Cranmer: The Weedy Field with the Great Harvest
If you’re not aware of this already, let me give you some breaking news: Jesus is awesome.
I love this gospel text. It is a perfect illustration of his subversive wisdom, his undermining grace, his sneak attack on our complacencies and familiarities.
One of my favorite things about Jesus is that he refuses to allow us to believe we have all the answers.
We’ll arrive at a new spiritual understanding and relish and celebrate and benefit from it.
But the minute it starts to contribute to our ego satisfaction, Jesus will rip the rug out from underneath us.
Last week we talked about the fact that however great of a spiritual teacher Jesus may be, to be honest he would make an abysmal farmer.
Thank God the family business was carpentry instead.
But we continue this week with another edition of Poor Agricultural Advice by Jesus Christ, in the form of the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat.
First of all, who sows weeds? How does one even accomplish that?
Jesus attributes it to the Enemy or the Evil One, and I always have this image of the Devil standing in someone’s newly plowed field blowing the seeds off dandelions with unholy glee.
Then Jesus has the householder tell his servants not to weed the ground, because “in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.”
That’s, um, not how it works.
Every first-grader cultivating his first garden plot in the backyard knows that weeding is an unpleasant but entirely necessary part of the process.
And when you pull out weeds, generally the plants you are trying to grow are not uprooted if you pay attention at all.
So if we conclude once again that Jesus is not giving literal horticultural advice, what does he mean? If we are to take this spiritually, where do we land? Continue reading