Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples approached him, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” (Matthew 13:36)
I can never read the ‘parable of the weeds in the field’ without remembering the battle we had in the Marrickville Minister’s Fellowship about twenty years ago – the battle over whether the Metropolitan Community Church should be invited to join us.
A ‘Ministers’ Fellowship’ (in case you don’t know) is a gathering of Christian clergy and church workers in a particular region – Catholic, Anglican, Uniting, Baptist, Pentecostal, and the Orthodox too if they’ll come. At the time of the great debate, our Ministers’ Fellowship had between 20 and 30 people regularly attending each month.
The Metropolitan Community Church (if you don’t know them) were at that time better known as the ‘gay church’. In the 1980’s they were also referred to as the ‘AIDS church’, and nowadays they are often referred to as ‘the queer church’. You get the idea. Our question was, ‘should we invite them to be one of our churches?’
It was another Anglican cleric who proposed inviting them, reasoning that our basis for inclusion was acceptance of the first three creeds of the church, and we assumed these people accepted those creeds. Another cleric suggested that we add a second criteria for inclusion: ‘that you accept the first three creeds and that you’re not gay!’
I’ll let you know how that debate resolved later, but let me first connect it to this parable, as it’s a controversial parable and one of only two where we’re told that the disciples had to ask Jesus what the parable meant (the other one being the ‘Parable of the Sower’ that occurs directly before this one).
“Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” (Matthew 13:36)
Jesus explains this and the previous parable to the disciples and, in both cases, He gives an allegorical interpretation, meaning that He makes sense of the parables by substituting key elements in the story with characters and elements found in real life.
Most parables don’t work this way. Jesus told about 38 different parables all together, and most of them make a single point and are not open to allegorical interpretation.
When Jesus says, “the Kingdom of God is like a woman who mixed yeast into three measures of flour” (Matthew 13:33), we don’t ask, ‘who does this woman represent?’
When Jesus says, ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed … which indeed is the least of all the seeds; but when it is grown it is greater than the shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches’ (Matthew 13:31-32), we don’t need to ask, ‘who do the birds represent in this story?’
Parables don’t normally function like allegories with fixed meanings. They are ‘language events’ as Rudolph Bultmann called them, that defy simple explanations. They are like windows, says Daniel Via, through which we view the world differently, and then, all of a sudden, catch our reflection. Parables defy straightforward authoritative explanations. They’re flexible. We work with them and they work on us.
Not so, the parable of the wheat and the weeds. Jesus gives us a straightforward allegorical interpretation to this story, and hence its meaning is fixed!
A farmer sows good seed in his field, but an enemy also sows in weeds, so that when the plants grow, there are a mixture of wheat and weeds. Jesus explains:
“the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil.” (Matthew 13:38-39)
This provides the context for the question at the heart of this parable. The farmhands ask their master “Should we then go and gather up the weeds?” (Matthew 13:29), to which their master responds with a straightforward “No”. He says, “for in gathering the weeds, you would uproot the wheat along with them.” (Matthew 13:29)
The parable ends with the farmer solving the problem:
“At harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.” (Matthew 13:30)
The harvest and the reapers are also given allegorical meanings. Jesus says: ‘the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels.’ (Matthew 13:39)
There is no room for misinterpretation here. It’s not our place to judge! We can’t tell the difference between wheat and weed. We must leave it to God (or to the angels in this case). Frankly, I think that message is pretty obvious with or without Jesus’ explanation, but is there are danger that we would misinterpret this parable if Jesus hadn’t made the meaning so unambiguous? The simple answer is ‘yes’! Indeed, if you look at our history of persecutions and inquisitions, we, the church, have never stopped trying to root out the weeds from the wheat!
I’m just finishing reading a history of the Crusades that took place in the between the 11th and 13th centuries, depicting Christian priests chanting ‘Christ have mercy’ as their armies burst into Jerusalem, murdering every man, woman and child in sight as yet another attempt to purge Christ’s field of its weeds.
I don’t doubt that if Jesus hadn’t given us a fixed interpretation of this parable, we would have identified ourselves, and not the angels, as ‘the reapers’, whose job it is to separate the wheat from the weeds, The real tragedy is that Jesus left us no room to interpret His teachings that way and yet we took up the role of reapers anyway.
Back to the great battle of the Marrickville Ministers Fellowship of he early 2000’s. The result of the debate was that it pretty much destroyed the Ministers Fellowship without leading to any real result. We went down from meetings of 20 to 30 per month to meeting of less than a dozen each month, and we never did get the pastor from the Metropolitan Community Church to join us as I think we met on his day off.
Yes, the church is a mess, and it always has been, and the clear and unambiguous message we get from the parable today is that it’s not our job to clean it up! Our job is to keep sowing the seed, spreading the word, and to keep the doors open.
Our Sunday Eucharist
It was great sharing the panel last Sunday with Rob Gilland and Doug Pyeatt – both good friends and wise souls.
I’ve included our Bible banter over Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 8, at the end of today’s newsletter. It’s a difficult passage, with Paul talking about the battle between the flesh and the spirit, but there was a lot of insight shared, and we were greatly assisted by AI Saint Paul, who seemed to have a great grasp of what the battle with the flesh is about even though ‘he’ doesn’t have any!
I’ve included the week’s most popular shorts below. As ever, our prayers for Dr Hassoun resonate broadly with his family and his supporters across the world. I’ll include an update on his situation in my closing comments (below).
We’ve had some last-minute changes for this coming Sunday, but I’m now very much looking forward to having Rob Gilland with us again, this time joined by Jakob Pyeatt. Unfortunately, Scottie Minchin had to cancel his appearance, and I’m very grateful to Rob for volunteering to take his place.
We go live at midday on Sunday on Rumble. You can, of course, also join via Facebook, Twitter (X), LinkedIn, Instagram, Faithia, and StreamYard, but for those who haven’t settled anywhere yet, I’m still encouraging you to try Rumble (and please follow my Rumble channel while you’re there).
Let me work your corner
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What’s On?
- Sunday, July 19th – Our Eucharist from noon @ thesundayeucharist.com, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Faithia, StreamYard and Rumble
- Sunday, July 19th – Hussain Day at 81 Clifton Ave, Kemps Creek, from 3 to 5 pm.
- Monday, July 20th – Boxing at Brofit Gym in Bankstown from 6.30 pm
- Tuesday, July 21st – Boxing at the Mundine Gym in Redfern from 7 pm.
- Thursday, July 23rd – Noon Bible Study @www.thesundayeucharist.com/bible
- Friday to Sunday, July 24th to 26th – @Binacrombi. Please join us.
- Tuesday, July 28th – Bearing Witness: Palestinian Christian Voices @ Parramatta Community Uniting Church, 279 Macquarie Street, Parramatta, 6.30 to 8.30 pm
I’m concluding this newsletter on a plane – jetting back from Melbourne to Sydney, having spent two nights with my wonderful daughter, Imogen, who has just emerged from hospital after surgery on her jaw.
Say a prayer for Imo, please. Her mum and I have both been down to stay with her, but it’s hard leaving her on her own. Even so, I need to get back to celebrate my brother’s birthday (tonight), to prepare and conduct worship services, and to attend Hussain Day on Sunday.
If you haven’t got your tickets yet for Hussain Day, they are free. Just click the lin here and reserve your space. I’ll include the promotional poster again below.
Suffice it to say here that Hussain Day is a wonderful initiative coming from the young people of our Shia Muslim community, attempting to enhance social harmony and deepen our cooperation on issues that affect us all.
The moral leadership being shown by the Shia community reminds me of another one of Jesus’ parables. When the disciples looked to Jesus for an example of a good Jew, He showed them a good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37). As we look to Jesus for examples of good Christians, God shows us good Muslims!
Another great Muslim saint whom many of us have been praying for is my brother, Dr Hassoun – the former Grand Mufti of Syria. As you know, he’s currently on trial in Damascus, and I received news this week of the proceedings from a friend who attended the trial:
“Today, three witnesses appeared and gave testimony against Sheikh Ahmad Hassoun. We believe their testimony was false, and it was recorded and widely shared on social media. Meanwhile, four witnesses appeared in support of Sheikh Ahmad, but their testimony was not shown, leaving only the negative portrayal of him in the eyes of the public.”
Things are proceeding as we had feared. Meanwhile, I’ve been working with my friend Mimi @partisangirl on X) to initiate a defamation case against one of Dr Hassoun’s most notorious detractors. Even so, we’re having trouble reaching Dr Hassoun to get his consent to proceed. Please pray with me that we find a way to move forward with this.
I’m sure you’ve heard enough from me today. If you can put up with more, let me commend to you a tribute I wrote to the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (click here). I’ve had a video tribute published somewhere too, but I’ll save that for next week.
I’ll hope to connect with you again on Sunday for our Eucharist, and I may even see a few of you at Hussain Day later in the afternoon. 😊❤️
May the Lord bless and strengthen you for the work to which you have been called.
Your brother in the Good Fight,
www.fatherdave.org
www.fatherdave.info
www.fightshop.biz
www.fatherdave.com.au
www.binacrombi.com.au
www.savethesheikh.com
www.prayersforsyria.com
www.fighting-fathers.com
www.boxersforpeace.com
www.softwareresales.com
www.warriorweekends.com
www.israelandpalestine.org
www.thesundayeucharist.com
www.oldschoolboxing.academy
www.christiansandmuslims.com
www.christianswithdepression.com
P.S. A very odd question in closing, but if any of you who live in either the Sydney or Melbourne area would like to look after a cat for six months, please let me know. I’ll give you the full story when I hear from you. Nor now, suffice it to say that he’s a very friendly cat. 😻
About Father Dave Smith
Preacher, Pugilist, Activist, Father of four
