Reading: Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
Preached at Beckley Presbyterian Church on
July 17th 2005
Light - Darkness
Hope - Despair
Faith - Unbelief
Good - Evil
God - Devil
Beauty - Ugliness
Commitment - Apathy
Truth - Lies
All these things mixed together are forces that shape our world, shape
our beliefs, and shape our lives. Wouldn't it be great if we could throw out
all the negatives and only have the positives?
There were those who, when Jesus came along and people started saying,
'This is it, He's the Messiah, God with us', thought that's exactly what Jesus would do - get rid of the bad and make the
world a place filled only with the good things and the good people with good intentions.
In particular they identified the bad and evil side of life with the
occupying, godless, Gentile, Romans who controlled the Jewish homelands. Surely
God knew what sort of people they were and surely it was time they got what was coming to them. Jesus would raise up a mighty army of the righteous to drive them out of the land and restore to the throne
a King like David, ruler of Israel and champion of the World; Jesus, the Mighty warrior King, who took no prisoners and wiped
the scum off the face of the earth.
Now don't think that this idea of Jesus being some great political
King of all Creation is confined to a few misguided individuals a couple thousand years ago in Jerusalem. Throughout the church’s history there have been numerous
groups, even nations, who saw the Kingdom of God in
terms of earthly domination and political power.
Around 312 AD Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the State
religion of the empire and intended to force it on the whole world. With Jesus
on His side how could he lose? I dare say a policy of 'Be baptized in the name
of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit or I'll beat your brains out’ may create nominal church members, but it doesn't make
for genuine disciples! 'Conquer the world for Christ and Constantine' proved
a rousing battle cry - but ultimately the Roman
Empire crumbled in the dust.
In the Middle Ages the Crusaders waged war against the infidels in
an attempt to wipe the Christ-Killers and Christ-Cursers from the planet and reclaim the Holy Land
for God's holy ones. Instead their empires collapsed and the Holy Lands remain
claimed by opposing religious and political groups as their rightful home.
When any nation sets itself up as the being the one most likely to
usher in the reign of God, you can be sure of one thing. Trouble. Both in the world and in the nation. The Kingdom of God is not meant to be some great nationalistic political force that
wipes out all other kingdoms, eradicates all the negatives by the irresistible force of the positives.
There have been those, who in the belief that most of the world is
so hopelessly tainted by evil that it is beyond being redeemed, have taken a different stand.
They have interpreted the command to "Be in the world but not of the world" by seeking to withdraw from the world altogether.
They were around in Judaism at the time of Jesus’ earthly ministry. The ‘Essennes’ were a Jewish Sect who led a monastic existence out in
the desert. In an attempt to guard their souls from corruption they simply tried
to get away from everything and start over again, regulating their lives by strict rules.
The Christian Church has embraced this idea throughout its history. Groups of folk have renounced all earthly pleasures, and withdrawn from the world
to pray and study the teachings of Christianity, usually by following the rule of a particular teacher or Reformer. Sometimes their withdrawal from the world has produced great treasures for the world
in terms of creativity and spirituality. Some times such communities have indeed
been an oasis of holiness within a corrupt church and society. Yet not always.
Others found that monasticism was not enough of a withdrawal and sought
to live a solitary life as hermits or lone pilgrims. But they discovered an uncomfortable
truth, a truth that many also discovered in their ordered existence in monastic communities. Withdrawal from the world was
no escape!
Light and darkness, hope and despair, faith and unbelief, commitment
and apathy, truth and lies; they weren't just aspects
of life out there in the wicked world, they were forces that were shaping their own personal worlds, their own internal kingdoms. The prayer "Thy Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven” became 'Thy Kingdom
come in my heart as in the heart of Christ'.
This Kingdom business was the problem. Wasn't
the coming Kingdom supposed to solve everything? If a person invited Jesus into
their hearts wouldn't that mean no more problems, no more struggles, dead to the world, alive to Christ, grace would drive
out the devil and godliness would be victorious?
Matthew's gospel talks a lot about the Kingdom. At times Matthew is gloriously ambiguous. Yes, the Kingdom
had come in Jesus, but no, it wasn't here yet. Yes, you are citizens of the Kingdom,
but no, you won't always live that way. Many Christians feel that tension in
their spiritual lives! St. Paul writes of
how he longs to do the right, but often seemed to do the wrong thing.
Let's remind ourselves of the parable Jesus told us about the Kingdom
in today's reading.
Matthew Chapter 13 beginning at verse 24 - "The kingdom of heaven may
be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among
the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then
the weeds appeared as well."
The Servants want to cut the whole thing down, the wheat and the weeds,
but Jesus tells them, "Let both of them grow together until the harvest." The
harvest, he later explains to the disciples, is the “end of the age,” a time when collected out of the Kingdom
will be "all causes of sin and all evildoers" leaving "the righteous to shine
like the sun."
To the Kingdom seekers who wanted Jesus to blow away the opposition
and remove from their own lives every taint of darkness, this was not a good news parable.
There would be no resounding once and for all victory. There would be
no sudden overthrow of the forces of evil. There would continue to be, as Jesus
elsewhere says, ‘Wars and rumors of wars’, they would ‘always have the poor with them’; the final
harvest would come, but not yet.
The world today continues to have places of wonder and alleys of cruelty. The families we are born into can bring us great joy, but also great pain. Our churches can be one moment inspiringly courageous and the next moment petty and faithless. In our own lives we have moments of inspirational faith and moments of crashing failure. Good mixes in with bad.
Are we then lost forever in a hopelessly compromised world? Not at all. We are not told to be passive in the face of evil. It is not a divine command that we ignore injustice in the world, or violence in society
or evil in the church. The parable is a realistic reminder that those who seek
to be disciples of Jesus Christ do not have the ability to get rid of all the weeds, and that sometimes trying to do so causes
more harm than good.
Are any of you like me in the sense of being botanically challenged?
My mum back in Britain has
a wonderful garden. However she never encouraged me to help with the weeding. Sometimes what looked like a weed to me turned out to be some prize bloom. I’d pull it out and throw it on the fire. What I thought
was a flower turned out to be the weed so I left it there. You can imagine my
mums anguished cry as she surveyed her patch of prize weeds blowing in the breeze
- “What have you done to my garden!”
In a similar way we are incredibly undiscerning when it comes to the
things of God’s Garden, the world. If judgment were left up to us, then
a lot of mistakes would be made. I’m glad that at the final harvest it is a righteous, loving, holy God who calls the
shots.
If we try and elude the wicked world by withdrawing into our own little
shells or even going our own solitary way, we will find that the good and the bad still resonate within us. We can not escape them. But we can decide whether we are going
to nurture the wheat or feed the weeds.
To feed the weeds we just have to go our own way and not take the
time to care. To nurture the wheat is to concentrate
on those things that build us up in our faith. Things like worship and being
faithful members of our church communities and prayer and service and getting to know God’s Word. Things like looking after each other and helping those less fortunate than ourselves.
As to saving the world by systematically eradicating every stronghold
of darkness, .... forget it. That’s not what the Kingdom of God is about. There is going
to be wheat and there are going to be weeds, and we are not always going to even know the difference between them.
100 years ago there were those who predicted that by the year 2000
Christianity would have taken the world, poverty would be eradicated, war at an end and Christ enthroned as King of the nations.
Two World Wars and conflicts from Vietnam to Kosovo, from Afghanistan
to Iraq, the many today who will have died through lack or adequate medical care, the millions who go to bed hungry and homeless,
such things testify to the truth of Jesus parable... the wheat and the weeds grow together.
All is not lost. If we
can concentrate on doing the good we know, then by the grace of God, the Spirit of God will nurture our lives and we will
see good things springing up in all sorts of unexpected places. That’s
how it seemed to work for the first disciples. So that’s how it’s
meant to work for us. In Christ’s name let us seek for it to be so.
Rev. Adrian J. Pratt
