In a children’s Sunday school room in Saraland, Alabama, in the midst of the smell of crayons, the sight of little bodies on straight-backed wooden chairs, and beneath the shadow of Bible characters being moved around on flannel boards, my teacher told me that a parable is an earthly story with a heavenly meaning.
Depending on how you count a few of Jesus’ sayings, there are around 40 of these parables across the Gospels. Matthew 13 is considered the parable discourse, and it includes eight parables on the Kingdom of God and three explanations or interpretations, all in one neatly packaged chapter. The interpretations included in this chapter are unique to this gospel and unique to this chapter. But before you get all excited that Jesus explained the meaning of some of the parables, I must report to you that many New Testament scholars suggest that the interpretations are influenced by the communities that preserved this gospel.
Now, I know it might be difficult for you to believe that Christians would adopt interpretations of Jesus’ teachings that fit their current situation or worldview, but it is always a possibility.
Despite that fact, one good question we might ask is why Jesus used parables in the first place. Now, the Gospels don’t exactly agree on the answer, so I don’t want to try to tackle that. But conventional wisdom suggests that Jesus taught in parables because humans have a hard time learning things. So Jesus needed to give them an easier version, sort of like the Gospel for Dummies.
Maybe.
Or maybe these parables, earthly stories, are a preferred method of communication by God. Humans observing, looking, listening at the everyday in nature and human relationships and looking for God to reveal truth within and from that everyday life.
Arguably, the two most well-known of Jesus’ parables are the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. The former reads like a true crime story, and the latter is a family drama worthy of your best gossip section. Think about that. Two of Jesus’ most famous teachings have as their background and their vehicle stories of the everyday, familiar, and fractured relationships. Human suffering, crime, family drama, all of these reveal divine opportunities and invitations to hear something from God. But hearing the message will require some reflection on our part and a decent dose of imagination.
And then there are parables like the one today, the wheat and the tares, or the wheat and the weeds, and these have agricultural settings. Tripp preached on the parable of the sower last week, also found in this chapter. I listened closely to that sermon, hanging on every word, relieved when he went in other directions that I planned to go this week.
I only have so much imagination and ability.
So here’s my direction for this parable.
I like to imagine that Jesus and the disciples are walking along and they come across a field of wheat. And Jesus says, “Hey, folks, imagine that field, but instead of just wheat, it’s full of weeds as well.” And the disciples would know that the weeds he’s talking about are wheat lookalikes called darnel. And you can’t really tell the wheat from the darnel until closer to the harvest. And right before their eyes, with a little imagination, comes a lesson about life and the kingdom of God that is both true and memorable.
Some of us, probably all of us at one time or another, are just like the character in the story who offered to remove the weeds. The right thing to do is punish those weeds by removing them. The wheat shouldn’t have to live next to those weeds. The weeds don’t deserve that opportunity. They are weeds. Let’s remove the weeds, get them gone, and live as if they never existed.
Some Christian groups are quite concerned with weeds. They are committed to purity within their ranks. And I’m sure you’ve met a person or two who has been excluded from a group or weeded out of a place because they found themselves breaking an unwritten rule or behaving unsatisfactorily.
I had a part-time job decades ago in Georgia, and my coworker was in his 70s from Pennsylvania. He was Mennonite. Now, they weren’t the horse-and-buggy-type Mennonites. They had cars. But they did have a rule about not having a radio in their cars. He and his wife had bought a new car. And Herman said he had plans to take the radio out of the car, but he didn’t get it out before Sunday service. So while he was inside the church worshiping God, some leaders of the congregation went out and removed his radio.
He said that was the last straw. He moved to Georgia.
Now, there’s plenty of Bible verses that will justify the removal of your radio or whatever else the community deems unnecessary for your commitment to God. “And if you won’t remove it, we’ll remove you,” they say, “so you won’t contaminate the rest of us.” But Jesus says no.
By removing the weeds, we might actually do more harm than good, and much harm has been done to people in that situation. And besides, it’s not our job. Leave judgment to God and learn to coexist, this parable recommends to us.
And while we are coexisting, we might discover that the people we thought were weeds were actually wheat. And on some occasions, we will be the weed in need of some grace from the wheat.
That’s what a parable can do. It was just a field of wheat, something the people saw every day. But with a little help and willingness to listen, take time to imagine adding a story and characters with real desires and real flaws, the mundane, the everyday earthly situations create stories, and stories create meaning. But it does require imagination.
I’ve been reading Tish Harrison Warren’s new book, Liturgy of the Ordinary, as I’ve thought about this idea of finding God in the everyday and Jesus’ use of parables. In the book, she reflects on sacred practices of her everyday life. So she has chapters on making the bed, losing her car keys, fighting with her husband, checking email, calling a friend, on and on. All of those opportunities that we have in the mundane, the sometimes drudgery, to find God.
So she includes this funny story of when her husband was in graduate school for a theology degree. One of his professors assigned them to read St. Augustine’s Confessions. It’s his autobiography. It’s a classic of Christian literature written at the end of the fourth century. A student in the class expressed an opinion probably shared by many in the class when he said to the professor, “This book is boring.”
The professor replied, “St. Augustine is not boring. You are boring.”
That guy definitely had tenure.
The teacher’s point was that you have to approach what’s before you with curiosity. You have to look at the wonder and the gift of the human experience, not for entertainment or for dopamine rushes, but for wisdom, truth. We are seeking wisdom and truth. You can find heavenly meanings in earthly stories as long as you have curiosity and imagination.
So I think Jesus is modeling for us what we can do for ourselves, which is, by the way, the mark of a good teacher.
We’re not just learning from the stories of heavenly meaning, we’re invited to be characters in our own stories of grace and love and forgiveness. How far do you have to look in your own family for a relationship that needs reconciliation? Not far. How far do you have to look for an example of a time when you had a chance to make a difference or meet a need in someone’s life, but you didn’t? Not far. How far do you have to look in nature to find wonder and awe and be overwhelmed by love that has its roots in God? Not far.
These stories are not for learning. These stories are for being. They are earthly stories with spiritual meanings that provide earthly benefits.
Nicholas Herman, he was known as Brother Lawrence, was a seventeenth-century lay brother of the Carmelite tradition in France. He made quite an impact on others at the monastery, so much so that after his death, they compiled his letters and writings into a book. Otherwise, we would have never heard about him, which is also a lesson. People are actually listening to things we say and write, even our children.
His friends titled the book The Practice of the Presence of God, because that’s what he was known for. For not separating a time of prayer and a time of work, but joining them together. He did not like working in the kitchen at the monastery, but then he realized that that could actually be time well spent. He would say to God at the beginning of his shift, “Since you are with me, and since by your will I occupy myself with external things, please grant me the grace to remain with you in your presence. Work with me, O God, so that my work might be the very best. Receive this work as an offering of love and all my affections.”
So during his kitchen work, he would speak to God as if God were right there with him, thanking God for God’s assistance. And at the end of his shift, he’d examine his work. “If I noticed faults,” he said, “I asked God’s forgiveness without being discouraged and then went on with my work, still dwelling with God, thus continuing in the practice of conversing with God throughout each day.” It wasn’t work, it was prayer. It wasn’t prayer, it was work.
The Benedictine monks used the Latin phrase ora et labora to describe this practice. It’s translated, pray and work. They were so intertwined, like the same coin, but two different sides. And work doesn’t just mean your employment, what you are paid to do. Whatever’s on your calendar tomorrow, reporting to the office at eight AM, caring for a loved one or a friend, weeding your flower garden or picking ripe vegetables, shopping for groceries with yet another buggy that has one bumpy wheel.
If we live into this vision of life, the earthly becomes spiritual, heavenly even. And as those stories unfold with a little imagination, we can interpret them as parables with even larger meaning.
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Elizabeth Strout has a new book out, and the main character is a fifty-seven-year-old high school history teacher named Arty, who is quietly going through a personal crisis of loneliness and sadness.
He likes to compose music as a hobby.
Arty’s son, Rob, and his daughter-in-law, Francesca, who are having their own troubles, visit Arty and his wife for Thanksgiving. Francesca is a world-renowned concert pianist.
In a very small scene on that Thanksgiving Day, Arty plays a song that he had composed on the piano, and he asks Francesca to add her flourishes, which she does to Arty’s delight and amazement. Arty then asks Francesca, “Francesca, what do you think about when you are playing in a concert?”
She looked at the piano keys, and then she looked at him and said, “I’m trying to get inside the music.”
He said, “Okay.”
But then as she rose from the piano, she put her finger to her mouth to indicate a secret and said very softly, “I’m looking for God when I play.”
“Do you find him?” Arty asks.
She winked at him and said, “Sometimes.”
I don’t know about you, but I’ll take sometimes, and each of those times will be a gift that will carry us to the next time. And in between those times, we will depend on each other. Sometimes wheat-like, sometimes weed-like, to the end of our days and beyond.