For Sunday
Proper 11A
Collect
Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, you know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask; through the worthiness of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
Jesus offers a second teaching about seeds and soil that might remind us of the one we read last week. But Jesus takes this one in a completely different direction.
While the former spoke about the hospitality of the soil and the conditions which inspire growth, now Jesus is talking about good seeds and bad seeds and not worrying about which is which! And while I think we follow the transition, we might do so without reckoning with the inherent conflict of the two teachings.
The former feels like a good self-help lesson about preparing to be a better host and this one is similarly recognizable: don’t be so judgey with other people. This is a lesson we like a lot more in the abstract than in the particular.
One of the conflicts we have with this passage, however, is dealing with how much the rest of scripture encourages us to identify the bad in our midst—in ourselves and our communities—and to turn away from it, end it, or get rid of it. But here, Jesus is saying that we are to leave it alone and let God deal with it in the end. Again, this makes sense to us by half, and the other half conflicts. Perhaps.
This teaching also reminds me of enduring and striving, of existing in a world in which good and bad is all mixed together. And all we have to go on is that God can tell the difference, God has told us the difference, and we are called to live that different way anyway. Which, if we’re being honest, only makes sense if we’re surrounded by weeds which look like good, healthy, grain-bearing plants.