What most of us want is simple, black-and-white clarity in our lives. Is it or isn’t it? Yes or no? Yet the whole of Christianity is run through with paradox. And so, over the last 2000 years many Christian people have done their best to sort out, or resolve, the paradoxes. But we are invited, as Christians, to hold those paradoxes, to live with them, and to live in them. The nature of paradoxes is that they are, by nature, uncomfortable. They are ambiguous, unclear, troublesome, and they are impossible to state in a straightforward way.
It’s no coincidence that many of the heresies, the contradictions to Christian doctrine, that have rocked orthodox Christianity over the past two thousand years have grown from a discomfort with paradox. For example, Jesus can’t be fully God and fully human, so let’s choose one. Or God can’t be immanent (here in the world, in all places and at all times, with us) and transcendent (existing completely above, beyond, and independent of the material universe) at the same time, so let’s choose one over the other.
Here are just a few of the paradoxes that are at the heart of the Christian faith…
God is One, and God is Three.
The Bible is God’s Word, and the Bible is authored by flawed humans.
Creation is good, and Creation is broken.
To give is to receive. To die is to live.
To be weak is to be strong.
To serve is to reign.
We’re saved by grace, and faith without works is dead.
The kingdom of God is coming, and the kingdom of God is among us.
At every point it seems, Christianity calls us to hold together truths that might appear bizarre, nonsensical, counterintuitive, and irreconcilable to a rational person. It’s hard, and takes courage to say, “This is true – and this is true also. I don’t know how. But God does. And in time, truth will be revealed to us. For now we have to live with the incomprehensible truth of the paradox.”
In our Gospel reading this week, Jesus invites us to practice just this kind of courage. In yet another agricultural parable, Jesus tells the crowds that a householder plants their crop in their field. But while they sleep, an enemy sneaks onto the field, and sows weeds among the wheat. When the plants come up, the householder’s servants are baffled. “Master, did you not sow good seed in your field?” they ask. “Where did these weeds come from?” The householder doesn’t spare the truth: “An enemy has done this.”
But when the servants offer to tear up the weeds, the householder stops them. “No, for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let them both grow together until the harvest. At harvest time, I’ll instruct my reapers to collect, bundle, and burn the weeds, and then I’ll gather the wheat into my barn.”
In this parable, we encounter a paradox. Firstly, we are asked to acknowledge that evil is real, is poisonous, and is among us. Secondly, and paradoxically, this parable teaches us that our response to evil, despite its danger and its harm, must be to live with it.
Using language such as ‘evil that lives among us’ to deescribe life in our world can feel draconian, and I confess to a certain discomfort using language that is so easily misunderstood. Apart from anything else, within the Church, use of the word evil has an ugly history of exclusion and wounding. So, it’s tempting to shy away from using the word evil at all. But Jesus doesn’t share this discomfort. In the 1st Century, talking of evil, and attributing events or conditions to ‘evil’ would not have been out of the ordinary. Jesus describes weeds being intentionally sown by a real enemy to cause destruction of something good. The weeds, he says, are children of the evil one.
This Gospel explanation of this parable might lead us to think that the wheat and the weeds are metaphors for different groups of people, those who are wholly good, and those who are evil. The good will ‘shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father’, and the evil ones will go to the everlasting fires of hell.
But weeds and wheat, good and evil, don’t describe groups of people. The wheat, even though we may like to think we are on the right side, and generally do good, doesn’t describe us – for who among us is perfectly good? And, on the other side, it is very dangerous when we begin casting anyone, ourselves or others, as pure evil. It’s not difficult to find acts of violence and hatred around our world that stem from this kind of labelling of others, either individuals, or groups of people, as bad, evil people.
The truth is that every one of us, like the field in the parable, is a big messy mixture of wheat and weed, good and evil. As Martin Luther wrote, we are each at the same time both sinner and saint, and we can recognise the truth of this when we reflect on our own lives with honesty and humility.
This parable is one of the teachings of Jesus that is concerned with the end of the world; with death, judgement, and the ultimate destiny of humanity. This is a branch of theology called ‘eschatology’ that speaks about the end times. So what is Jesus telling us through this parable? Jesus is telling us that evil will not remain. He is not saying that evil people will burn in eternal fires of hell. He is saying that all that is downtrodden, disenfranchised, tormented, wounded, and oppressed, will be set free from all suffering. All that is born of evil in every person, in every place, will ultimately be destroyed. Not because God hates the world. But because God loves it.
So that’s the end times dealt with. Phew!
But Jesus, in his teaching, is also always teaching about how we are to live our lives. So what does this parable say about this? What are we to do about the evil we might see around us, or recognise within us?
When we witness or experience something, or someone, that we judge to be ‘evil’, we might want to say to Jesus, ‘I’ve got this. Trust me, I know how to separate the weeds from the wheat. Leave me to it and I’ll have that field cleared for you in no time! I know what is good, and what is bad. Who belongs, and who does not.’ We might be tempted to do some ’moral gardening’ on Jesus’ behalf. But this is not our task. Judgement is God’s task alone. Jesus tells us “No, don’t try to separate good from bad,” and “wait.” Why?
Well, it’s a truth that the seeds of God’s life in us are still young and growing. Our roots are delicate and tender, and need time. They need lifetimes. This is not to say we should ignore evil. But it is to say that we should move gently and with great care. It is to say, we should look for goodness and feed it with goodness of our own.
In this parable Jesus says, stop judging, stop casting aside what we might think are weeds, or, evil in our world, and look with eyes and minds and hearts that love, that seek goodness and growth, that trust in God’s Kingdom. The field is not ours, it is God’s. Only God knows it intimately enough to tend it. Only God loves it enough to bring it safely to harvest. And this will happen at a time we cannot know.
Once again we are called by Jesus to a complicated in-between. A paradox. Evil is real, poisonous, and among us, and our response to evil must include both acknowledgement, living with it; and restraint, do not become the judge. Though we might fear paradox, God does not, and it is in God’s soil that we are firmly planted. We’re safe, even in the contradictions. Messy and weedy, and safe.