1st Reading : Wisdom of Solomon 12.13, 16-19
2nd Reading: Romans 8.12-25
Gospel : Matthew 13.24-30, 36-43
Text: In hope we were saved (Romans 8.24)
The weeping and gnashing of teeth at the last judgment, which features in Jesus’ explanation of his story about the wheat and the weeds, is a phrase which occurs six times in Matthew’s gospel, just once in Luke, and not at all in Mark or John. This suggests that Matthew and his community of Jewish Christians may have seen Jesus’ teaching through a lens of sharper division than the other gospel writers. It is not unimportant, and I will come back to it presently, but if we focus too heavily on the divisiveness of the concluding explanation, we risk missing what may well have been the central point of the original story.
The servants, who have found the weeds growing up amongst the wheat, ask the farmer whether he wants them to go through the field pulling up all the weeds. No, he says, don’t do that. You’ll pull up half the wheat at the same time. Leave both till harvest time, when the wheat will be ripe. Then the weeds can be pulled up and thrown out without spoiling the crop. On this reading, although there will be a separation of good from evil when harvest time comes – which may indeed be a metaphor for the day of judgment – the point for now is that we have to get on with life as best we can in a mixed world of good and evil.
This interpretation, putting the emphasis on patience and tolerance now rather than division and judgment later, does seem to be more consistent, not only with the general thrust of Jesus’ teaching, but with what we may reasonably infer from other parts of the Bible about the nature of God. Our reading from the Wisdom of Solomon emphasised the patience and mercy of God who sets us all an example of kindness, filling us with hope linked to the gift of repentance. Looking a few verses back, there is more in the same vein of loving, patient correction, rather than summary justice:
You spare all things, for they are yours, O Lord, you who love the living
For your immortal spirit is in all things.
Therefore you correct little by little those who trespass,
And you remind and warn them of the things through which they sin,
So that they may be freed from wickedness and put their trust in you, O Lord.
(Wisdom 11.26 – 12.2)
Our reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans is also about how to cope with life in a mixed world of good and evil. Like the wheat in Jesus’ story, we are growing up in an environment of good and evil. The good seed in us has been planted and is growing. Our deepest instincts, implanted by the Spirit of God, teach us to appeal to Him as Abba, Father. If the Spirit teaches us to call God our Father, then we really are his children. We have the first fruits of the Spirit already (v 23), and with Christ we will share the gift of eternal life. Paul even suggests intriguingly that our redemption will in some way break the cycle of futility, death and decay for all creation. While we wait, we live in hope, even if we groan as we long to enter into our full inheritance as God’s adopted children.
Which brings us back to our field of wheat and weeds. The situation is one with which we are all familiar. The harvest is on its way. God’s rule is coming, and nothing will stop it. The decisive event in the coming of the kingdom has already taken place, in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Yet the struggle for God’s kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven has continued over a much longer period of time than the early Church could imagine. Two thousand years later we are still in the thick of it. We are impatient and disappointed as we experience our own failure to live up to our calling as Christians, as well as the limited impact which the Church seems to have on the world around us.
If the central message of the parable is about patience and tolerance in this uncomfortable in-between time while the harvest is ripening, we should nonetheless keep one eye on the end of the story. For the coming of the kingdom, to which we all have to respond as we live out our lives, is itself a process of sifting, a judgment. The rich man who wants to follow Jesus turns sadly away when he is asked to give up his riches. Another, who says he will follow Jesus anywhere, is warned that the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. Yet another, who pleads for time to go home and say good-bye, is warned: No man who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God. These are deliberately extreme examples of the choices we may have to make if we are serious about following Christ. They are not meant to be taken literally. The point is that as we go through life, making choices day by day, some quite small, others more obviously of life-shaping significance, the strength of our commitment to Jesus will be continually tested. Our own decisions will reveal where our priorities really lie. We may indeed live to regret the choices which shape the judgment we pass on ourselves.
Which is why we need to cling firmly to the hope to which Paul directs us. For it is in hope that we are saved. Now, in this in-between time, our Spirits which recognise the Lord of the harvest groan as the weeds seem to be getting the upper hand – both in ourselves and in the world about us. But if we really want to follow him, if we really want our mind-set to be increasingly attuned to the culture of love for one another and for God which is characteristic of life in his kingdom, if we live in the hope that this is how it will one day be, then we are already being saved.
With that hope in our hearts, may God grant us the grace to live lovingly, patiently, tolerantly for as long as it takes. Amen