century
Jew to read his times in this way. Judas of Galilee, Simon bar Kokhba, Simon of
Peraea, and Athrongaius all claimed that they were anointed by God to bring about
God’s basileia, to cleanse the temple and throw off the Romans, and they
announced God’s vindication of his suffering faithful was imminent. We probably
don’t talk enough about how different Jesus was from these other apocalyptic
Messiahs—about his warnings that the fanaticism of the zealots of Pharisees
would bring the full military force of Rome down on the Holy Land and the
temple with catastrophic consequences. Jesus’ message of peace was different—but
he was very much like these other messianic figures in that he believed
his ministry was taking place at the crucial hour, and that he himself would
have the central role in the drama that was to unfold
At that revealing—the great harvest, or judgement—or,
separating of sheep and goats, or rendering of accounts as he calls it in other
parables—Jesus says all skandala (causes to sin) will be removed and
those practicing lawlessness (or, anomia) will be judged. The idea of
lawlessness doesn’t mean to Jesus that there will be judgment on those from the
wild west. This is language about those without torah—the torah
being the Jewish law. Jesus is dipping into the language that the violent revolutionaries
around him would have been using to call to arms against Herodians, against the
Romans, against the pagans who don’t observe torah. Elsewhere is Jesus’
ministry we hear how it is the meek, the sick, the poor, and the unexpected
outsiders who are actually keeping torah, but naming God’s judgment
against those who don’t keep torah--this is unexpectedly divisive
language from someone who in our tradition we take as our model of radical
welcome.
Although it is, in the present moment, hard to tell the
difference between the good wheat and the potentially poisonous counterfeit,
all will be made clear when it is burned in fire—burned by a purifying fire.
The children of the evil one are thrown in the fire. (Again, this is not the
kind Jesus we would have made in our own image.) And finally, after all this
startling sabotage and fire and violence, what is the telos, the end of
Jesus’ worldview? What is the answer to the question, where are we going? That
the children of the basileia will shine forth like the sun in their
father’s kingdom.
This brown man, this man with earwax and fingernails and
blisters…his worldview does not fit as a pat answer to the question “what is
the best possible set of beliefs to have about the world?” Engaging with what
Jesus actually thought about the world, completely apart from the question of
whether there is a devil sowing darnel among us, or whether there is imminent
hellfire—is a bit like our Old Testament reading from this morning. We are
wrestling with a stranger in the dark. We can smell his breath and feel the
strength of his body, and it’s uncomfortable for us. But it’s good for us. It’s
real.
There is one question that we can give the answer “Jesus”
to with assurance. How DOES God establish himself as king, reigning on earth as
in heaven? The answer is this man that we see dimly, with difficulty, working
out with prayer over centuries what exactly his story meant. When this man,
convinced that a disastrous end is coming to his people, worked by a diabolical
power, assisted by angels, against those that don’t keep torah, is
faithful to the task God has called him to and to the renewed torah God has
given him to preach….when he is obedient to death, then new creation starts,
and not only the devil but death and Hell are beaten. May Jesus, our Lord and
our God, but also our man, continue to reveal who he was and is to each of us.
Amen.
