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For earlier essays on this week's RCL texts, see Dan Clendenin, The Anxious Longing of Creation (2023); Debie Thomas, Let Them Grow Together (2020); and Dan Clendenin, In Heaven and On Earth (2008).

This Week's Essay

By Amy Frykholm, who writes the lectionary essay every week for JWJ.  

Genesis 28:16: “Surely the LORD is in this place—and I did not know it!"

Once again in this week’s lectionary, we have a parable and then its “explanation.” The word “explain” is an interesting one. From the Latin, it means literally “to flatten.” In this case to “explain” means to take a three-dimensional story and iron it out so that it becomes two-dimensional. When we do this, things become distorted. Once the parable is “explained,” in Matthew 13, it becomes less useful to us. Once we’ve assigned roles in the story to “children of the kingdom” and “children of the evil one,” once we’ve added “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” we don’t actually know what to listen for anymore. All I know how to think is, “Whew. Glad I’m not one of those bad people.”

When I read the explanation for the parable of the wheat and the chaff, I immediately thought of a day at the community meal at our church, where a longtime volunteer worried out loud to me that the meal was being overtaken by “bad people.” She said, “Pretty soon, the good people will stop coming.” I understood her fear. There are certainly people in my community that I don’t much want to have lunch with (and surely I am one of the good people, right?). Maybe these other people make me uncomfortable, maybe I’ve given them labels like liar or thief or addict. There are people who walk through the door and, if I’m honest, my heart sinks a little. They seem to seethe with conflict, to bring trouble in with them like a backpack. 

Did Jimmy hide drugs in the sanctuary? Did Harold take money from the donation box? Did Larry just say what I think he said? 

Vincent Van Gogh, Wheatfield with Sheaves (1888).

There was one man who did all of these things, and we tried everything we could to stop him, to reform him, to “fix” him, or at least to keep him away over the years. We talked with him, we argued with him, we removed him from the dining room, we called the police. We banned him from the meals for a time. During one particularly raucous period, we got a protection order against him. But none of that stopped him from coming. It’s not a particularly kind metaphor, but he was like a weed that kept growing back. 

One day I came into the meal on a Friday to cook. I opened the door and started the coffee. This man came in soon after, accompanied by an advocate who worked for the court system. The man had been injured by a fire at his camp in the woods. The fire had blown into his eyes, which were nearly swollen shut. The advocate told me that he’d refused to go to the hospital, but that he’d agreed to come to the church. He poured a cup of coffee and got a pastry, and the two of them sat together in the dining room. After an hour or so, he agreed to go to the hospital. “This is his home base,” the court advocate said. “He had to check in here first, and then he felt okay enough to go to the hospital.” 

After that, I started to understand his presence not as a nuisance, but as a necessity. I puzzled at the paradox that while he never felt particularly safe to me, I was part of his safety. I started to see our church through his eyes a little more, and I wondered how we could cultivate his sense of “home base,” instead of destroy it. I even started to appreciate his relentless return as a form of love that was hard for me to receive. 

The parable of the wheat and the chaff begins as all parables do: “The kingdom of heaven is like….” We are in the realm of “as if.” “As if” is a transformative place. It’s a place where things shape-shift and change. We can squint and see one thing and then squint again and see something completely different. And as we look through the lens of “as if,” we change even as the story changes. 

In the parable, a person sowed seed in a field. This seed was good. The best. But while everyone was asleep, someone else snuck in and sowed weeds among the good seed. When the plants came up, it was obvious to everyone that there were weeds mixed in with the good grain. 

Vincent Van Gogh, Arles View From the Wheatfields (1888).

The sower was defensive when the servants came to him and said, “Are you sure you sowed the good seed in the field? Because now there are a lot of weeds.”

“Of course I did,” the sower answered. “An enemy must have come and sown the bad seed.” Sure, right, there’s that enemy, who is always mixing the good seed and the bad seed. Not my fault, he says. But even so, he also acknowledges that consciousness and control have failed again — all this happens while “everyone is asleep” (Matthew 13:25). It might not be his fault, but the result is the same.

But now the servants wonder what they should do with this situation. The good wheat might be in danger. It might get choked out by the weeds. The whole crop is threatened, is it not?

The sower’s answer is a bit of a surprise. You might think he’d call for some careful weeding, for hours of painstaking work. Instead he says, “Let both of them grow together until the harvest” (Matthew 13:30). We might do more harm than good, he says, if we try to separate the good from the bad now. There will be plenty of time to sort it later. 

It does feel like this inside me. It feels like someone else planted all that bad stuff —the bad habits, the self-serving comments, the indifference to my neighbors’ suffering. That’s not me. I am good and generous and kind. But nonetheless, these weeds have grown up inside me, and as Maurice Blanchot puts it, I have a “distance between self and self.” I could — and I have — spent hours of painstaking work trying to separate out my good qualities from my bad qualities. But, as Nadia Boltz Weber says, “We are simultaneously sinner and saint, 100 percent of both, all the time.” 

In all the realms of my experience this quality remains: I can’t always distinguish good thoughts from bad thoughts. Good feelings from bad feelings. Good actions from bad actions. Even good weather from bad weather. Right now there’s a forest fire raging a few miles from my house, endangering my community in a multitude of ways. This same “bad” fire is bringing with it desperately needed renewal to the forests near my house. 

Vincent Van Gogh, Wheatfield, Arles Bouches du Rhone (1888).

And this also seems true in my community: I feel so confident in my ability to sort out the good people from the bad people. I have such strong feelings about it. But if I tried to pull them apart using my infinite wisdom, what would happen? I would, almost certainly, destroy the community itself — the place where we’ve all grown up together.   

The sower’s response reminds me of T.S. Eliot’s words in “The Four Quartets.” 

“For I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.”

It’s a contemplative call — to let forces greater than we are separate wheat from weed at a time not of our choosing. And meanwhile, the space between this life and “the harvest” is a space of waiting. The revelation that we “groan” for (Romans 8:22) is still a ways off. Maybe the explanation of the parable given in Matthew 13:36–43 is spot on, accurate in every way. Maybe it is a parable about the “children of the kingdom” and the “children of the evil one,” about reaper-angels and evildoers. But right here, from where I sit, my role is not to run around pulling weeds, but to wait, with patience, for the harvest.   

Weekly Prayer

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965)

I Said to My Soul, Be Still

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) was one of the most important poets of the 20th-century. In 1927 he converted from Unitarianism to Anglicanism, renounced his American citizenship and became a British citizen. In 1948 Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is commemorated with a large stone in the floor of the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. This excerpt is from his long poem The Four Quartets.

Amy Frykholm: amy@journeywithjesus.net

Image credits: (1) Artchive; (2) Artchive; and (3) Artchive.