Worried Wheat

Of all the words Jesus spoke that are recorded in the Gospels, what I enjoy most of all are the parables. Jesus was a master of this particular form of story-telling. The person telling a good parable is a bit like a magician. Like a magician, the teller of the parable keeps you watching something else - you think you know what the trick is going to be, and then suddenly out of thin air something totally surprising appears. The truth slips in through the back door, while you were watching so keenly at the front door.

There's always something new to be discovered in a parable. Parables don't usually have a single point. They may even speak to you differently at different times, depending on your mood and your frame of mind and your situation.

Well, one of the parables which is most fascinating to me is the parable of the weeds among the wheat. Just a few moments ago, we read this parable from the Gospel of Matthew.

In it, we learn how a farmer's enemy secretly sows weeds among his wheat during the night, and how the farmer decides to let the weeds grow up alongside the wheat, until harvest time.

He’s worried uprooting the weeds may harm the genuine, but young and delicate wheat crop.

Later in the same chapter Jesus explains to the disciples, the wheat represents the children of the kingdom, and the weeds are the children of the evil one, sown by Satan to disrupt the followers of God and God’s plan for our world.

Now, on occasion, I've used this parable as the basis for a Bible Study. Of course, every member of the group is a stunning and beautiful example of total Christian development and maturity, but sometimes I've wondered, as the discussion progresses along, whether any of my fellow pilgrims have experienced, as I have, an involuntary spasm of self-doubt as they listened to the parable.

"You're a weed! You're a weed!" screams this loud voice of my nagging insecurity and self-doubt. "Call yourself wheat, you weed? You gotta' be kidding!"

"Calm down," says the quiet voice of kindness, reassurance and reason. "You are a minister ... surely somewhere along the way you've done some good - helped God along with the divine plan in some way!. Sure, you may be a bit stunted and defective in the grain department, but you are wheat ... not a weed."

It's taken me a good many years to hear and trust that quiet voice of reassurance and hope. I'll tell you, I need to hear that voice and listen.

I don't know if anyone else in one of those discussion groups actually wrestled with inner fears, wondering if he or she might be children of the evil one, unconsciously planted to do damage to the saints; but I do know a lot of Christians find it much easier to believe they are condemned, rather than forgiven, wanted and loved by God. I meet people all the time who've spent their lives feeling guilty about every conceivable failing and weakness. They sometimes even apologize for being born - for taking up space in an overcrowded world. This particular vulnerability, the tendency to always find within themselves the root causes of failure and disappointment and trouble - this hopelessness, does not make life easy ... to say the least.

I felt this fear for a long time, in fact, I think I learned it as a child.

Just about fifty years ago, when the world was less politically correct and primary school teachers were just about permitted to use any means of discipline and torture their minds could dream up, I had the misfortune of being placed in Miss MacKenzie's Grade 4 class. Just her name alone, struck fear and terror into the hearts of Grade 3 graduates. Miss MacKenzie was tough and mean and ugly. She was about three hundred years old, and she ate bad, nine year old kids for breakfast.

Well, it may be hard for you to believe, but I was not a model student back in those days. I certainly can't remember doing anything to warrant punishment, but somehow or other, I ended up with my desk being pushed to the back of the class, and finding myself seated away from the other kids in the doorway to the cloakroom. I was sure Miss MacKenzie just had it in for me.

Well, one day at recess, I and some other kids discovered a wonderful ice slide on a little downhill slope in the playground. We weren't supposed to play on these little patches of ice, because of course they became more and more polished and more and more slippery, which was just exactly what we wanted, but not quite exactly what the school wanted to have happen. However, kids would inevitably have some kind of fall and get hurt, so the janitor would come out and put salt on these exciting little ice patches.

The really wimpy kids were even known to report the very existence of ice to one of the teachers on duty.

Well, we were having a great time on this ice ... and then I had my fall. I came running up at full speed to that patch of ice, put out my feet to go sliding along, and both feet went right out from under me in a classic "Charlie Brown" type spill. I landed with a "woomph", flat on my back on the ice.

I couldn't move ... I couldn't breathe, I turned my head to the side, just in time to see Miss MacKenzie bearing down on me like a tank.

As the sharp pang of realization swept through my brain: "Caught in a forbidden activity!" I knew I would never see age ten. I couldn't move. I couldn't even run to escape her clutches. I was like a fly caught in a web, with the voracious, ugly spider descending upon it.

Miss MacKenzie came on - moving fast. She bent over me. As I closed my eyes to shut out the awful reality of the world, I saw her reaching out her hand to grab me up by the earlobe and haul me into the office, where I'd get the strap.

But then unexpectedly, I felt her hand rubbing gently through my hair, and this almost unrecognizable, kind and soft voice saying to me, "Wesley, have you hurt yourself? Are you alright?"

I opened my eyes and couldn't believe what I saw. Miss MacKenzie was looking upon me with tender concern and care, her hand continuing to gently run through my hair in a comforting and soothing way. She even looked somehow younger and prettier ... maybe she was only like eighty instead of three hundred.

She helped me back up on my feet again and took me into the nurse's office. It was nothing worse than having had the wind knocked out of me, but the biggest difference was in the way I saw Miss MacKenzie.

Maybe she just didn't realize how her loud, public condemnations and her forbidding manner struck terror in the hearts of the small, innocent children she taught.

I realized Miss MacKenzie was quite nice after all.

Some of the statements Jesus made are very frightening. They were meant to be. He never pulled his punches or compromised the truth when something needed to be said.

But Jesus could also be so tender and forgiving with individuals who were conscious of their weaknesses, failures and sins. He still is, especially with worried people like you and me, wondering whether we fit into the category of weeds or wheat.

I'm quite sure when Jesus was here on earth in his physical body, there must have been many small, nervous people who would have tugged at the master's sleeve after one of those awesome speeches about hell-fire and gnashing of teeth.

"Err ... excuse me," they would have said, "I don't think I'm going to make it."

"Don't worry," Jesus might have replied through the side of his mouth. "I'll see you later. It's that lot I'm after."

And "that lot" were the hypocrites, the Pharisees, those who claimed to be getting everything right, the ones who placed impossible burdens on the shoulders of those same anxious people, who wanted to be good, but knew they weren't succeeding.

The Good News is, even though we're sinners, we can relax in the arms of God.

Sometimes it seems like such an uphill climb to become a better person, a better disciple, a more pure and virtuous follower of Christ. We have sins and weaknesses that hold us back and slow us down and we wonder if we'll ever make it.

What we need to remember at such times is this is precisely why Christ came. The Apostle Paul writes in Thessalonians, "For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him."

In Romans Paul says, "There is no one who is righteous, not even one" … and yet we can be useful to God, because we are loved and forgiven.

If we feel lousy about ourselves - guilty, worried and distraught, it’s difficult for us to receive God’s love or share it with others. We may end up acting out our own self-hatred and loathing. We'll avoid the church and worship because it reminds us, “You’re a failure.”

We'll drive away those who want to give us only love and kindness. We'll make victims out of those who are closest to us.

But there is no distinction, we all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. We are now justified by divine grace - by God’s forgiveness, as a gift of love. This is what faith and Christianity are about. I'm not a weed, I'm just a somewhat stunted and deformed wheat plant ... but one that God loves and nurtures and desires to see grow tall and straight.

We do not pray for the rigid justice of Christ, the dislike of God and the unfriendliness of the Holy Spirit to be with us all. Grace, love and friendship are the attributes of God that warm us and draw us together. God hates all sin because of how it pulls us away from God, and for how it sows seeds of fear, doubt and mistrust amongst God’s children. The law is the law ... but when it comes to the crunch, when we’re lying on the ice of our own failures, unable to get up, expecting condemnation, perhaps God kneels beside us, brushes the hair from our eyes, and says, “Are you hurt? Are you all right?”

For all of us worried little wheat plants, I'm certain God's just about as nice and kind, as good old Miss MacKenzie.