Jesus put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. 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.’” He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”
I think it is easy for us to misunderstand the message in the parables of Jesus in today’s Gospel. Part of that may come from most of us in Newmarket not having had much experience growing wheat. Even so, most of us get the point of the parable … that the kingdom of heaven is like a tiny seed – yet a seed that is so strong, that even if there are weeds everywhere overwhelming it,and you don’t see anything growing, don’t worry about the weeds, leave them there. That seed will be so strong, there will be huge plants in the end, everything is going to work out.
I suspect that deep down, many of us have trouble believing the parable. Because mostly what we see in this world is that the weeds are pretty powerful. This is a world where evil seems to win too much of the time, where the people with the most money and the most clout pretty much get what they want.
We are all tempted at times to feel that way, and when we are, Jesus points out to us that when confronted with weeds, with things we see as wrong, confronted with people we think are choking off what God wants, our instinct is to focus on them, and think that it is our job to decide what a weed is and then root them out. Because it can be very satisfying to decide we’re the ones who are meant to do that, it gives us plenty to do and be angry about. But it turns out that figuring out what’s a weed and what isn’t, is, in the end, God’s job. Not ours.
Our job is to be the seed, the small sign of love or courage or just a simple act of generosity that looks like it might not grow into anything. Our job is the embrace of someone who fails again and again, it’s the money given to a person on the street who looks like a losing investment, it’s the hospitality offered to one refugee among millions, it’s the welcome given to someone that other communities don’t seem to want, It’s the job given to someone who can’t get a break, It’s the one letter written in support of people who don’t have a voice.
All these little things we can do to try to make the world more just and generous, well, they can seem like the equivalent of a seed that will be overwhelmed by the size of what it is up against; It doesn’t seem like any one of them is going to turn the world around.
But it turns out we’re not here to turn the world around. We are here to build a new world in the midst of the old one. Because these parables describing the kingdom of Heaven are not telling us how things will work in heaven, at some other place and time when everything is perfection and people are somehow better people, acting heavenly.
The kingdom of heaven is the way we can live in the world now, It is the way we build a new world in the midst of the old one. It is the way we build a new world with entirely different rules in place about what is important and what isn’t, what is powerful and what isn’t. Because the kingdom of heaven is where the poor count more than the powerful, where you have to give things away as fast as you get them, where love guides what we decide about everything.
That kingdom isn’t built by tearing anything down, by pulling out weed; That kingdom isn’t built by any kind of self-righteous anger. It’s built by planting seeds, and believing in the work. It is built by believing that a little yeast turns flour into quantities of bread; It is built by believing that every seed ends up as a tree. It is built by showing patience, having hope, believing in grace, and not sitting back because the odds are too much against the good you might be inspired by God to do. The kingdom is built by believing that love is never wasted, and despite the way things look, the seeds planted for the kingdom always win.