Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.
Jesus tells another parable about seeds being sown. But this time, the evil one comes at night and sows a bunch of weed seeds in the same place. Having had a garden, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the work of that evil one! When the good seeds grew and produced grain, the weeds grew too. The workers asked if they should go gather the weeds. No, the sower says, if you gather the weeds, you might also gather up the good plants and their grain. No, leave them all to grow until the harvest. At the time of the harvest, the grain will be separated from the weeds. The grain will go into the barn, and the weeds burned.
This is a parable about the kingdom of heaven. This morning, I’m thinking about how the sower puts out good seed. Bad seed is also introduced, and the sower does not elect to weed before the growing season is over. It’s not until the end of their season, before the culmination of the differing plants’ life cycle, that they either produce grain or don’t. It’s not until that moment that the sower sorts.
I’m intrigued by two aspects of this. First, determinations about the good seed versus bad seed isn’t done by anyone but the sower, and only at the end of the plants’ life. Taken into my world, that says that we are not judged until the end of our lives, until we’ve either produced the life-equivalent of grain, or not. We have a whole life to be judged, and produce our grain. Also comforting is the fact that it’s only the sower that ought to judge. Not media, not others in my world, not the church, not even me. Likewise, it’s not my place to judge anyone else. That job is solely reserved for the sower of our lives.
The other thing I’m thinking about this morning is part of the reason for the no-weeding edict. The parable says that no weeding should occur while the plants are in their growing cycle because in the course of weeding out the bad plants, the roots of the good plants might be disturbed and harm the good plants. There’s something about sorting good from bad too early that can actually harm the good.
So here’s how I cobble this all together. God should be the only judge of good and bad. And that only happens at the end of our life. When we try to judge either based on our world view, or our assumption of God’s, we can harm the good. This makes me think of all of the people society has thrown away, whether because of 3-strike prison sentences, death sentence, mental illness, addiction, famine, poverty. We’ve judged them before they’ve had a chance to produce their grain and be judged by the only judge that really matters. What if in our judgment, we’ve disrupted their roots? What if our very act of punishment or imprisonment, or apathetic inaction has caused good grain to die?
Today, I want to be mindful of the judgment I make on people, whether by me directly, done by someone on my behalf, or done due to apathy. I want to see in them the possibility that God’s judgement has not been made, they have not had the chance to produce the grain. I want to own the responsibility of my role in disrupting their roots, and help give everyone the chance to live as God intended, so God alone can judge.
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