First preached as a sermon by
Canon Andrew Bishop at Guildford Cathedral Sunday 23 July, 2017, Sixth Sunday
after Trinity. Gospel text, Matthew 13.24-30, 36-43
‘Let anyone with ears listen’ Matthew 13.43
In nomine Patris…
The parables that Jesus told his
disciples and the crowds who followed him are multifaceted. On first hearing
they are deceptively simple, and certainly memorable. Many, but not all, have
an obvious and apparent meaning. But a second hearing, or reading, makes us
realise that there is a whole lot more to them. The parables become searing and
searching. If we are reading them faithfully, with attention and open to the
possibility that God will speak through them, we find that the parables read us
more than we read them.
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| Weeds in a field of wheat |
And we bring our own experience
and insights to the parables. If you spent the day in the garden weeding
yesterday, between the showers, or have it planned this afternoon, no doubt you
will be thinking practicalities and the merits of glysophate (for those not
horticulturally minded, it’s a weedkiller) or the hand trowel. But more than
that we start to be searched out by a parable like this. We might begin to
wonder what weeds need plucking out of our own lives; what are the weeds that
need plucking out of society?
This is a tough parable. Its
conclusion really flies in the face of what we might assume the gospel is all
about. Surely God does not want the destruction of anyone, be they virtuous wheat
or malevolent weeds; so what’s all the talk of furnaces of fire, weeping and
gnashing of teeth? Surely we moved on from all that after the Middle Ages? It
doesn’t feel the sort of modern message we might want to hear.
So do we leave it there, declare
that things have moved on a bit and conveniently ignore this parable? I suggest
not.
If we remember that the parable
reads us as much as we read it, it becomes frighteningly modern and prescient.
This is because the parable condemns judgmentalism and commends judgement.
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| Judgements need to be weighed carefully |
Judgement has got a bad name in
recent years. This happens when we mistake judgement for judgmentalism. Making
good judgements in our choices is fundamental to be responsible human beings in
society. Judgements are integral to justice, and in the gospels justice and
mercy go hand in hand. Mercy is not a soft option but is the partner of
judgement.
Our age is curiously
judgemental and not so good at making judgements. Social media firestorms rage
in the heaping up of judgements against other people; be they politicians,
celebrities, media figures or even, bizarrely, the judiciary. Demands for
instant solutions force and hurry poor judgements which results in poor
decisions. Judgmentalism evacuates mercy from justice.
In contemporary society very
often the word, ‘religious’ or at least ‘Christian’ is assumed to be synonymous
with ‘judgemental’. And it has been well earned. The church has often been
complicit in believing herself to be the judge, dispensing condemnations and
anathemas to those who step out of line.
The church has wanted to do the
weeding long before the harvest. This has led, quite literally sometimes, to
the burning of those people who dissent or fall outside the norms of the time
or those we choose to point the finger at, scapegoat and blame.
The point of the parable is
that the weeding, the judgement, is not our task. In the parable when the weeds
are uprooted the wheat will be uprooted along with it: put another way, the very act of us judging and seeking to
root out others corrupts us at the same time.
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| Marchela Dimitrova, “Jesus Christ, the Judge.” 2011 |
The parable resists our human
inclination to judge others, and indeed even to judge ourselves. How dare we?
How dare we, who proclaim in the Creed, ‘He will come again in glory to judge
the living and the dead’, seek to be judges ourselves? The judgement is
Christ’s not ours.
As individuals, the church and
as a society we all stand together under judgement. Here’s the challenge. How
can the church show not what it is to judge, but what it is to stand open to
judgement? In other words, to be penitential?
Remember: this parable is a
vision of the Kingdom of God, not a world controlled by the church. It is as
demanding for the wheat – the children of the kingdom – as it is for the weeds
– the children of the evil one. Yet we are impatient to start weeding,
trimming, tidying: for the children of the kingdom other gifts are required:
patience, faith and trust. The judgement is Christ’s.
This has a direct personal
implication and impact. As the children’s song goes, ‘Let there be peace on
earth, and let it begin with me’. We can change that to, ‘Let there be penitence
on earth and let it begin with me’.
The seeds of pernicious weeds
are usually pretty tiny, mobile and germinate easily. They take root quickly
and deeply. So it is with our own shortcomings– that ‘persistent buried grudge,
the half-acknowledged enmity which is still smouldering’ that envy or jealousy
– those things, once they root and take hold, become sin; they impair our
vision and sharing in the life of God.
At each Eucharist we open
ourselves up and speak words of confession and are assured that God’s judgement
is merciful and inclined to forgiveness. For some, and perhaps it should be for
more of us, the practice of confession one to one with a priest becomes a way
of digging deeper, not to diminish ourselves but to be filled with God’s mercy.
The priest does not judge, but the penitent says before God, I am open to judgement.
As a paraphrase of the last
verses of Psalm 139 put it:
Investigate
my life, O God,
find out everything about me;
Cross-examine
and test me,
get a clear picture of what I’m about;
See
for yourself whether I’ve done anything wrong—
then guide me on the road to eternal life.
And this moves beyond the
personal and into life together. What
then does it look like for the church to be open to judgement? It requires us
to re-position how we speak of the faith. So, rather than condemn, we commend.
It has been said that, ‘through
creative, repentant activity in public life, the church participates in God’s
healing transformation of the world.’ That is hard. It is also something that
will not be understood by the world.
We acknowledge that this has to
be spoken to ourselves as the church first so that we can speak it to the
world. An example might be how we speak of the ecological crisis and
sustainability. We need to retreat from sanctimony and confess the ways that
our use of scripture has led to domination and the exploitation of the world’s
resources. In end of life matters, we need to commend life and support all that
enriches life before we condemn those of a different position: we all stand
under judgement.
We cannot claim to be anything
other than fallible human beings, but fallible human beings entrusted with a
great treasure for and on behalf of the world.
The existence of the church is
the guarantee that Jesus Christ remains committed to the world for which he
died.
You and I are implicated in
that as disciples. The church tells the world that Jesus’ message is to the end
of the age. It is not about being superior, or judgmental, but rather, being
faithful to Christ in a world that does not know him, simply out of love for
that world and ‘all who dwell in it’.
So, the message is: forget the
weeding! It is not my job or your job, not the Archbishop of Canterbury’s, nor
even the Pope’s job, to make the kingdom neatly manicured or weeded, wielding
spiritual glysophate and religious hand trowels, with us judging what is a weed
and what is a flower. This is Christ’s ministry.
Let’s reject judgmentalism and
take judgement seriously. And may it start right here: in my heart and in
yours.
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| Roger Toulson (1946-2017) |
Dedicated in thanksgiving for the life of Roger Toulson, Lord Toulson, sometime Queen's Counsel, Lord Justice of Appeal, Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom: the least judgmental judge I know. May he rest in peace. Amen.
© Andrew Bishop, 2017
