Some Advice on Gardening

Image by Manuela Hartmann from Pixabay

Those of you who know me well, just did a double take at the title

Gardening advice from me is….interesting…

Okay, cards on the table!  I don’t have green fingers and, to be honest, I only do gardening because I have to.  I would never list it as a leisure choice.  It seems to me, you put in a lot of effort and it never seems to be finished!!!

Gardening is a nice idea, but I avoid it for as long as possible

Jesus used illustrations from horticulture to make his hearer think.  Among them were the parable of the sower, the mustard seed and the wheat and tares.

The wheat and tares begins innocently enough: a farmer plants good seed.

So far, so good.  You can almost imagine him uploading the image onto his social media with the caption “looking forward to a bumper harvest”

Plot Twist

Then—plot twist—an enemy sneaks in at night and plants weeds.

Really????

Who has that kind of time????

I mean, doesn’t the enemy have something better to do?  Tiptoeing through fields scattering weeds.  Imagine hating someone so much, you break into their field with a plan saying, “I will sabotage this man’s wheat”

The plants start growing, and the workers notice: “Where did all these weeds come from?”  Anyone with an ounce of knowledge of gardening knows, weeds will appear.  So, lets assume, there are a lot of weeds. More than the workers might have expected.  A field full of weeds where there should be Wheat.
and the farmer’s response is a casual “Yeah, I know. Enemy activity.”

Naturally, the workers suggest the obvious solution: weeding
At last, something we can all relate to.

Activity

Action.

Productivity.

A to-do list.

And the farmer says… “No.”

Excuse me??

“No because, if you try to pull up the weeds now, you might accidentally uproot the wheat too. Just let them grow together until the harvest.”

This is the moment where every gardener faints!

You have to get rid of the weeds. 

They will steal nutrients and water from the plants that you actually want.  You cannot leave them in place!!!

But the farmer insists “let them all grow together.  We can sort it later”

What’s This Really About?

Of course, Jesus isn’t really giving a lesson on farming. 

He is talking about human attitudes and behaviours and about our attitudes and behaviours. Here is where the lesson gets harder!

Maybe we don’t have to go around aggressively sorting people into “good” and “bad” categories like an aggressive strimmer whacking every “weed” insight. Which sounds good but, is not always easy to do.  You see, we do it almost by instinct.  We decide who is wheat and who is weed and weeds need to be whacked!

But, according to Jesus, the situation is… complicated.

Life is messy.

People are complicated

Root systems tangle together in ways you can’t always see.

And so, we might not be as good at identifying “weeds” as we think we are.

The real twist is that the sorting does happen—but later and not by the overenthusiastic farmhands with grabby hands and strong opinions, but at the harvest, at the right time, by someone who actually knows what they’re doing.

So what’s the takeaway?

Maybe it’s this:

Not every mess is yours to fix immediately.
Not every judgment you feel compelled to make is accurate.
And not every “weed” is as obvious as it looks at first glance.