the Gospel reading appointed for today our Lord Jesus
tells the parable of the wheat and the tares. It is a
familiar story about a man who owns a field in which he
plants good seed for pure wheat, but an enemy comes and
sows tares in that field, weeds which grow up alongside
the wheat. When workmen notice this they offer to pull
up the weeds but the wise planter knows how root systems
work and that it’s far too easy to rip up the good wheat
at the same time, so he tells them to wait until the
harvest when the tares can be tied in bundles and burned
and the wheat safely gathered in barns. Our Lord Jesus
interprets the parable: The son of Man plants the seed
in the field of the world, and that good seed is the
word of God. The righteous are the children of the
Kingdom. The devil is the enemy who sows tares – the
unrighteous. Jesus concludes by telling us this:
The Son of
Man will send out his angels, and they will gather out
of his Kingdom all things that cause stumbling, and
those who do iniquity, and will cast them into the
furnace of fire. There will be weeping and the gnashing
of teeth. Then the righteous will shine forth like the
sun in the Kingdom of their Father.
One of the wonderful things about
the Parables of Jesus is that they paint a picture of
common scenes from everyday life while at the same time
illustrating eternal truth, and the truth this parable
makes loud and clear is that there is for us a
reckoning, a day of judgment when we are held
accountable. In our day and age and culture we find this
conviction unsettling; we don’t like being told that we
are answerable to someone, that we are not ultimately in
charge of our own destiny; that we are not the director
of our own play. This news doesn’t resonate well with
us; it chafes against our attitudes, our ‘post-modern
sensibilities.’ What we don’t like is admitting that we
are not ultimately the boss of us. In fact it’s easier
for most of us to think of God as a distant, impersonal,
mysterious force which creates life, or as the essential
unity and oneness of all things. All of that is okay
with us because it’s all suitably abstract and doesn’t
require anything from us, like obedience. To regard God
in the Biblical way, though, in a relational manner as
‘Thou who must be obeyed,’ rankles us because we know
such a God requires obedience; we know we must let go of
control and faithfully surrender our egotistical little
self to a loving eternal reality far, far greater. This
is not a popular idea in our culture just now. We
haven’t yet found a way to market this because it
actually is the real thing, and all that’s selling these
days are illusions.
Of course the picture is different
in other parts of the word. In many places right now the
religions which are growing fastest, including
Christianity, are those which tell people up front to
get over themselves, that they must be obedient, and
that they are precisely
not the
‘master and commander’ of their own vessel because God
is at the helm. Those religions are growing by leaps and
bounds. However, that isn’t really a popular message
where we live. It’s a tough sell. You may well ask
what’s wrong with our culture and how our society came
to be this way, and I think I can help explain that. In
fact, I’ve been meaning to apologize for some time. I am
the reason our society and culture came to be this way.
It is my fault. Of course, I didn’t do it all myself,
single-handedly. I had help.
It happened this way: When I was a
child I was told that I should pursue whatever made me
happy. “Do what makes you happy.” That was the advice I
received from wise uncles and aunts. “You should do what
makes you happy.” Later on, guidance counselors and
graduation ceremony speakers told us essentially the
same thing: “Follow your heart, pursue your dreams,
climb every mountain, ford every stream.” It was all
just a variation of ‘do what makes you happy.’ And still
later on we heard this message again at college
graduations where impressive people were brought in to
inspire us on the occasion and the profound truth and
lesson life had taught them, the wisdom of the ages
distilled for us at that moment, was that we should do
what makes us happy. And when we heard that advice we
didn’t hear like an Aristotle or a Plato and think in
terms of the final happiness of the philosopher
contemplating eternal truth. Nor did we hear this advice
like a St. Augustine or a Dante and think of God and the
heavenly, beatific vision. No, sadly not. When we heard:
“Do what makes you happy,” we didn’t have the first,
foggiest idea what it was that would make us happy. And
so instead, we just focused on the ‘you’ part of the
advice and became the ‘me-generation.’ Now when you
think about it, this is exactly the sort of culture the
‘me-generation’ is going to produce, one that is as
shallow as it is aggressively narcissistic, which makes
an idol of celebrity itself. What did you expect from
the ‘me-generation?’
This is the culture we live in;
this particular wasteland is our wilderness where we are
called to be faithful and are held accountable. However,
the message of accountability is not one we like to
hear. We are like convicts who enjoy being pardoned but
not reformed. We don’t really seek to be re-born on
God’s terms; we want instead to be refurbished on our
own terms. Forget the new birth, we’ll settle for a
makeover. We don’t really want a Lord and Savior; we
want a life-coach. But here is the truth. God does
indeed promise to exalt us to life far greater than we
can imagine but the way to that exaltation is humility;
the way to the exalted life is through the narrow gate
of repentance. We must take up our cross and be ready to
die to our old ways of seeing things and doing things.
We must repent of our self-serving ways and know that we
are held accountable. This accountability – this
conviction that we may not simply remain as we are – is
the fear of the Lord in us and it is the beginning of
wisdom.
If the first lesson of this parable
is that we must be prepared for judgment then the second
lesson is that we must be prepared to reserve judgment.
It is too easy to rip up the precious wheat when you’re
trying to weed out the tares, and all too often we tend
to mistake one for the other. Let me explain what I mean
by way of illustration. Imagine that as a young person
in high school and college you burned the candle at both
ends, partied a lot, and lived the high-life.
Eventually, you met the right person, settled down and
buckled down and started to work hard, sacrifice, and
save, and it all began to pay off. Eventually you got
married and settled down further, and then you had
children, and that really concentrated your attention
and shaped your efforts to such an extent you soon found
yourself all tired out with no time left on your
schedule to be selfish. And then one Sunday you’re in
church and you hear a sermon on the ways of the flesh
and the things that are done by the old, unregenerate
human nature which St. Paul calls ‘the old man.’ The
preacher mentions drunkenness and carousing, and you
remember doing that. He mentions other sins of the flesh
which you also recall having committed, and you begin to
think that if that is the way the unregenerate, ‘old me’
behaved, then life as I now live it must be the new,
regenerate me. Not so fast!
Do not ever settle for anything
less than the glorious liberty of the children of God.
You see, it may be true that your life now is a lot
better than it used to be, but you should not confuse
your current, relative level of wellness with the new
life you are called to in Christ. Think of it this way:
When you were a baby, learning to crawl was a real
milestone. However, if you are still crawling five years
later it is considered a problem. My friends, we’re
still crawling. These days, you may be producing a more
well adjusted you; a happier, more efficient, nicer,
more patient and successful version of you, but it is
still your version; it is still a life lived on the
level of the flesh on your terms. The essential problem
here is that we think of ourselves as if we are an actor
assigned the role of being a Christian with a given set
of circumstances. We find this role to be a challenge,
especially given our particular circumstances. In fact,
we even wish the author would give us a break sometimes.
At other times you wish something exciting would happen
and that you might get a new storyline you can really
sink your teeth into. However, the Christian faith tells
you instead that you do not require a new storyline;
what is required is a new you. What is needed in this
play is not a new narrative but a new actor. In this
play it isn’t just the set and scenery that gets taken
down, it’s the actor who must be dismantled as well.
Living our lives on the basis of
likes and dislikes, tastes, preferences, tendencies,
appetites, attractions, and aversions, and going for the
maximum amount of pleasure and the least amount of pain
may be how everybody else lives but it is not what we
are called to in the risen Lord Jesus Christ. We must
begin with the conviction that we are accountable to
God, and the fear of the Lord is the beginning of
wisdom. In faith we know we are pure wheat created by
God in his own divine image and likeness. He has
breathed into us the very breath of life, and in his
divine Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, we are
being restored to our true likeness. We are his children
after all.
~ Father Petley
