Religious fanatics have probably done
more damage to religion than all the atheists, agnostics and public sinners put
together! As Blaise Paschal said, “Men never do evil so completely and
cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction!” Cock-sure and blind
as bats, they claim to have perfect eye-sight when it comes to good and evil,
setting themselves up as judge, jury and executioner!
We are painfully familiar with fanatic
Muslims who would fly planes into high rise buildings as a way to rid the world
of “degenerate western influences” or our own Puritans who would burn so-called
“witches” at the stake to keep their church “pure.” In our own church, fanatics
had a heyday during what we know as the “Inquisition” and "Crusades." The “Inquisition” and "Crusades" were invented by religious fanatics who wanted to do a good thing: rid the world of
heresy, error and sin, but they chose some of the most vicious, cruel, inhumane
and un-Christian, methods imaginable to accomplish their goals! Many good, holy
and even saintly people were brutally killed by those misguided people with
their "good" intentions - all in the name of God, of course! I am
scared to death of the “Christian Nationalist” movement that is gaining
strength in our country for these precise reasons. As Jesus reminds us in
today's gospel: beware of overzealous, fanatic weed-pullers!
Today's parable is one of my
favorites. In it, Jesus reminds us that in his kingdom here on earth, the good
and the bad exist alongside each other and nobody but God can really tell
the difference! To make his point, he again turns to farming for a parable. He
tells the story of a farmer who planted good seeds in his field, only to find
out that, as they sprouted, weeds also appeared growing right there with
them!
In this parable, God is that farmer
and we are his hired hands. One day, the farmer’s hired hands came
in to report the presence of weeds growing among the wheat and to suggest that
they could fire-up their big weed-eaters and go to work on them! The
wise farmer gives them a quick and firm “no, don’t you dare!” “Leave the weeds
alone and let them grow together with the wheat till harvest time!” Wisely, the
farmer tells his hired hands that if they uprooted the weeds now, they would
end up pulling up the wheat along with them because, at this point, no one
could tell one from the other!
This is a wonderful parable because
the specific weed Jesus is talking about is an especially noxious weed that
looks exactly like wheat when it is young and tender. In fact, people back then
had a nickname for this particular kind of weed Jesus was talking about. They
called it “bastard wheat!” Not only did it look exactly like wheat when it was
young and tender, its roots also entangled themselves around the roots of
tender wheat shoots! Not only can they not be distinguished, one from the
other, their roots had become so entwined that if you tried to pull the weeds
up too early, you would end up destroying the precious wheat crop by pulling up
the wheat along with them!
When the time finally came for
harvest, the weeds and wheat would cut together and threshed. Threshing was the
process of separating the seeds from the chaff. The wheat seeds had a golden
color and the weed seeds had a slate gray color which made it easier to
separate them. The weed seeds were slightly poisonous, having a bitter taste
and causing dizziness and sickness, so they had to be destroyed. The precious
wheat could then be stored in the farmer’s barn.
The point of the parable is that,
unlike human beings who tend to judge quickly, God is lenient and patient and
wise.
This parable clearly reflects Jesus’
own experience of being condemned by religious people. They thought of
themselves as the precious wheat while the social outcasts that Jesus
associated with as the useless poisonous weeds. Jesus could see that
often it was the other way around! As Scripture says, “People see
externals, but God can see into people's hearts.”
My friends, the message for us today is
simple! Good and evil exist side by side in the church and in the world, but we
need to be very weary of overzealous fanatics who want to "pull
weeds" and “clean house” – whether they come from the church or the
government! More often than not, those people do more harm than good because
they really cannot see what they are doing, or even understand the purity of their
own motives, all that well! As Jesus put it, when he warned people about false, people-abusing prophets whose uniform was a woolen sheep pelt, "Be aware of wolves
dressed up to look like sheep!"
What to do with "weeds," has
always been, and will always will be, a problem for the church! However,
as the parable teaches us today, we also need to know that overly enthusiastic weed-pullers
have sometimes created bigger problems than the "weeds" they so
eagerly want to pull up! As Jesus said, "...if you pull up the
weeds, you might uproot the wheat along with them. Let them grow together
until harvest." As the great preacher, Billy Graham, so wisely put
it, "It is the Holy Spirit's job to convict, God's job to judge and my job
to love!"
