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| Aleksey Savrasov, Rye (1881) |
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The Tree of Life is a strange and beautiful movie by Terrence Malick. Perhaps you’ve seen it. The film revolves around the life of Jack O’Brien and his relationship with his brother and parents. It surrounds this family drama with epic scenes: the creation of the world, gestation and birth—even dinosaurs and the Reunion Tower. Most scenes, though, are intimate flashbacks to Jack’s childhood in a 1950s Texas town. In an important sequence, Jack as a twelve-year old boy is swimming with a group of boys on a beautiful summer afternoon. Everything is sunshine and smiles. Then tragedy: a boy floats facedown in the water. Men dive in. Try to resuscitate the boy. Fail. Jack is right there The scene shifts and Jack’s family is coming out of a church in funeral clothes. The boys are silent but turn summersaults in the graveyard. The scene shifts again and Jack is playing with friends. There’s laughter. But in a whispered voiceover, we hear what’s on Jack’s mind. He’s crying out to God: “Where were you? You let a boy die. You let anything happen.”
If you are like me, you’ve whispered similar protests to God. “Where were you? You let anything happen. You let good people suffer. You let injustice unchecked. You let the Holocaust happen. You let Hiroshima happen. You let my grandfather’s mind get eaten by Alzheimer’s. You let my friend lose his job. You let me get cancer. You let...You let…You let...”
We protest because we believe God is good and able to set things right, but things continue all wrong and we don’t understand why he doesn’t just step in and fix it.
The parable in today’s Gospel lesson raises precisely this problem: Why does God seem to let anything happen? You know the story: a man sows good seed into his field, but his enemy comes and sows weeds among the wheat. The poisonous weeds grow up alongside the wheat, and their root systems become intertwined. When the man’s servants see the weeds, they want to pull them up right away. But he refuses! He doesn’t want to risk rooting up the wheat along with them. “Let them both grow together until the harvest,” he says, “and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn” (Mt. 13:36).
As Jesus explains to his disciples, the man in the story signifies himself, the Son of Man who sows the good seed, the good news of the kingdom, in the world. The weeds signify the devastation born of the lies sown by the Enemy, the sin and evil that corrupt the goodness of creation. The wheat is the people of God, the precious crop the Lord of the harvest waits to gather into his barn. The weeds are destined for the fire, but the righteous for the glory of the Kingdom of God.
“Everything will turn out alright in the end,” Jesus seems to be saying, “you just have to be patient.”
But this doesn’t answer our question: Why does God wait to pull up the weeds? Sure, it’s nice to hear that God cares about the wheat and will bring it into his barn and all, but I’m stuck here in the field with all these weeds around me! How does this help me bear living in the here and now? Where death threatens to tear my loves from me, where the devil and the world’s pomp beset me, where there’s never enough to satisfy my desires, where I walk “by faith, not by sight,” where the whole creation groans. “How does the hope of “the life of the world to come” help me endure all this suffering and evil?”, we ask. My spouse is dying, and I’m worried about finances, and there are school shootings, and Syria’s falling apart, and it may come out alright in the end, but someone’s got to do something before everything goes to hell!
So we set about trying to fix things ourselves. We’re self-reliant Americans after all. And a lot of the time this strategy seems to work pretty well: We train better lifeguards, and fewer boys drown; we develop new medical technologies, and life expectancy increases; we get tough, and crime decreases; we reform education, and test scores improve.
But then there are the times this strategy doesn’t work out so well. Often even our best efforts have negative unintended consequences, and our impatience leads to disaster. We seek justice, but put an innocent man on death row. We want to prolong the life of our loved ones, but pump them full of medicines until they’re numb and place them in institutions where they die alone under fluorescent lights. We work hard to provide for our families, but our marriages fall apart. We try to reform the church, but end up sowing division. We respect the dignity of every human being, but neglect the worship of God. We seek to do good, but evil results. All we wanted was to pull up the weeds, but we’ve uprooted the wheat as well. We were not able adequately to disentangle the roots.
And that’s the rub, isn’t it? The root systems go deep, deep down: both wheat and weeds grow together in our hearts. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn puts it powerfully in The Gulag Archipelago: “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.” [2] Solzhenitsyn continues, “This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an uprooted small corner of evil.” [2]
That the line between good and evil passes right through my heart helps me see the Lord’s delay in rooting out evil as good news. If it were otherwise, a considerable portion of my heart might cling like clods of dirts to the roots of the weeds he pulls out. As it is, waiting for his coming leaves room for repentance. Our Lord is coming to judge the quick and the dead, and if he does “let anything happen” in the interim, it begins to seem like kindness and mercy and patience towards me, rather than negligence. St. Peter confirms this when he writes, “The Lord is not slow about his promise as some count slowness, but is forbearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Pt. 3:9). The Lord forbears for our own good. Even in our own hearts, “he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Mt. 5:45).
Knowing God forbears also with the evil in my own heart does help me endure life in the field. Yet if we had just this parable to go on, we might think that God is standing somewhere off at the edge of the field, at a remove from the sufferings of our lives. Thankfully, though, we know God not as a bystander to our lives, but as involved with us and for us. He has made us, and we are his. He cares for us. He plants his people Israel; he stoops to tend their soil. He prunes old branches and grafts in new. And in Jesus, he has rooted himself in our field. Jesus is God-with-us. He is both farmer and plant—the root of Jesse, the true vine. He knows what it is to grow up alongside weeds, because “he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isa. 53:4), endured hostility and suffering and the cross. He is the grain of wheat that has fallen into the earth, so that it might bear much fruit (cf. Jn. 12:24). Risen from the dead, he is “the first fruits” (1 Cor. 15:20) of the great wheat harvest of the Resurrection.
This is the best news: in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has already acted decisively to set things right. He is making all things new. He is the one who will establish his reign of justice and peace, who will relegate “all causes of sin” and all evil (Mt. 13:41) to the past; who will swallow up death forever.
Because his redemption is sure, we can live in the joyful hope of the Resurrection. Because God has won the victory, we can live without defense. Because God is in control, we can live without needing to take control. We do not need—indeed, are not able—to fix the devastation of the world. All we need do is be faithful to God. [3]
And God is able to use our simple faithfulness in his care for the world. Indeed, our faithfulness, our fortitude in the face of evil, is itself a sign of God’s renewal of creation. “The truest fortitude,” says John Milton, is patience. The truest fortitude is not allowing wrongs suffered for the sake of the good to turn us from following Christ. This fortitude, this patience, is the fruit of the Holy Spirit. That is, its presence is a sign that the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is at work in our lives. Patience is a foretaste of the peaceable Kingdom. Our patient faithfulness anticipates the glory we will have in the Resurrection, when we shall forever “behold the fair beauty of the Lord” (Ps. 27:4) and “be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 Jn. 3:2).
God is able to use our faithfulness in his renewal of the world. Therefore, we can live joyfully in the midst of the sufferings of this present time. I can’t say it any better than St. Paul: “we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us” (Rom. 5:3–5).
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[1] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, Part I, Chapter 4, “The Bluecaps,” in Edward E. Ericson, Jr., and Daniel J. Mahoney, eds., The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947-2005, p. 231.
[ 2] Ibid., Part IV, Chapter 1, “The Ascent,” in The Solzhenitsyn Reader, pp. 265–6.
[3] My debt to the work of Stanley Hauerwas in the paragraph is obvious. See, e.g., Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics, and Stanley Hauerwas (with Charles Pinches), “Practicing Patience: How Christians Should Be Sick” in The Hauerwas Reader (eds., John Berkman and Michael G. Cartwright), pp. 348–366.