Artery of Darkness

Propers: The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 16), A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Last week we heard Jesus’ Parable of the Sower, in which a sower sows seed upon both good soil and rocky ground. Today we have Jesus’ other Parable of the Sower, in which a sower sows good seed into his garden, only to have an enemy come by night and scatter weeds amongst the grain. When the seeds sprout, the servants find weeds amongst the crop, tares amongst the wheat. And the householder—the sower—sees what his enemy has done, yet instructs his servants not to separate the tares from the wheat until the harvest, lest violence be done to his intended crop.

And the explanation for this parable given in the text remains fairly straightforward, even if the implications for our lives do not. The one who sows the seed is Christ Himself, the Son of Man; the field is the world, and the good seed represents the children of God’s Kingdom. The enemy is the devil, the weeds his children. And the harvest is the end of the age, when the angels shall reap the wheat and cast the tares into a furnace of fire.

This reveals to us something of the nature of evil. God does not sow both good seed and bad; evil is not a thing created by our Creator. Rather, evil is something introduced afterward, out of jealousy, spite, or sadism pure and simple. It is telling, I think, that wickedness is represented by weeds—weeds being, of course, not a specific genus or phylum of plant, but rather good plants that are simply out of place. What makes a weed a weed is that you don’t want it where it is. The devil cannot create something new; he does not have that power. He can only corrupt and disorder what was initially made good by God.

Now, there is a term one often hears in the news, “Manichaeism.” And Manichaeism is shorthand for a dualistic worldview that separates mankind, and indeed all of Creation, into two opposing camps. There are the children of light, and the children of darkness: the former all good and the latter all bad. You may be familiar with the phrase, “All things are pure for the pure.” It’s the same idea. The children of light can do no wrong, and are justified in using whatever methods necessary to defeat the children of darkness. The ends justify the means.

Whenever the world is split into two antagonistic and diametrically opposed camps; whenever opponents are demonized and allies whitewashed; whenever people commit horrors for the supposed sake of the greater good; there hell reigns. Manichaeism always carries within it the implicit justification for holy war—and not simply a just war, a defensive war, but a war of annihilation, of extermination, of genocide in the name of God or the proletariat or the master race or democracy or whatever you worship as the light amongst the dark.

We must not read Jesus’ parable in this way. We must not convince ourselves that there are two sorts of people, one all fruitful and all good, the other utterly unwanted and worthless, fit only to be burned. That is not the Gospel.

You know, it’s funny. Growing up as a child in the eighties, the great Big Bad, the villains of every book and film and television series, were always the Communists, always the Russians. I remember the Cold War very clearly, the superpower struggle, the atomic bomb drills. We knew as kids that someday soon the world would come to its fiery end, a secular apocalypse, and it would all be because of those godless Russians. We had to hit them hard before they could hit at us! It was us or them! Nuke ‘em!

Yet now, as a man, I cannot read the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares without hearing the voice of a Russian in my head: the great Christian author Solzhenitsyn, who knew that the true enemy was never without but within.

“If only it were all so simple!” he wrote. “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

The seeds sown in the God’s garden, the tares amongst the wheat, are not people but lies, wickedness, sin. Christ calls the devil the father of lies, and these seeds He calls his children. There are not two species of human being, one good and one evil, but wheat and tares are sown together in every human heart. And that, I think, is why God does not simply tear them out. We are not ready for such violent love. We would not experience it as liberation, as life, but as pain—as the death of who we think we are. For we love our lies, do we not? We love that artery of darkness that marbles through our heart.

Yet it is a great comfort to me that in the fullness of time Christ shall pull out of me all causes of sin and all evildoers. He will reach into the deepest part of who and what I am and He shall uproot the sickness, the darkness, the cancer of my soul. He will cast out of me all that I should not be and throw it into the furnace to weep and gnash its teeth. And the grain of me—the fruitful seed of who I shall become and was meant to be all along—that He will gather and glorify and grow.

I am a garden full of weeds, dear Christians. Yet Christ claims me for His own. He loves me, as He loves all His children, all His Creation. He tends and guards and waters me; He toils and sweats and bleeds for me. For He sees me not as I am—not as any of us are!—but as we shall become when the harvest comes in full. Then He shall send out His angels to gather us home, and the fires of His furnace shall burn up, in the intensity of His love, all the things within us we were never meant to be! And we shall shine like the sun in the Kingdom of our Father.

Let anyone with ears listen.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.