Wheat and Weeds

            The story of Jacob’s ladder is a story of grace.  Jacob was a very bad man, he conned his brother, his father, his erstwhile father-in-law, and really thought nothing of it.  Yet, here he is sleeping out in the open with a stone for a pillow and he has a dream of a ladder reaching to heaven and God on the top of it telling Jacob that he will be the father of many nations and that God will be with him wherever he goes.  This God does, despite all of the nasty things that Jacob has done.

            The reason that I love this story is because it the story of all of us and it is a good background for Jesus’ parable of the good seed sown in the field and the weeds that spring up among the good plants.  Like all of us, the farmer’s servants want to go and destroy the weeds, but the farmer says:

                         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.  

            If that isn’t a perfect description of the state of the world, I have never heard one.  When I look at the Middle East, or at the Ukraine; or at the children struggling to come into this country across the Mexican border, I know that I am looking at a collection of wheat and weeds and I mostly have a hard time separating the one from the other.  Our politicians try to tell us to gather the weeds and then they identify them for us.  This always takes the form of political ideology and doesn’t help very much.  We are tempted to use our military force or our money or something else to remedy what we see as the problem, but we don’t understand that the wheat and the weeds are growing together and in getting rid of the weeds, we will also uproot some of the wheat.  Jesus is trying to help his followers to understand that we live in a world where the weeds and the wheat are tightly entwined; just like the evil and the goodness in our lives.  When we try too hard to uproot the weeds, we also will destroy a lot of what is good.

            It seems to me that we need to work hard to understand the circumstances that face us in this world, and try to see that sometimes what we think are weeds are really wheat that is trying to grow.  The quick solutions that are often proposed to “fix” the world are generally self-serving and don’t fix much of anything except our own desires.  Jesus is telling his followers to sit a little looser to the problems that we see and to offer them in prayer to our God that like Jacob and his many faults, the goodness of God may be allowed to shine through, despite the presence of what seems to be so obviously wrong.  

            I have been to the Middle East and have heard the cries of both Israelis and Palestinians and I don’t think that either side is free of fault.  They continue to struggle and to blame and to say that they want peace, but yet do very little to bring it about.  A two state solution may be desirable for many people in the world, but neither side in that dispute seems to want it enough to allow it to happen.  In God’s time, the wheat will be separated from the weeds and goodness will prevail.  In the meantime, we need to work to see that justice is done in these places as best we can, hopefully without ruining the harvest that God wants so desperately to happen.