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Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time A
July 17, 2011
Reading I: Wisdom 12:13, 16-19
Responsorial Psalm: 86:5-6, 9-10, 15-16
Reading II: Romans 8:26-27
Gospel: Matthew 13:24-43 or 13:24-30
http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/072014.cfm
Leave them grow together.
It is surprising how these puzzles show their hidden convolutions when you turn them over in your mind for a few days. Many commentators take this story at face value and spend their time discussing the particular weed (darnel, a type of rye grass that is similar to wheat when young, but easy to distinguish at harvest time), or the enemy (who could have been pursuing a long-standing family feud), always assuming that the farmer is merely insisting on best practice farming. The lectionary seems to interpret the key message as an example of the patience and compassion of God.
When I try to identify the one key point of the parable I find it lies in the difference between the solution suggested by the workers and the solution preferred by the boss. The workers suggest weeding while the plants are young. This, I suspect, represents world’s best practice, pulling out the weeds before their root system develops and so giving the wheat maximum chance to grow. In the parable it seems to be presented as the obvious solution.
This farmer prefers to go against the common practice with the novel idea that you can pick out the weeds at harvest time. Commentators defend this with the observation that the mature plants will be easy to distinguish. Perhaps they have not worked much in the field. Traditionally, the world over, harvesting is hard, hot work, the workers always under pressure to get the job done before the heads of wheat become overripe and the grain falls out before it gets to the threshing floor, or before another summer storm wets the exposed wheat, and so on. In the real world the idea of laboriously picking out stalks of rye grass from sheaves of wheat is a little fanciful.
Clearly Jesus is not selling the latest high-tech harvester. But he does have his farmer say that the separation will be done at harvest time - and this novel idea is the key to the parable, though not its essential message. God's world is different from a field of wheat that has been oversown with darnel, because the ‘harvest’ process is different. In God's world the harvest will be taken care of in a totally different way; how, we are not told. In the meantime, the workers need to keep their hands off the weeds and let them grow together with the wheat.
It is surprising that in the explanation of the parable (which is probably not from the lips of Jesus but an interpretation put on the story in the early church, when there were new converts who had no contact with farming customs) the instruction of the farmer to the workers to ‘leave them grow together’ is omitted! I wonder if this does not show that the church even at that early stage was already inclined to ‘weed them out’, heedless of the Master’s warning that you might uproot the wheat plants along with the weeds.
The crux of the issue is this: in God's world it is not the role of the workers to pull out weeds. Unlike weeds in a field of wheat, ‘weeds’ in a christian community are to be tolerated 'because when you weed out the darnel you might pull up the wheat with it’.
The shift of focus between the original parable and the interpretation is even more astonishing when we compare the simple practical instruction to the harvesters in the parable ‘to tie them in bundles to be burned’ with the imaginary description of the end of time, packed with threat and terror, in the interpretation.
A footnote in the New American Bible blandly states: ‘In the explanation of the parable of the weeds, emphasis lies on the fearful end of the wicked, whereas the parable itself concentrates on patience with them until judgment time.’ - What!!! No further comment? No surprise? Not even a question as to how such a change in the message of this parable could occur or what difference it makes? How the detachment of the scholar is revealed! I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that during those first decades the christian community had already moved away from the extraordinary injunction of Jesus to ‘let them both grow’ - to a policy and practice of control by threat and intimidation, presuming to put labels on those to be weeded out.
In this instance the church might well go back beyond its origins to the original teaching of Jesus, and with faith and humility, rescind its policy of pulling out weeds: excommunicating scholars who are searching for truth with integrity, removing teachers who work at presenting the christian message in the language of their hearers.
‘Do you want us to go and weed it out?’ ‘NO, because... you might pull out the wheat too.’
There are two sides to this. You may make a mistake of judgement and weed out not just a strong healthy authentic plant, or you may cause so much distress among the people that many will walk away, unwilling to be enslaved by a totalitarian regime when they had been promised the Freedom of the Childen of God.
The two little parables set in the middle of this gospel selection are part of the teaching here: the tiny grain of seed grows into a major tree; a few spoonfuls of yeast contain the energy to leaven a whole batch of dough. The power to grow, to transform is contained in God's word , and it is enough. God's world, the 'kingdom', will grow from God's word, and the disciples of Jesus need to learn not to meddle, and especially not to imagine they can build God's world by any efforts of their own.