There’s a scene in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, which, if not the greatest film ever made, has got to be a contender, in which our heroes Bill and Ted stand before St. Peter at the gates of Heaven. To gain entrance, Peter asks them “What is the meaning of life?”
After a brief private conference, Bill opens his arms and says most philosophically, “Every rose has its thorn, just like every night has its dawn, just like every cowboy sings a sad, sad, song…every rose has its thorn.” Peter is more or less satisfied, not seeming to realize that they’re just quoting a Poison song from 1988. And yes, I do like Miley’s cover and don’t care who knows it.
Well, that might not be the meaning of life, but it’s definitely a big piece of living one. Ask people the one question they’d most like God to answer, and it’ll usually be some variation on this one big “Why?” Why the tragedy, why the pain, why the cracks running through every good thing?
Every single one.
Jesus’ words today start to get us behind all this. I don’t know if there’s complete understanding to be had this side of the Kingdom, but we can catch glimmers of it, flashes, glimpses. There are three quick parables about wheat and weeds, about bread and yeast, and about a tiny seed and a large plant. And these parables are all meant to describe the Kingdom of God. And all three of them are examples of how God doesn’t always work the way we would expect Him to. As Bishop Braxton often puts it, “God is not God the way we would be God if we were God.”
The parable of the wheat and the weeds looks at this world of ours, this life, with its mix of good and bad, and gets at that question of “why?” Why does God allow the bad? Jesus talks about a farmer who wants only the good, but has to permit the mixture for a time. Because he is powerless to stop the bad? No - because removing it violently would do harm to the good.
One morning in high school Dad asked me to weed a certain area of the garden. I weeded it, all right. Dad came out and looked at the ground, then looked at me, then looked at the ground, then looked at me, and said, “Steven? Where are the black-eyed Susans?” Now, in my defense, a Black-eyed Susan that isn’t flowering looks an awful lot like a weed. I mean it looks really unfairly weed-like. We found them in the weed pile and it was surprising how well a few survived, but they were never the same. It was all okay; those weeds had to get pulled sooner or later. But what if the Black-eyed Susans were each infinitely precious to my father? What if they were each the apple of his eye, for which he’d trade anything? In that case, we would have let some of the weeds stay. We’d have allowed the garden to be imperfect, mixed, because we would trade anything for the health of those flowers.
Now let Christ’s parable throw some light on our questions about life. As the theologian Shakira puts it in a song, “And if our fates have all been wrapped around your finger, and if you wrote the script then why the troublemakers?” It’s the question Christ is answering when he creates this image of a field with wheat and weeds. An enemy has put the weeds there. They aren’t part of the plan. But the farmer has to choose how to deal with them. This is where we chime in telling God what to do... get rid of these weeds! Pull them up! Fix the world! But this farmer knows his crop, knows how fragile it is, and knows that at least right now, the weeds can’t be separated from the wheat without doing more harm than good.
What are the weeds in our world? Like most of Christ’s parables, this one works on many levels. The most superficial reading would say that the wheat are the good people and the weeds are the bad people. Why doesn’t God do something about the bad people? But I think there’s more to it than that. Remember, we don’t get to draw the line between good and evil somewhere out there. That’s what the Pharisees did, and it cut them off from the Gospel. That line runs through every human heart, yours and mine. What if God were going to make a perfect world by eliminating all the sinners? Would you be left? I wouldn’t. But God has plans for us, to salvage us, to redeem us, and so the Master Gardener chooses to hold off for now on a complete, absolute separation of good and evil.
Free will is the answer to why God permits a lot of evil. All the evil that comes from human choices God permits because his gift of freedom is worth it. Remember - He could have had a perfect world. He could have made a world where everything worked just like He told it to. But you wouldn’t be in it. He chose you. He could have had a perfect world. He’d rather have you.
But what about the evil, the suffering, that can’t be chalked up to free will? This is much harder to understand. Why can’t God pull those weeds?
One of my best friends growing up was Danny Burke. We played all the time, figured out how to play baseball with two people, built worlds out of Lego’s, tested the limits of the 10-year old boy’s appetite for destruction and mayhem, and of course ended up confessing to all of it. Danny’s little brother Timmy stayed in the house. Timmy had Muscular Dystrophy. It crippled his body, crippled his ability to communicate, and guaranteed him a short life in a wheelchair.
Timmy was so good. I don’t just mean he was a good person... he really had little opportunity to be a bad one. I mean his existence, his presence, his life, was so good. And having him with us made us better. I could see it in Danny. I could see it in the admirable man he grew up to be.
Is muscular dystrophy good? Is it good to die in your late teens without so many of the experiences most of us consider to be the highlights of life? It’s awful. It’s heartbreaking. But knowing Timmy and Danny and all of us around him, I can’t help but think that if we never met people like Timmy, if we never had to tap the deep wells of tenderness and sacrifice that he brought us to, we would be somehow poorer. Yes, there would be a little less bad in the world. But there would also be a lot less good. Hopefully we can cure MD someday, but there will always be people among us whose difference and goodness make the world better, make us better. A world where everyone is a charming genius supermodel would be poorer, less human.
So if the good in the world always seems touched by evil, if every good thing comes with a little stain of sin, if God delays in ripping out all the bad from the world, let’s not be too quick to sit in judgment of God. The day will come to separate the wheat from the chaff. Rushing it would not be for the best.
This truth is borne by a dozen cliches about roses having thorns and clouds having silver linings and April showers bringing May flowers. What Jesus tells us is that it isn’t just a brute fact we have to deal with. It isn’t the Plan. It isn’t the will of the Gardener. It’s not an easy answer to our questions - there’s nothing easy about it. It wasn’t easy for Christ, when He prayed that the cup of suffering could pass Him by. But after that prayer, He found one more. From some deep well of courage and strength and absolute faith, He was able to summon this prayer: “Not my will, but Thine.”
The story of the wheat and the weeds tells us on one hand that evil is not God’s will, that it will absolutely be separated one day, and on the other hand that separating it violently right now isn’t something we should necessarily want. That’s why Christ got up from His desperate prayer and went to the Cross, trusting His Father’s path for His life. And that’s where He has called us to follow Him. Our religion isn’t about avoiding suffering. It’s about finding redemption and life on the other side of it. And when Christ returns from the other side, you’ll remember how He proved His identity. You’ll remember how He showed His glory. It was His scars.
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