Isn’t life messy? Isn’t it complicated?
A few weeks ago, I took a few days’ retreat at the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield. I stayed in what they call ‘The Hermitage’: a converted stable or outbuilding of some sort, which contains a table and chairs, a bed, a fridge, a microwave, a shower… and not much else. And I was fine with that. Life is pretty simple when it revolves around just eating, sleeping, thinking, reading, reflecting, and praying, and my little hermitage provided all I needed (and nothing more) for those few days.
But a retreat is, by definition, not ‘real life’, not ‘everyday life’; and real, everyday life is, as I said, both complicated and messy. Real life rarely feels like moving in a straight line from A to B without hesitation, deviation or repetition. Real life so often involves getting it wrong., messing things up, starting again, going round in circles; it involves frustration, disappointment, loss, pain.
We touched on this last week, when we heard the parable of the sower. The sower sows seed everywhere, but some falls on the path and gets eaten by birds, some falls on rocky ground and fails to thrive, some falls among thorns and gets choked, and only a small proportion falls on good soil and flourishes and grows. Life is messy, and so often stuff – birds, rocks, thorns… whatever these represent in our lives – gets in the way of our full flourishing, of our becoming the people God calls us to be.
Today’s Gospel reading – another parable about sowing and growing – adds another layer of meaning to the parable of the sower. In this parable the sower sows good wheat on his good land, but an enemy comes along while everyone is asleep and sows weeds among the wheat, so that when the wheat comes up it’s all tangled up with the weeds.
Last week I tried to be reassuring: the sower keeps on sowing, on good soil and bad; God keeps on trying with us, even when we fail to understand, even when we are distracted, even when we lack staying-power. But this week’s parable adds another complication. Because, after all, it’s not just about us. Human beings are political animals. We live in communities – as much now as in Jesus’s day; we can’t get by without a community around us… tempting as that hermitage might be sometimes! We need other people – we love other people – but we’re also aware that being all tangled up with other people can be a distraction, a temptation, a slippery slope, a fast-track route off the good soil and into the rocks and weeds.
And this is more true than ever in today’s increasingly secular world. It’s a world that’s sometimes referred to as ‘post-Christendom’, a world in which to profess a faith marks you out as unusual, a curiosity, maybe a bit old-fashioned… harmless, perhaps, but definitely odd. If we, Christians, are the wheat in this parable, then we are surrounded, outnumbered, dwarfed by the non-Christian weeds. How are we meant to flourish under these circumstances?
Well, once again, I think, Jesus provides reassurance. ‘Let us go and pull up the weeds’ the sower’s servants say. But the sower won’t let them try it… Pulling up the weeds would also uproot the wheat. Pour weedkiller on the weeds and you kill the wheat too. No, the only way for the wheat to flourish is alongside the weeds. The two need to grow together, until such time as both can be harvested and the good and bad separated. Life is messy. It’s good and bad, all mixed up together. It’s painful and hopeful, difficult and straightforward at one and the same time. It’s messy. And living with the mess is the only way…
And what does that mean for us, in our own ‘post-Christian’, messy, troubled world? Are we supposed simply to shrug and say ‘don’t mind the mess’, to do nothing about the weeds – the bad people, the misplaced values, the self-interest and greed and prejudice and hypocrisy and outright evil – that we see all around us? Are we really to do nothing?
Well, yes … and no. Doing nothing does not mean throwing our hands up and giving in to the power of the secular world that surrounds us. But it does mean accepting that the secular world around us is the water in which we swim, the community that we need, the air that we breathe. Can we try to make the world a better place? Yes, of course… we’d be poor Christians if we didn’t try to do that. Should we speak up for the poor and oppressed? Should we support those in need? Should we care for the environment and love our neighbours as ourselves? Of course we should.
And there’s the rub… ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’, Jesus had said. He did not qualify the commandment by saying ‘Unless, of course, your neighbour is a weed’. On the contrary, the story that he told to illustrate this commandment – the story of the Good Samaritan – has as its hero precisely someone whom most of Jesus’s first followers would have thought of as a weed, an outsider, not to be trusted. Jesus doesn’t even say ‘Love your neighbours as yourselves, even if they are weeds’! Rather, what this parable seems to be directing us to do is to love our neighbours without even stopping to worry about whether they are weeds or not. To love them. Full stop. End of. Simply to love them, as members of the same community, fruit of the same field.
Once again, our Old Testament reading helps us to understand what this might mean for us. Jacob, having tricked his brother Esau out of his birthright and received his father’s blessing – the blessing that should really have been due to the firstborn – has been sent away by his father to find a wife for himself among his mother’s people (and to stay safe from the murderous plans of the older brother he has disinherited, who is waiting only for their father to die in order to do away with him). As he travels, he has a miraculous dream of a ladder stretching from earth to heaven and a vision of God, who reiterates the promise made to Jacob’s grandfather Abraham, the promise that, through him, all the families of the earth – yes, all of them; weeds and wheat together – would be blessed.
On waking up, Jacob exclaims: ‘Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it’. How often do we fail to notice God’s presence in the day-to-day messy realities of our everyday lives? How often do we only recognise that God has been with us when we look back on a period in our lives or on a situation in which we have found ourselves? How often do we look around us and perceive only chaos, and realise only later that God was with us in that (apparent) chaos all along?
We live among weeds and wheat. We live with frailty, sin and weakness, and with God’s promise, God’s calling, God’s blessing at one and the same time. And the good news is that we are not the ones who, in the end, will be called to divide the wheat from the weeds, the good from the bad. We are not the ones who will be called to sort out this messy, complicated life of ours once and for all. That is the work of the Son of Man – of God alone. And who knows what that judgement will look like when the time comes? Who knows whether, by then, there will still be any weeds left to chop up and throw onto the fire? We are not called to judge. We are called to live and to love in this messy and complex life. We are called to live and to love alongside one another, with and for one another, as neighbours. That is all. We live in a complicated, messy world. But we live in a world where there is hope, a world where the sower sows and the wheat grows and the weeds cannot, in the end, strangle it and prevent it from flourishing. We live in a world that is so very far from perfect, but in which the seeds of perfection have already been sown. And we live in a world where we are called to fertilise and nurture those seeds in our hearts, with love for our neighbours and for ourselves: love planted in Jesus’s love for us, fertilised with hope, watered by the Holy Spirit and just waiting to bear glorious abundant fruit so that we too might exclaim ‘How awesome is this place! This place – here, where we are, amid the mess and the weeds – is the house of God and God was right here with us all along.