Cautious Words from Jesus during This Strange Time

by John V. Upton, Executive Director

This has been a month of strange and wild behavior among many churches. Just this week alone, I know of seven churches that have either dismissed their pastor or lost their pastor due to conflict. That is not to mention the number of churches still in the midst of conflict. I don’t know if it is the panic on Wall Street, the feeling of loss of control in our lives, the anxiety of an election year, the fear of insecurity, or all of these things, but something strange and painful is happening in the life of many churches and pastors. All I know is that I am hearing the same kind of comment over and over again – “we are just trying to do the right thing.” 

I can honestly say that given what I’ve seen lately, doing the “right thing” must not be as simple as it first appears to everyone, because in the middle of that “right thing” I’m seeing a whole lot of wrong taking place. Doing “right” isn’t all that simple, is it? Add to this the fact that while the world is in roiling confusion, the call of God to us brings new complexities into our lives. This doesn’t help. Jesus tried to teach us not to be so naive as to think that life with him would be simple. 

So Jesus told a parable to make his point. It was of a farmer who planted his field for a great crop of wheat, and the seeds he used were the best. But that night an enemy crept into the field in the dark and covered the field with another kind of seed: darnel weed.  Darnel is a weed that looks just like wheat when it sprouts.  But darnel weed is toxic, and if some of its seed gets mixed into the harvest of wheat grain and finds its way into the bread, it can make one sick.  There are reports that some even died from eating it.

Field hands noticed that all over the field much that had looked like wheat was now looking like darnel. They came running to the farmer and said, “Boss, didn’t you plant good seed? How is it that your field has a crop that is thoroughly mixed with weed? We had better cut that stuff down.” And the farmer says, “No, leave the weeds alone. You can’t always tell which is which, and when you think you are sure you know, you discover the roots are all mingled together. Just let it all grow together until harvest time. It will be dealt with then.”

But isn’t this how God’s Kingdom is, Jesus says. The intertwining of evil and good together is often indistinguishable. And when we try to root out evil, we tear out the good along with it. And so God doesn’t try to root it either, not now. We are not living in the golden age of harvest. We are living in the green season of the growing of the good that is rooted and twined with evil. Jesus’ parable doesn’t even attempt to tell us where this evil comes from. Its only interest is to ask, “How are you going to handle this?”

I think Jesus is telling us to be cautious about a religious impulse that has dominated the Church’s history – the impulse to make everything “right,” the purity impulse.

Now let me say quickly that none of this means that we are to be naively passive about evils around us or among us or within us. We are not to respond to what is wrong with just a shrug. There are confrontations to be made, especially where abuses of any kind are occurring. 

But in our struggles against what is wrong, Jesus does counsel us to caution and proper patience and humility. For we who think we understand so much are part of the unpure field. There are weeds wrapped around our eyes, and the roots of them have insinuated themselves down into our hearts. It is so easy to miss how intertwined evil is with good and how hard it is to trust that both, for now, belong in the hands of the One who understands contradiction.

I was in Europe this summer and walked past many an old cathedral. I was amazed at how many of the Gothic cathedrals have gargoyles and monsters carved on them. As I walked into those places of worship, I had to stare at the faces of evil that were everywhere. Richard Roar has said that if you don’t put the gargoyles on the corners of your temple, they will climb right up onto the altar.

We live as if we are the pure ones and frequently become the demonic every time. Husbands and wives do this to each other. Some fantasy of a perfect spouse fuels continual attacks, accusations, and withdrawals, doing great harm and destruction. Parents have done it to their children, attacking imperfection so relentlessly that a great deal of good is torn away. Debacles are occurring in church life when a few decide they are going to “fix” the church. On and on it goes, and how often in our naive quest for the purely good we don’t even notice that the flaws we try to be rid of really are intertwined with the good we should love. We just can’t pull them apart.

The same applies to us, if we are among those people who live with constant self-accusations because we are not the kind of people we know we ought to be. Listen, getting better never happens by going after your faults and sins with a weed whacker. Getting better occurs when we give the whole unpure field that we cannot fix into the hands of the One who knows and over time redeems the impure, if they will wait, if they will trust.

Have you seen the old paintings of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane – a garden always portrayed as infested with thorns? What are thorns doing in his garden? Those paintings always portray that while his friends were sleeping, Jesus knelt among those invading, unwanted, painful, weedy things. The next morning it was those very things that he wore like a crown.

Jesus, as the owner of all gardens and fields, abides ambiguities, blesses contradictions, and turns thorny ground toward holy ground. The people who executed Jesus weren’t completely bad. In many ways, they were really good people. As Jesus died, he forgave everything bad in them – and he forgave them everything they thought was “right” too.

Let us allow Jesus to walk in our unpure fields and in his presence see what we are meant to see, and let us look more to the One whose patient wisdom can be redeem all things in time.