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Sermon- Sunday, July 13, 2011 Pentecost VI, Proper 11

Fr. Gerry Swieringa

“Jesus put before the crowd another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field...’” Matt. 13:24

This week St. Matthew invites us to consider another parable of Jesus describing the kingdom of heaven. Like last week, it uses the metaphor of a sower and seed sown in a field. But unlike last week, we aren’t as concerned with the nature of the soil as we are with the fruitfulness of the crop that results. We are asked to understand that the same soil which yielded the hundred fold, sixtyfold and thirty of last week’s lesson, might also yield the weeds of this week’s.

Like the parable of the sower, Jesus delivers this example without explanation. He doesn’t complete the meaning of the parable until after the disciples approach him for it. And he concludes the explanation with the same words full of portent and meaning: “Let anyone with ears listen!” Exclamation point. This is serious stuff.

So what are we to make of this parable? Like last week Jesus gives an explanation that seemingly is so direct that any deviation from it is risky. Here’s the connections:

Sower equals the Son of Man, that is Jesus himself

Field equals the world.

Good seed equals the children of the kingdom.

The weeds equal the children of Satan.

The enemy is Satan.

The harvest is the end of the age, or the world as we know it.

The reapers equal the angels.

Finally, the binding and the burning of the weeds is the final disgrace and eradication of evil promised at the end of time.

This is an apocalyptic parable. It is a glimpse into a future that we, of ourselves, can know nothing about. Nor do we particularly want to know about it. After all, it’s a pretty grizzly scene isn’t it? Some Christian sects have latched on to these apocalyptic visions of mass destruction as a wakeup call to push the unbeliever into repentance. Through the middle ages the iconography of the church became obsessed with the mouth of hell. Devils dance with glee as first one and then another sinner falls prey to eternal damnation. The image of a loving savior, of a Good Shepherd leading his flock by tenderness is lost in the panic of escaping the encroaching fires of hell. We look back on all that today as not true religion, akin to superstition, an embarrassment to the church and a stumbling block to the sophisticated would be believers of the 21^st century. And yet, how much distance is there really between the fiery mouth of hell and our contemporary apocalypse of global warming assuredly devouring the earth one climate zone at a time? We are as sure of our scientific speculation as medieval man was of the reality of his religious nightmares. We don’t know what’s around the corner, but we suspect the worst, and we know we have to change or face unthinkable consequences. At least medieval man could look forward to the joy of his surrender. His repentance led to forgiveness and forgiveness led to redemption. Our contemporary sophisticate can only wail and bewail that he is surrounded by fools dragging him ever closer to the apocalypse.

Well, is that what we’re supposed to get out of this parable? No. Jesus doesn’t say the kingdom of heaven is like delayed justice. He says the kingdom of heaven is like someONE who sowed good seed in his field. The kingdom of heaven is like the sower who can do nothing but sow goodness. Because to do otherwise would be to step outside the kingdom of heaven, and that, for Jesus, for God, is impossible.

And yet the good field sown with the sower’s good seed grows a crop of weeds right alongside the good wheat. The slaves of the sower who see it are dumbfounded. Where did all those weeds come from? And in this question we have the issue that has occupied the best minds of Christian and non-Christian thinkers for centuries: Where does evil come from?

If God is good and if everything he created is good, what is the origin of evil? There are several answers that have ancient roots and are still put forward today.

Evil is the fundamental active principle of the Universe. It’s not that we should ask where does evil come from, but where does goodness come from? In a fundamentally evil universe, happiness is an illusion, a false sense of security and being loved set against a hard reality of suffering, common to all. Happiness might alleviate our suffering, but only temporarily. Sooner or later the reality of our aloneness and our defenseless position against the disregard of the Universe will prevail. To borrow a favorite phrase of Lyle’s, we had better “cowboy up” because that’s the best we can do when starring into the face of this Universe. The problem with this understanding is that it doesn’t square with the story of creation as told in Genesis. At each stage of His creation, God pauses to pronounce the work as “good.” If God merely laid his goodness on a creation that was fundamentally evil, then we need to go back to some earlier God who created that Universe. The sower in our parable sows good seed on good ground. The evil, when it appears, did not come from the seed he sowed, and did not come from the ground. That is why it is so disturbing to his slaves.
Evil is an opposite and equal principle with goodness in the Universe and the battle between the two is ongoing, a sort of perpetual stalemate. This is a core belief of Zoroastrianism and found its way into much early Gnostic teaching as well. In our parable it at least explains the existence of the weeds in common with and in opposition to the wheat. Weeds and wheat are each part of the necessary tension of life and are what holds all things together. One is not morally superior to the other, both are needed and both will be necessary until the end of times when all things will be sorted out. Yet clearly, the slaves are horrified by the weeds. They do represent a corruption of the sower’s field. Their first impulse is to snatch them out, even at the risk of removing some of the precious wheat as well. They are stopped by the wise and benevolent Master.
Evil comes into the world through the efforts of Satan and our readiness to help him. This is the Truth of the parable and it is a hard and saving grace when we come to see it. We need to go back to Genesis for the whole story. In the beginning, when God created man and woman, he gave him his blessing. “God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Gen. 1: 28. So he gave us dominion over his creation. He entrusted his creation to us, and sealed it with his blessing. Creation was ours to care for, and sadly, ours to corrupt. This Satan did in tempting us to disobey God. In effect, we handed over the control of creation which God had entrusted to us, to Satan on the pretext that in doing so we would become like God himself. Once we completed the act, Satan gained dominance over creation, evil was loosed on the world, and we became his subjects as Prince of This World.

All this is tersely implied in Jesus’ statement “An enemy has done this.” And we are faced with the current state of creation as Paul describes it in Romans. A creation that has been groaning in labor pains until now. A creation so encumbered by its burden of corruption that it cries out for deliverance.

Well, what was God to do? Athanasius in his work on The Incarnation pictures the dilemma God found himself in. He could go back on his word, on the promise of his blessing, and just start over. But that would be to say that all the goodness of his creation was in vain. It would say that His word could be corrupted as well as his world, and by the efforts of Satan. Clearly this was not an option.

Or God could act to redeem creation from the hold of Satan by offering a second Adam who would not fall to Satan’s temptations. Who would lead creation from corruption to incorruption. Who would erase the consequences of the Fall in his rising. So perfect and so complete would be this atonement that it will cause all the righteous, all those redeemed by this act of redemption, to “shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” And this he did in the gift of his Son, Jesus Christ, the eternal Word whose death and resurrection makes our escape from Hell not only possible, but preordained.

There’s one more lesson for us in this parable. If God is not the author of evil, and in fact is absolutely opposed to evil and intent on crushing it and delivering his creation from under the burden of it, what are we to do in the meantime when we discover evil in the world?

Evil makes its presence known in several ways. We see evil institutionalized when peoples are held captive, when governments strangle the rights of the governed. We see evil personified when children die at the hands of their parents and teachers are murdered by their students. We see evil made manifest in diseases and plagues. We see evil insidious in cancer and AIDS and creeping Alzheimer's disease. Evil is manifest everywhere, and it is an awesome and ultimately impossible task if we try to separate it out by ourselves. The wise Father holds us back. The wise Father offers a better plan.

Accept your adoption. Come and join the family. Paul writes, “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry. “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” When we accept our adoption we enter under the watchful care and loving arms of the Father. The evil around us may still sting. We may and will still feel the pain of life, but we will not be conquered by it. Jacob lay his head down upon a stone, and had a vision of the Lord His God saying to him, “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go.” There’s nothing soft about a stone. The stone didn’t turn into a pillow. It remained a stone. But Joseph, he was never to be the same again.

Does that mean we turn our back on evil? No. We are to do with evil like the slaves do with the weeds in the Master’s field. The first thing they did was report it to the master. And so should we. To go and attack evil without first taking it to God in prayer is both foolish and futile. We will not defeat it without God’s help, and in fact it may very well defeat us. Call it out when we see it? Yes. Steer others away from it? Yes. Expose it as the lie it is? Yes. Remove it from the world? No. That is God’s business, not ours.

Also we have a standing order to make disciples of all the nations and to baptize them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. That is our primary mission on earth, and one which should be all fulfilling. For even the most heinous evil is not beyond redemption. The power of Christ’s death and resurrection is such that only one sin: blaspheming the work of the Holy Spirit, is beyond redemption. For all others, his Grace is sufficient.

We must not be overwhelmed by evil, nor should we be oblivious to it. We need to stand in a state of watchful awareness until that day when the Prince of this world is finally overthrown. “Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father, He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit,

Amen