I am confronted by this parable every time I walk outside my house. I live in a small cul-de-sac, and at the entrance of the cul-de-sac are two houses, right across the street from each other. They both have three big, rectangular raised beds in the front yard. The ones on the left look immaculate: I have no idea what the plants are, but they’re beautiful and well-maintained. The ones on the right are completely overgrown and unkempt. I enjoy looking at the gardens on the left. The owner obviously weeds them. But then I look at the wild ones on the right and wonder: maybe God likes those better. For while God has the wisdom and the wherewithal to weed properly, according to Jesus, God prefers not to weed at all.
Now of course, today's Gospel is not about plants. It is a provocative parable that hits hard on several different levels, but central to all of them is this metaphor of weeding. In the story, the workers are eager to weed the fields. But the Master is not. And if we let that idea of weeding sink in a bit, we can see why the Master might want to avoid it. In our long history as human beings, we have not always been good at weeding. For one thing, we often have trouble identifying what is a weed and what is not: often a weed has just been anything or anyone we don’t like. And when we decide we are going to weed out what we don’t like, what we deem bad or undesirable, the results often range from the hurtful to the horrific. There are social groups, cliques, and clubs that try to drive out those who don’t “fit in.” In fact, whole societies can do that by targeting minorities that the majority either dislikes or distrusts. This impulse to weed has led to such atrocities as ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, genocide in Rwanda, and, of course, the Holocaust. And, sadly, there are voices out there in our own nation which speak the language of weeding people out in reference to immigrants, Muslims, political opponents, and others. Just last week, for example, the founder of the America First Movement spoke at a rally in Florida and said – this is a direct quotation – these words about Jews: “They will go down. We have God on our side and they will go down with their Satanic master. They have no future in America. The enemies of Christ have no future in this world.”
That is truly terrible and needs to be acknowledged as such. But I wonder if this parable can help us to dig deep and look at the roots of the problem. So often the brokenness in the world around us reflects the brokenness inside of us. And the reality is that each one of us is a mixed field, with both wheat and weeds growing. And people can be pretty ruthless about weeding out the things about themselves they don’t like – or at least, trying to weed them out. And these are not necessarily sins at all. How many people, for example, go to great lengths to rid themselves of what they see as physical defects, even to the point of damaging their bodies and their health? I have listened to some gay people describe to me how they tried to uproot their sexuality because they feared that God or their families or their society would not accept it. But in trying to uproot it, they just inflicted tremendous emotional harm on themselves. And even when we talk about things that are sinful, this urge to weed them out can become destructive. If someone with an anger problem, for example, just gets angry at herself for being angry and tries to forcefully suppress or eliminate that anger, the result is often guilt, self-loathing – and even more anger. The Master in this parable has the wisdom to see that trying to weed out parts of ourselves that we don’t like for whatever reason often causes more harm than good. And it doesn’t take profound psychological insight to see that when people cannot love and accept themselves as they are, they all too easily project that lack of love and acceptance out into the world around them. Viciously trying to weed out the undesirable within us can quickly lead to viciously trying to weed out the undesirable around us.
This is not the way of Christ. We certainly want to protect ourselves and others from getting harmed. But the Gospel calls us to take a different approach than weeding. Jesus’ way of loving begins by accepting people where they are and as they are. And we have a great example of this in the apostle Paul. Paul has plenty of weeds in his field. One of them is particularly hard for him: he calls it a thorn in his flesh. We have no idea what this is. It could be a personality trait, it could be a bad habit, it could be a moral failing, it could be a physical condition – we just don’t know. What we do know is that Paul wants to get rid of it, and asks God to root it out. And God says no: God won’t do that kind of weeding. Instead God calls Paul to peace and acceptance, assuring him that my power is made perfect in weakness. Maybe God knows that rooting this weed out from Paul’s life would hurt him too much. Or maybe God in her wisdom knows that this thorn is not a weed at all, but something that will ultimately help Paul grow in love. Whatever it may be, God’s approach to it is loving and merciful.
This is one of the things I have always admired about 12 step programs. Addiction is awful and destructive, but those programs do not try to weed out addiction. Their approach is rather one of acceptance and surrender: acceptance that they are addicts, and surrender to God’s love. That love working through that program can lead to freedom from the power of addiction, but it doesn’t get rid of the addiction itself. I have spoken with people who have been in the program for decades and they will say, “I’m in recovery, I’m sober, I’m clean — but I’m still an addict.”
That is the way of Christ: not violently trying to uproot what we perceive to be weeds, but allowing the love of God to do what God knows is best. That doesn’t give us quick, easy fixes, and it may not eliminate things we wish were not there, but it does help us avoid hurting ourselves or others in a puritanical quest to get rid of anything we don’t like. So when we feel the need to weed, maybe we can take it out on our plants and limit it to our gardens. And we can let God do the ultimate weeding which only God has the wisdom and the wherewithal to do right.
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