The Garden

DAILY BYTE

We’ve heard this week in the story of Saddam Hussein that wheat can look decidedly like weeds, just as weeds can look decidedly like wheat, depending on your perspective.

Weeds and wheat are mixed together in one field.

It can be distressing when it seems we can’t trust what our eyes see about others. One commentator named Herbert Lockyer says, “Many who are not the Lord’s yet resemble those who are: they go to church, pray, read the Bible like Christians, but are, alas, Christless.” But this distressed attitude makes me look around wondering which person looks good on the outside, but is, in fact, Christless…? It sews seeds of doubt and fear about who people are and who they claim to be, and it doesn’t inspire many great feelings of wanting to unite with these people who could actually be, well, Christian impostors!

This may be the interpretation some churches use, but I don’t believe cultivating such fear is the intention of the Gospel. I believe there is another intention imbedded in Jesus’ parables. When my mother was preparing for her fifty-fifth birthday, she was very ill and unable to go outside for walks in the gardens that she had spent years cultivating. So, while she was resting, I would go out and photograph pictures of all the flowers in the gardens and fields. As a gift, I created a booklet of scriptures about the earth and these photographs of all the plants she loved so much. And when I proudly presented it to her on her birthday, she flipped through, looked up at me and said with the voice of a true gardener, “You do realize that some of these plants are weeds…”

I smiled – because the truth was, I really couldn’t tell which ones were and which ones weren’t. I simply said that yes – I suppose some of them are, but they were growing in the field, and aren’t they beautiful?

Although God ultimately judges us – all of us – inside and out – this parable seems to tell us that God’s judgment is not a judgment founded on fear, but a judgment founded on deep love and care for us.

God allows the good and the bad to grow within each one of us, and he looks at it and says – you are beautiful children of God – and you’re so worth keeping that I can’t afford to lose one single one of you, no matter who you are or what you’ve done.

So, to recap the interpretation of the parable in Matthew 13 this week: We should not judge good people from evil ones – in fact – we cannot judge them because good and evil exist alongside each other within every one of us – and God, miraculously, loves us all the same.

Where do you see beauty within yourself? Within others?

FOCUS TEXT

James 2:12-13 (NRSV)

So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty. For judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.

PRAY AS YOU GO

Loving God,
You judge our lives, looking on them with the deepest love the world has ever known. Help us to feel the depth of that love so that we will be able to share mercy and kindness with others. You see each one of us as a priceless, unique treasure. Train our eyesight so that we will see such beauty in one another. Amen.