A hellfire and brimstone preacher was preaching on the Gospel of Matthew, and he came to one of his favourite Matthean phrases, “ and there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” And immediately, one of the old ladies sitting in the pew said, “let them that has ‘em, gnash ‘em.” The preacher continued and reached the phrase again “and there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” The old lady said, louder this time, “let them that has ‘em, gnash ‘em.” A third time the preacher reached the phrase, and this time the lady at the top of her voice, said “let them that has ‘em, gnash ‘em.” At this point, the preacher turned to the old lady and said, “Madam, teeth shall be provided.”
The second part of the parable that we heard this morning, the interpretation, seems to be a bit like that fire and brimstone preacher – very interested in the process of judgement at the end of the age. As we heard last week, it is not very often that parables are written with a particular interpretation- they tend to be more enigmatic, layered with many possible meanings.
If we turn to the parable itself, the first part of the reading, the emphasis seems to be a bit different. The servants are keen to sort out the bad from the good, but the master tells them to hold off. There is a danger in uprooting the good, as well as the bad. Perhaps Jesus is referring to a weed known as the “bearded darnel”, with seeds that were quite dangerous, causing hallucinations or possibly even death. Its roots surrounded the roots of other plants, depriving them of water and other nutrients, but also making it difficult to remove without also removing the other plant. There was one other difficulty with the bearded darnel, before it bears seed, it looks exactly the same as wheat. So apart from the difficulty in uprooting the weed, it can also be difficult to tell which is the wheat and which is the weed.
Religious people of all persuasions over the years have found it very tempting to separate the world into “them” and “us”, weeds and wheat. Whether it be Christians and Jews, Christians and Muslims, Muslims and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Hindus and Christians, there seems to be an element of religious belief for a significant number of people that needs to know who are the goodies and who are the baddies, so they know which side they are on. So often religious belief is defined by what it opposes.
But reality is not always so clear cut. Take the example of this morning’s Old Testament reading, focussed on Jacob. We hear the amazing dream he had about a stairway from heaven to earth with angels ascending and descending upon it. And God promises Jacob that, not only will Jacob inherit the promised land, but that God will be with Jacob wherever he goes and bring him back to the promised land. What a blessing! Jacob must be one of the goodies, right?
Well, if you remember last week’s Old Testament reading, Jacob made his starving brother Esau give up his birthright for a bowl of stew. The conclusion drawn by the author was that Esau despised his birthright, but could it not also be interpreted as Jacob exploiting his brother’s vulnerability. Not only that, but in the verses immediately before this reading, Jacob and his mother conspire to deceive his father Isaac into mistaking him for his brother Esau and giving Jacob the blessing that rightly belonged to his firstborn brother. You may recall Rebekah covering Jacob’s hands and neck with goatskins so he would seem to be hairy rather than smooth of skin. At the time of this dream, Jacob is on the run, fleeing from the wrath of his twice-usurped elder brother.
So is Jacob still one of the goodies? Or is it harder to tell? I certainly find it more difficult every time I read his story!
Despite his behaviour, Jacob still receives the promise from God. Perhaps a reminder that God works in a different way to that which we might expect. Perhaps a reminder that God’s promises are not a reflection of human behaviour, they are first and foremost a gift from God, a reflection of God’s generosity rather than us earning what is rightfully ours. In a culture where most things are regarded as transactional, this can be a challenging lesson for us. It can be hard to accept a gift without feeling that we have to do something to earn it.
Perhaps this is part of the lesson to learn from the parable of the wheat. We are not to judge whether someone is worthy or otherwise, whether someone ought to be uprooted and cast out, because we do not know what is going on inside that person. We are not the best judges of wheatiness or weediness, we are not the ones to decide whether others should be uprooted and cast into the fire. Those decisions are not ours to make, but God’s. Our job is to include, to nourish, to grow into the promises that God has given to us – not because we have a right to them, not because we have earned them by our good behaviour, but because the God we believe in is an inclusive God, a God of limitless love and forgiveness. All we can do is to hope to grow into the fullness of that promise, to allow our lives to more fully reflect that generous God.