Preached at Holy Cross, Seend
Romans 8.12–25; Matthew 13.24–30, 36–43
“The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No…’”
What happens when the people we are supposed to look up to fail? What happens when the people we would like to see as examples and patterns for our own lives turn out to be no better than the rest of us – and often much worse?
Domenico Fetti, The Parable of the Wheat and the Tares (1620-21). Hangs in the Courtauld Institute, London.
As a society, we’re speedrunning that experiment. Trust in democratic institutions is crumbling. Only one in eight of us now trusts governments to put nation before party all or most of the time. There is a growing political gap in how much people say they trust judges, scientists, teachers, professors, and civil servants – for a large minority of the population, they are the political priesthood of the other side.
As for other sources of authority, they too have seen their credibility dissolve. The Royal Family? Let’s not dwell too long on Prince Andrew. The world of celebrities? Rife with abuse.
The Church, and its priests and bishops – [fx: LOUD CLEARING OF THROAT] – well, they certainly have their share of wrongdoers, with regard to sex and money, of course, but also in handling safeguarding disclosures and episodes of bullying.
Most people aren’t interested in the Church – and if what we were selling was the idea that we’re in a position to stand in judgement over others, then they’d be right. The Church will not be the judge of the world, only the Saviour to whom it points the human race, Jesus Christ. Those who call themselves Christians will be under His judgement as much as anyone else. Now, if we truly seek to make Christ the guiding light of our lives, we can hope to live better lives than we would otherwise, but we certainly aren’t perfect.
In this life, God allows the good and the bad to grow together. Often, the wicked flourish. Now, I’m sure most of us have chapters in our lives that we’re not proud of, and most of us know how they tend to start. We do something small that we know isn’t quite right, and we get away with it, and it doesn’t cause us that much worry – after all, other people are getting away with the same sort of thing and mostly they seem to be perfectly nice people most of the time. Then our moral compass starts to go awry, small steps lead to larger steps, and we find ourselves deep amid the weeds, living in a way that would once have caused us shame.
If we’re very lucky, our conscience pricks at us before too long and we pull ourselves together. If we’re only slightly less lucky, we don’t get away with it for very long, and something goes wrong while our misdeeds are still relatively minor, and we get the chance to learn a painful lesson before we can do too much damage to ourselves or those we care about.
The people who are truly to be pitied are those who do seem get away with it, who live horrible lives and flourish materially. For all of us will have to give account to God of how we have used His gift of life.
The hardest part of this parable is that we all hear the Devil’s sweet, seductive voice more often than any of us would comfortably admit in public. It’s easy for the garden of our own soul to be choked with weeds and poison, while we tell ourselves that at least we aren’t half as bad as them – the really bad people, like the politicians and celebrities and clergy, who do all the same things we do but seem to be much more materially successful. Self-righteousness and hypocrisy were the sins that made Jesus angriest; they are also the foundational sins we use to justify the unjustifiable to ourselves.
That’s why the master won’t allow the servants to weed the field, because they can’t tell the difference reliably and would tear up the wheat. I don’t know what the furnace is. I know that Jesus meant something serious by it, and I’m suspicious of any preacher who claims to know more than that. What I do know is that I am not qualified to say who is in it – and neither is anyone else. That’s why we can’t just launch some great purge to rid ourselves of wrong ‘uns once a year, like in that movie, because when we do that we always become the very thing we condemn. God is patient with His creation, including us, allowing the good and the bad to mature. The harvest, as we should be well aware at this time of year, cannot be hurried.
So instead of worrying about which of the people you detest are bad enough to merit the furnace, take the opportunities the Church provides to make sure you don’t end up in it yourself. Take a moment during the confession to bring your sins before God, week by week in Church, and seek His guidance in living a better life. Consider seeing a spiritual director or confessor regularly. These are the tools which should strengthen the voice of conscience within us, so we catch ourselves on before we find we don’t get away with it in the end. These are the ordinary ways we keep the garden of the soul from being choked while we wait for the harvest.
If today’s Gospel tells us how to live before the harvest, the Epistle tells us why that waiting is worthwhile. St Paul reminds us that what we experience in this life is only a portion of the fullness of our existence. Paul lived a harder life than most of us can imagine – full of imprisonments, beatings, and being run out of one city after another. He also committed sins far worse than most of us have the capacity for.
Writing several decades after God sought him out and rescued him with the shock tactics that alone would have worked, Paul reflected that the sufferings of our age aren’t worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. Then he used some remarkable imagery – that the whole of creation is like a pregnant woman who has just gone into labour, groaning as her contractions start. Pregnancy is like the harvest: it cannot be hurried – it takes as long as it takes. But the whole of creation, from the Big Bang to the last supernova, is waiting to give birth to something still more wonderful than it already is.
And in that grand picture, we are like babes in the womb, already the same people that our mature forms will be, but with no possible way of knowing what we will become on the other side of that birth canal. We hope, St Paul reminds us, for the things we do not already possess and often cannot yet see. That’s what hope is.
Hope is not the same as optimism. It doesn’t depend on us taking a positive spin on the facts. And Christian hope lies in this – the human story continually reveals there is no hope that we can save ourselves from the darkness inside ourselves, so God came on a rescue mission Himself, fulfilled on the Cross, when the worst that human beings can be was laid bare and God’s love triumphed over it.
Christian hope isn’t the hope that eventually everyone will become good Christians and everything will be wonderful; it’s the hope that it is precisely in the depth of our failure that God chooses to rescue us, not because we are good but because He is love.
It is that divine love that undergirds God’s administration of justice, both more exacting and more merciful than anything humans can manage and, if we trust in Christ’s promises, that divine love that will see us reborn with the whole of creation. Don’t forget how the parable ends – “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father”.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and for evermore. Amen.
