Jesus tells this cool story. It’s about a landowner who has this huge field of wheat. One night some ‘enemy’ comes in and plants weeds among all the wheat [maybe the same guys that make all those crop circles and blame it on aliens and then Mel Gibson stars in a movie about it]. So, as you can imagine, soon enough everybody realizes that the wheat is polluted with these weeds. Now the servants, as dutiful and helpful as they can be, offer to go into the field and pluck up every last one of the weeds; but the landowner is like, “No way! Don’t go butchering up my field! You’ll pull all the good stuff up with the weeds and then my crop will really be a trainwreck! Wait ‘til the reapers [not to be confused with Mr. Grim] get here cuz they know a lot more about this stuff than you do.”
I think about this story, a parable as it is often called, a lot because here’s the thing… I think I’m a pretty good servant. I mean, honestly, when it comes to serving steak fries, bottomless beverages, and God I don’t think I’m all that shabby. Of course everybody needs improvement; but I try hard, and I believe that God appreciates the effort of my heart above all else.
But sometimes I get confused, ya know? Sometimes, in the midst of my dutiful servant hood, I forget my place. I get overly helpful. I jump the gun for God. For instance, sometimes I look out across this big field of a world, go ahead and size up the people I meet, and mentally categorize them as ‘wheat’ or ‘weed’. I would say the majority of this is unconscious, and I would also say it’s the ‘judging’ aspect of life that Jesus warns so harshly against. “Do not judge lest you be judged… Pull the plank out of your own eye before you pluck the speck out of your brother’s [or sister’s or cousin’s or annoying co-workers’] eye.”
I don’t really know when ‘judging others’ began; though I would venture to guess it was around the time that these living beings with opposable thumbs called ‘humans’ started roaming the earth in the middle of a very pretty garden. Ever since then, it’s been hard to remember that we’re not the reapers – we’re not the ones to decide the good from the bad, the clean from the unclean, the salvageable from the lost cause. We, not just people who claim to follow Jesus’ teachings but the entire human race, are not the ones who get to decide how good, or successful, or worthy, or ‘saved’ somebody is – though we try. Good thing, because imagine how embarrassed we would be when we throw out all these ‘weeds’ and our Landowner is like, “Um, put down my wheat, dude. I love that wheat and here you are just casting it aside like it’s worthless.”
I worked at a restaurant several years ago with this guy I’ll call Jeff. Jeff would bring in weed magazines. Not magazines about horticulture. Magazines about marijuana i.e. weed, pot, mary jane, or whatever you young kids call it these days. Jeff loved weed and, in a lot of ways in my opinion, Jeff WAS one. Jeff was a frustrating, lazy, high-all-the-time, unreliable weed to me – a weed whose motto was, “God created weed. God called everything ‘good’. Therefore, weed is good.” [Thank you, Logic. God called poison ivy ‘good’ as well. “Good for what purpose?” should be the question.]
One day Jeff said that he had started reading the bible while he was high – turned to page one and started reading. Soon enough, three other guys at work started going over to Jeff’s house to get high… and read the bible. They would come in with the craziest, most fabulous questions about Abraham and Genesis and parts of the Bible I hadn’t heard since I was in second grade Sunday school. Most bizarre bible study I had ever heard, but it worked for them and it made an impact in the strangest of all ways. I misjudged Jeff. Actually, I judged Jeff and I now believe that all judging is misjudging. I looked at him as a weed when God was growing things in him, and in others around him, all along.
We don’t know who the weeds are. We aren’t the judges. It’s not our job. It is our job to never dismiss anyone. It is our job to love what the world calls ‘unloveable’, because everyone matters. We are called to be ‘servants’ who equip ourselves with the best seeds - seeds of mercy and forgiveness and scandalous grace and crazy love. We are called to be ‘servants’, which means it is our job to simply plant the seeds. Just plant them, maybe water them when you can. God makes them grow. You never know what your seeds are doing, or how long it takes them to grow – but they grow.
We serve a God that says, “I am working in people, in places, that you would never fathom. Places that you would never dare to tread. You just plant those seeds wherever you find yourself - a restaurant, your workplace, a sick person's house, the middle of a war zone, the side of the road.” Seeds can be planted there. I am convinced that one of the ways we could make this world a whole lot better is if we’d look at everyone like they were good wheat and not worry about the rest. Because the truth is that God is the only judge there is, and I think all of us will be mighty surprised at God’s verdict when the time comes.
May we be impartial, without favoritism, prejudice, or dissension - just like the Creator of us all. And may we recognize that we serve a God who, from the beginning of the world, called all things 'good'.
