You've all had dandelions, right? Sure you have. It's a national epidemic, which is funny, because ultimately, the crazy thing about dandelions is the following: They're useful, you can eat them, you can use them to make soda pop and wine, you can use them in herbal remedies, and all that tut. And the craziest thing about all of that, is that they just grow wild. You don't have to put in any extra effort to grow them at all, in fact less so. Imagine if your garden suddenly and spontaneously grew up into lettuce as far as the eye could see, and if you were doing nothing but dealing with your spontaneous lettuce crop, wouldn't that be great? To have your yard paved with lettuce?
Ah, perhaps not. As my father (who is a biologist) said, the only difference between weeds and herbs is that you don't have to work to get weeds. Though dandelions may be useful and delicious (not to mention trendy right now), because we don't have to work for them, they hold no value whatsoever.
Contrast that with grass which is tough to grow, fickle, and has no use other than looking green. And it's not easy being green. There is no value to grass at all, which is why so many people are embracing xeriscaping, as a way of cutting down on water usage and all that. But honestly, we should probably all consider just letting our lawns grow into wild dandelions, and solve the hunger problem that way. Or at least make trendier salads.
But here's the juice about weeds: While they're growing, if they're growing next to things you want to keep, you may have a devil of a time getting your growth done right. For you see, the traditional way of dealing with weeds is to uproot them. And you know that if you just pinch off the flowers of a dandelion, it'll be back in minutes. You have to kill it right at the root, pull it up from where it grows and exterminate it that way. Righty ho, simple enough. So you get down there with a trowel, and carve out the weed, but in the process of doing so, you carve out a heck of a divot in your grass as well. And here's the problem. If you carve out a divot out of your lawn to get the weed out, you'll carve up the grass as well. It's unavoidable. You'll realize that grass roots, though
The roots of dandelions go down deep, sometimes down to about a foot. A foot of horrible taproot designed to use the moisture your grass wants to use, and make that dandelion into a big muscly plant full of white seeds. And if you pull it up, if that taproot is left, it'll send up another flower to replace that fallen soldier, leading you to feel like Hercules fighting the hydra. You chop off heads only to have more heads grow back. Just awful.
And this is where the story of the wheat and the weeds really goes into overdrive. For you see, the story traditionally leads us to the understanding of the field in which we say 'how long, O Lord, must
we wait for this harvest to happen? How long must we wait to be avenged?' We end up thinking a lot along the lines that lead us to Christian fatalism, in which we sit and we wait for God to do things on our behalf. We wait for God to avenge us, we wait for God to bring an end to all things so that the weeds will no longer be troublesome for us. When you hear messages out there about places of Christian persecution and unrest, when you see unfairness and murder and turmoil, you're always tempted to ask God to reach in and put a stop to history, and undo what has been done. Because we feel that we are living in the last generation, we must be! Things can't possibly get worse than this! There are wars and rumors of wars, there are murders, there is widespread unrest, earthquakes and famines, fire and pestilence, and culture is falling apart all the time. And so we sit, and we say 'how long, O Lord, must we wait?' But the Bible doesn't give us that message at all.
The Bible doesn't tell us that God is going to sweep into history every five seconds and purge all the evil people in the world. The Bible tells us instead that we will be given the strength to endure the things that are to come. Because we still have work to do.
Never forget that grain is seeds. And whenever the Bible talks about bearing fruit as good and positive fruit trees, that fruit exists for only one reason: To make more plants. Every single fruit that exists exists to be eaten, and for its seeds to be dropped further afield, that there may be more plants growing up from that same stock. That's what grains and seeds are all about! They exist to propagate their own.
Why do you think that Jesus has held off on his return until now? Although every generation has believed, sincerely believed, that they're the final generation on earth, they've all been wrong. The imminent return of Jesus coupled with his less than present return has given us a couple of things. It has given us both time to work, and an urgency with which to do that work. It's a crazy thing, in which every generation ought to behave as though they were the last, which ends up making them not lazier, but more enthusiastic. If you think you've got more time, then you are way more likely to slack off. If you are convinced that time is running out, then you get to work a lot quicker.
So then, the parable of the wheat and the weeds has immense importance to us here and now. No matter how close armageddon is to us, it's closer than it was to those who were living at the time of Jesus. And yet they treated the apocalypse as though it was imminent, living as though the harvest may happen at any time. That same urgency didn't lull them into complacency, didn't fool them into thinking that God was going to fix everything and they could slack off and wait, rather it spurred them into greater action always, knowing that if they were to take their foot of the metaphorical gas pedal, it would be too late to do anything. The night is coming soon, when no one can work. So what to take away from all this? Quite simple, really. Remember what fruit is for. Remember what grain is for. If you are good grain, if you are producing good fruit, your whole purpose is to make more like yourself. Your purpose is not to hunker down and wait for the harvest. You are to produce fruit in keeping with repentance, to produce good fruit that reproduces. To be grain that is itself seeds, to make more of what you are. If you are planted amongst the weeds, then you have a singular chance to bear fruit, to bear seeds, while you wait for the inevitable harvest to crowd out the weeds and to make more grain, more fruit trees, to cease the Christian fatalism that waits for and anticipates the end of the world, and instead gives thanks to God that he has extended the harvest thus far, and has given our nascent trees a chance to bear fruit, and to do the work required in his kingdom.
Blessed week as we wait for the harvest.
PJ.
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