Jesus warned us against judging others - and this is almost impossible. Instinctively, human beings want to rid themselves of unpleasant news and experiences by categorising them as ‘bad’. Today’s reflection looks at a story from the Gospel of Matthew, in which we are reminded that we do not always know how to distinguish between good and evil.
Photo by Guillaume Flandre on Unsplash
Below is a contemporary translation of the story we may know as the Parable of the Weeds or of The Wheat and the Tares, here called The Curtain of History. (If you are interested to read the story Jesus is explaining here, it is told in Matthew 13: 24-30.)
“Jesus dismissed the congregation and went into the house. His disciples came in and said, ‘Explain to us that story of the thistles in the field.’
So, he explained.
’The farmer who sows the pure seed is the Son of Man. The field is the world, the pure seeds are subjects of the kingdom, the thistles are subjects of the Devil, and the enemy who sows them is the Devil. The harvest is the end of the age, the curtain of history. The harvest hands are angels.
The picture of thistles pulled up and burned is a scene from the final act. The Son of Man will send his angels, weed out the thistles from his kingdom, pitch them in the trash, and be done with them. They are going to complain to high heaven, but nobody is going to listen. At the same time, ripe, holy lives will mature and adorn the kingdom of their Father.
Are you listening to this? Really listening?’”
With the title The Curtain of History, translator Eugene Petersen places this text within a genre called Apocalyptic writing. Apocalypse means to uncover.
What do you ‘hear’ as you listen to this story?
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Jesus is warning his followers about hasty judgement. In the parable he has been asked to explain, the farmhands want to act immediately to remove weeds. They think they can tell the difference between these and the wheat.
We, too, are often tempted to judge our own circumstances. If our day is interrupted by something we don’t like or don’t want to hear, we may have an overwhelming desire to pull it up by the roots. If a news item catches our butterfly-like attention span, we may spiral down into gloom that we assume we have to remedy.
Alternatively, we may project all our hopes onto a new person we decide is the saviour we have all been waiting for. Or get pulled along, unthinking, by a new spiritual fad that everyone is talking about, reading about, going to workshops about.
There is always an apocalypse.
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Situations we find ourselves wrapped up in will have the curtain of history lifted on them at some point. When that uncovering happens, the ‘thistles’ - subjects of the devil - will complain to high heaven because they are revealed for what they are.
A film about an uncovering of this nature is Spotlight.
On the surface, the Catholic church in Boston was a force for good, a pillar of the community, with a cardinal respected across the USA. Surely, someone on the side of the Angels. When a Jewish editor comes to the Boston Globe newspaper and asks all the right questions, the curtain of history lifts on a scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church to its foundations.
Watch the film if you can and meditate: who are the seeds and servants of the kingdom? who are the sowers of thistles?
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Parables such as the one Jesus tells and explains above are layered with rich meanings. Discomfort is part of the very purpose of a parable. It should dislocate our thinking and introduce us to a new world. It also has implications for our inner world, as we wrestle with it.
The following poem is an invitation to hold onto all that which grows up inside us - and wait patiently for the unveiling.
