24 He told another story. "God's kingdom is like a farmer who planted good seed in his field. 25 That night, while his hired men were asleep, his enemy sowed thistles all through the wheat and slipped away before dawn. 26 When the first green shoots appeared and the grain began to form, the thistles showed up, too. 27 "The farmhands came to the farmer and said, 'Master, that was clean seed you planted, wasn't it? Where did these thistles come from?' 28 "He answered, 'Some enemy did this.' "The farmhands asked, 'Should we weed out the thistles?' 29 "He said, 'No, if you weed the thistles, you'll pull up the wheat, too. 30 Let them grow together until harvest time. Then I'll instruct the harvesters to pull up the thistles and tie them in bundles for the fire, then gather the wheat and put it in the barn.'"
Judgment is not in our hands. We are not to separate the wheat from the weeds, the sacred from the secular, the holy from the unholy. This is God’s doing - God who is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love”.
Our task is to live faithfully, as those who are both wheat and weeds - we are not as pure as we would like to be. As Wm. Saloan Coffin has said, “Remember what history teaches, never do people so cheerfully do evil as when they do it from religious conviction.”
“God has invited us to gather rather than to judge, to get together and learn to live with one another, weeds and wheat alike. There is wheat within each of us as well as those all-too-visible weeds. From this patchy crop God can fashion a miraculous bread, transforming each of us by the pure wheat of this holy offering, making us into beings shaped by hope.” Richard I Pervo,
Prayer thought for the week: “Lord, help me to remember that it is not my job to judge.
You will take care of that. Help me to be merciful, as You are to me and to all.”
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