Responses to this week’s gospel passage (Matthew 13:24-30,36-43) will cluster into two areas:
- How you feel
- What you think
So how one actually responds will likely depend on this basic filter.
This isn’t to say this filter is honest or even useful. But that we are addicted to binary thinking, so we make this about one or the other. Rather than, say, both.
Feel/Think
The parable Jesus tells this week is about tending (good) wheat and the (evil) weeds that are put in there to screw with us. The binary of good against evil puts us in a mind to break this up. And Jesus’s teaching, then, might drive us into crafting our own response to the evil that messes with us now.
We might take it a step further, then, in trying to determine what it is Jesus is going on about. Is he encouraging us to deal with how it feels to have this disruption? Or is this about thinking through it and coming up with the correct response?
Of course, the answer is “yes.” Which proves how useless the binary ultimately is.
Our approach matters…sort of
How we approach the passage, then, might not seem to matter. I mean, if they binary is bullocks, then why are we choosing?
But it is actually only bullocks in the end. Playing with feeling or rationality helps us get into the text. The problem is when we end without dealing with the other parts of it.
I’ve been in groups in which the response to this passage would be mostly about feeling. In those spaces we’d explore how it feels, and mostly the trouble of dealing with both evil itself and with doing nothing about the evil.
Where these groups would land, however, is in the wilderness of indecision. Or else in the comfort of platitude. It rarely remains in the challenge Jesus seems bent on getting us to feel in this: that we live with evil in our midst: so our feelings can’t receive comfort here.
I’ve also been in very head-based groups which parse out the rules, ethics, and logic of the teaching. These groups are really good at keeping the question “what do we do?” front and center.
I find that these groups can struggle connecting these elements of logic deeply into their experience of the world. Or more precisely, other people’s experience of the world.
There’s a way the thinking, devoid of feeling, means we can struggle to connect with how this would actually be. Especially in ways outside our own imagined world. [Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory is the quintessential practitioner of this.]
Something more than both
In my 20’s, I was often labeled as “living in my head” and needing to “engage my heart” more. This, I think, was how people registered my penchant for analyzing things more than an assessment of how I felt things.
The problem with this analysis of me is that it was a perception of me; or more precisely, of my assumed processing of the world. It was not actually reflective of what “engaging my heart” is actually about.
In essence, life itself involves thinking and feeling. And their assessment was their engagement with the finished product of my internal engagement. In other words, they were using their heads to evaluate a process they assumed was dominated by my head.
But how we think and feel are intertwined. The false division of head from heart is the real villainy of binary thinking.
We often code problem-solving as “head” work because (we think) feelings are bad at it. Except when feelings of righteousness are involved, then suddenly our hearts are experts.
We also often code connecting with people as “heart” work because we treat social engagement (ie. different levels of intimacy) as feeling work. This utterly discounts the way people engage with art, debate, movies and even book clubs through modes of analysis and logic.
Consider all of this preamble to these two elementary questions:
What do we do?
And how should we feel?
It’s quite telling how easily the preamble becomes the point, isn’t it? How many words are spilled trying to explain the futility of systemic division when it does little to marshal us forward. And that, somehow, this explanation is itself futile in marshaling us forward.
I’d like to think that this is the proof of the argument itself. And that the means of our engagement with the argument will reflect our own bias toward the binary. That we’ll feel compelled to pick a side (Team Head or Team Heart). Or we’ll feel compelled to argue with the assumption this is based on.
All of this may feel like avoidance…rather than the work itself.
The parable invites us to wrestle with impossibility. With rightness that can’t be proven and wrongness that can’t be expunged. We are tasked with knowing the difference and being powerless to change some of it.
In a sense, this is a parable about times when there is nothing for us to do. We just feel. And know.
Other times
The beauty of parables is that they are situational. We should contrast this with the simple idea of their being universal.
So when Jesus tells a parable about weeds among the wheat, we’re being taught about something we can do nothing about. Which deeply contrasts with the great deal of stuff we can.
We might, then, attempt to summarize a whole lot of life into good and evil; changeable and unchangeable.
But the more earnest and human response to this passage is also quite simple.
I can’t expect to change the person next to me. And I certainly don’t get to decide whether or not they are good or evil. But I can change the way the world treats them. And to that, Jesus gives us clear direction: love, mercy, and generosity.