“The kingdom of God may be likened to a man who sowed good seed in his field. While everyone was asleep, his enemy came and sowed weeds all through the wheat…The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed…the smallest of all the seeds, yet when full-grown it is the largest of plants…The kingdom of God is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until the whole mass of dough began to rise.” Matthew 13, 24-43
This is the second Sunday in a row in which we have a parable from Jesus with illustrations from seed-crop cultivation and harvesting. Tacked on are two very short parables in which the kingdom of God is likened to the proliferation of mustard seed and the expansion of yeast in bread-making. Ultimately, all three parables are about the coming of the kingdom of God and the existence of good and evil in people and their attitudes, as we all long, knowingly and unknowingly, for the coming of the kingdom of God in which all will experience the freedom and liberty of which Paul speaks in last Sunday’s second reading and in which the values of God’s kingdom such as compassion, justice, mercy, forgiveness and care for the destitute, widows and orphans will be preeminent.
While today’s first parable paints as evil the crop-sower’s enemy and the weed seeds he sowed under the cover of darkness, we hear the crop-sower directing his servants to avoid their rush to set to work trying to dig out the sprouting weeds, lest they end up ruining the entire grain crop. The message for us is to be patient with and slow to judge all those unpleasant people beside whom we live and work every day. There is also a suggestion that we ourselves are not uncontaminated. There may well be weeds in us. And that might lead us into reflecting on what exactly it might be that leads us into labelling some plants as weeds. For instance, the dandy lion is widely regarded as a weed, yet the yellow petals of its flower are used to produce dandy lion wine. The purple-flowered, thorny thistle is the national flower of Scotland because it is a symbol of Scottish people’s resilience. Stripped of its thorns, this “weed” is edible when cooked and is a rich source of calcium and potassium. Its stalks taste like celery and its roots like parsnips.
When we stop and observe people who have a passion for weeding, in the garden or in the affairs of State and/or Church, we find they are often those who think they understand just how things should be. The “weeds” are what they believe upset God’s view of a properly ordered world. They seem to allow little room for diversity. In churches, they are the self-appointed religious perfectionists and guardians of what they regard as the correct ritual, music and liturgy. They are the equivalent of the stereotypical Pharisees of Jesus’ time. For them, listening to variant views is risking contagion and having contact with those whom they consider to be “weeds” will be sure to erode their virtue.
To the stereotypical Pharisees of his time, Jesus was anathema, for no other reason than that he engaged with tax-collectors, shared meals with “sinners”, set aside strict observance of law to reach out to the blind, the deaf, the crippled and the untouchable and even to allow his disciples to pluck and eat corn and other grain from plants on the Sabbath. As a way of introducing a dose of humour into conveying his message through today’s parable, he added the ludicrous example of a farmer deliberately planting a mustard seed, the seed of a plant which every farmer regarded as a noxious weed which propagated uncontrollably.
By introducing the example of the mustard-seed plant, was Jesus suggesting that the kingdom of God he was ushering in would flourish as prolifically as a plant categorised as a weed? Or might he have been doing no more than asking his audience (and us) to reconsider our haste in categorising some of the people we encounter as weeds to be avoided, discarded and uprooted?
It is important for us to be mindful of the fact that parables are a literary form used to teach a lesson by analogy. They are not vehicles of dogma. So, they also invite us to consider the possibility of exceptions. The political world in which we live is fraught with prejudicial views and opinions that reflect a level of injustice about which we cannot be silent or patient. In some of the countries in which readers of this weekly reflection live, racial prejudice thrives. Moreover, there are political figures who advocate for the exclusion of immigrants and refugees to whom they attach the label of “alien”. Such racism calls for immediate challenge because of its grave injustice. It is not a mere weed beside which Jesus would expect us to live patiently.
Jesus surely urges us to be patient with the difficult people beside and among whom we live, if for no other reason than to give us time and space to discover that we, too, are difficult and sinful. Eventually, we might realise that we are in need of the mercy of the God described in today’s First Reading from Wisdom: “There is no God other than you…you are mild in judgement, you govern us with great lenience…you have taught us a lesson in being kindly to others.”(Wisdom 12: 16-19)
One other element of this parable worthy of our notice is the fact that Matthew has attributed to Jesus an end-time, extremely vengeful call to account. This cannot be reconciled with his call to patience and tolerance in the early section of his parable. We can only attribute it to an editorial addition from Matthew, who had to deal with members of the Jewish community who had resorted to violence to discourage people who had given their allegiance to Jesus and his message. Matthew also had to give his attention to discouraging members of his community from fighting fire with fire. In doing so, he was carried away by his own desire to quell those followers of Jesus who had set out to even the score with those who had mistreated them. There is no evidence in the early part of this parable or in Matthew’s Gospel elsewhere that Jesus directed threats of violence to anyone who disagreed with him. Moreover, it is of no help to us to be told in one breath that God is full of tolerance and patience and, in the next, to learn that God has no patience and is even vengeful.
Finally, a brief word about the parables of the mustard and the yeast. At one level Jesus’ reference to planting a mustard seed was clearly a joke. No farmer in his audience would even think of such an action. However, he was pointing out that the kingdom of God would eventually flourish extravagantly, like mustard seed. He was also alluding to the fact that many in his audience would have regarded the kingdom of God about which he was teaching as something of a scourge. As for the parable of the yeast, any woman who used as much as 30 or even 50 pounds of flour to make bread would have needed to add an enormous amount of yeast. The result would have been enough bread to feed a whole village. Jesus was saying that the kingdom of God would grow like the yeast and nourish the lives of countless people.