Everyone Belongs to God

Yesterday I reflected on Jesus’ parable where he said the kingdom of heaven is like a farmer who planted a wheat field with good seed. And an enemy comes along and sows weeds right in the mix. When the servants notice, they say to the master: “This field is not pure. Do you want us to go out and pull the weeds?” But the Master stops them. In trying to pull out the weeds, you very well might also uproot the crop.

Now I imagine, when Jesus told this parable, he had the future church on his mind. I imagine he knew that some of us would be fixers, some of us here might be overly zealous, and some of us here would want our community to be pure, to be healthy, to look a certain way. I imagine he knew that we would think we always know best, and we would at times be too quick to judge, too quick to sort, too quick to pull what we thought were the weeds.

The truth is, sometimes in our attempts to pull weeds or to clean house, we’ve caused great harm.

I remember in reading church history, that in one of the first crusades, knights from Western Europe attacked an Arab town on their way to the holy land and killed everyone in sight. It was not until later, when they turned the bodies over, that they found crosses around most of their victim’s necks. Up until that point, it had never occurred to them that Christians came in brown skin as well as in white.

I wish I could say that that kind of weed pulling, and even violence were a thing of the past. Many great writers and theologians have contended that perhaps more evil comes into this world from trying to eliminate what we think is evil than from anything else. The fact is, we often can’t tell the wheat from the weeds, because they are so often intertwined – even within our own hearts.

Here, Jesus is saying: It’s not your job to judge, it’s mine. And it will happen at the end of the age. But not now, and not without me. Ultimately he is reminding us that it is not our job to determine who is worthy of God’s love. It is rather our job to love everyone and to imagine everyone as belonging to God.

Let us pray: Holy God, help us to trust your holy and mysterious workings. And grant us the sureness that one day you will sort out the good from the bad, the right from the wrong – even from within our own hearts; through Jesus Christ. Amen.