Fear can do dangerous things to compassion.
Ordinary Sunday 16: 21st July, 2002
Fr John Davis, Vicar of St Peter's, Eastern Hill
Let both of them grow together until the harvest... (Mtt 13:30)
Those weeds among the wheat.
This text is the patient good advice that comes at the end of the Lord's parable of the wheat and the weeds. A crop that was supposed to be only sown with good grain has unaccountably been found to have weeds in it as well. What is to be done? Should some emergency weeding immediately take place? How could this have happened anyway? Do we need to protect the good plants? And by the way, just quietly, which are we in the scheme of things? Can we be completely sure?
We might hear our own voices sometime saying, what are these people who are so different to us doing sharing our patch? Is it not necessary that we all have the same values and priorities? Should we not be working hard to protect that which is good and to root out that which is bad? And then, there is that nagging thought again: what if someone is meanwhile looking at us and determining that we are the weeds in the field.
So in terms of this parable that is at the centre of the gospel today, we have this time, this present time, to look to the sorts of plants we ourselves are developing into, what sort of fruit we ourselves are bearing. So we look around us with some care. The kingdom, it seems, is a space and a place where all sorts may be found alongside each other. So it would seem. In this parable, the sower of the seed does not seem to be all that fussed about that particular untidiness. That is for God to discern and to decide, not for us.
But equally, it is clear that this parable also underlines the actual likelihood of bad or unexpected things happening. In the end this is not going to be able to be avoided, although some clearly seem to have a more difficult time than others. This is not paradise that we are in. This is a place and a space where an appropriate response to the question, how can this have happened? can be "An enemy has done this." (13:28). There is evil abroad, taking many overt forms. And yet we have to work out how to get on with our living, even though these things do and will happen. This is not easy.
Kindliness and forgiveness.
The first lesson provides a challenging context for our consideration of the gospel. That part of the book of Wisdom speaks of how God is with us. What are the key characteristics of God? This passage says that God is 'mild in judgment', and 'lenient'. And then the text takes us in a difficult direction: if that is so of God with us, then that is how we should be with each other.
The people of God can learn something here – to be kindly to each other. The whole world can learn something here. What a gentle and old-fashioned thought and how totally out of keeping with the now prevailing patterns of interaction. Yet in this potential kindliness of disposition to each other there is hope for us
We can see how the line of thinking might go. Perhaps when things go badly wrong for us as individuals, and it is of our own doing, we may have in ourselves the grace to be sorry and to wish to make amends. When things go badly wrong for us and it is not of our doing, it is indeed much harder to be kindly and gentle. There are times when it is utterly appropriate to cry out for justice, or at least to cry out that justice might be done, and indeed to work towards that goal.
And then, we still have a God who is said to be mild in judgment and lenient towards us. How then are we called to be towards others? The pattern offered is this: as we have been forgiven, so we are called to reach out towards forgiving others.
We know well enough the Lord's Prayer addresses this issue and we probably offer it up every day of our lives:
Forgive us our sins
As we forgive those who have sinned against us.
Insofar as we are able to step out on the path towards forgiving those who have wronged us, so may we ourselves also be forgiven for the wrongs we ourselves have done. That has to be one of the hardest parts of the teaching of the Lord to take on board. But that is clearly the path we are asked to try to tread. The other ways are too terrible to contemplate. Examples of them are all around us.
And that is a very different path to the one of quick condemnation, easy judgment, fierce hatred, revenge and retribution. That violent alternative we can see, all around the world as well in personal lives, is a way that just gets worse and worse. We do know that the Lord's way of forgiveness and kindliness also led him to the cross. But it did not end there.
What we are being presented with is a grappling with the complexities of being a moral human in a complex and diverse world. There are going to be times when all this is just too much and there is no obvious way out or through. There are times when we will find ourselves right back down to the bedrock of an inarticulate faith. Then, as we heard in the epistle today: "Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words." (Rom 8:26.)
Discerning that which is just.
Perhaps one of the really big questions we are left with is this: why is the justice of God so slow-moving? How is that the sun can shine on good and apparently bad alike? And then, as we have already twice noted, are we always able to be entirely sure who is who? One nice aspect of the parable of the Last Judgement involving the sheep and the goats, is that there was some considerable level of surprise when those sheep and goats actually found out which God considered to be which.
I can remember a simpler stage in my own thinking that went into my early university years, when I was pretty convinced that wrong was something done by others. That certainly would indicate that as a child I did not have a conservative and guilt ridden catholic upbringing. That may have indeed served me well enough. But it was more complex than that.
The first realisation that there could be actions and policy directions that were indeed wrong that were taken not by others but which were our own, my own culture or society or nation – now that was a sobering learning experience. And very hard to bear. Everyone who was old enough had to grapple with those sorts of issues during the terribly divisive times of the Vietnam War. Everyone of my age is to a degree scarred by that. It was very hard to be 18 and doing this. And it was also hard for parents trying to consider for the first time that the whole direction that a government, our government, was lawfully taking, might nonetheless be wrong. That sort of conclusion had consequences. Now that was 35 years ago.
Now our headlines are full of war and talk of war again. Different sorts. The collateral damage this time around and at this stage is a lot of people moving. Huge numbers of people are on the move, mostly without much choice and probably in bigger numbers now than even at the end of the Second World War. So there are refugees at our borders and as so powerfully driven home to us this week, right in our midst. And actually just two blocks away from here on last Friday, the sad charade of those two young refugee boys was played out.
Fear can do dangerous things to compassion. Perfectly ordinary decent people can find themselves quite out of their depth. Yet each of us is called to consider and to make choices. We may wholeheartedly support policies and actions; or we may utterly oppose. But those sorts of conclusions will have consequences.
Consequences.
Some things we can influence, others we cannot. We cannot improve the lives of every one of these displaced people, but we can all do something to help individuals or some. And so we are, and so we will.
Meanwhile, we do all this in a confusing and complex world, right alongside many who are very different. But there is more than enough to get on with: "Let both of them grow together until the harvest..." (Mtt 13:30)
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