Genesis 28:10-19a
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
In a recent edition of the Christian Century a chaplain talks about receiving a call to visit a dying man. At the base of the man’s bed sat his eldest son, John. John told the chaplain not to worry. He said his dad was a Christian and had been “saved” for 27 years. John said he was saved as well. The real reason for his call, John confessed, was that the man in the next room over was dying as well, and he was pretty sure that he wasn’t saved. So, John wanted the chaplain to go next door and get the man to accept Jesus before it was too late.
The chaplain reflects how his own experience of salvation has more to do with the present than with the future, with an ongoing sense of God’s saving work.
Still, he writes, “I did not discuss Christian doctrine with my new friend the salvation-whisperer. I did learn that his dad’s neighbor was at peace, surrounded by loved ones after a laudable life of service to others. What I’ll never forget is the revealing picture I caught as I walked away. The two rooms shared a doorway, with a thin partition between. I stood in the doorway and saw two families, probably with very different worldviews, surrounding their departing loved ones in pure expressions of love. The beauty on either side of the wall was similarly striking and holy, and it was hard to imagine God feeling anything but glorified by it all.”[1]
I tend to see things the way this chaplain does, which in part is probably why I have a hard time with today’s parable. In today’s story we have two kinds of seeds and two kinds of sewers. The first is good and the second is evil. According to the way the parable is explained in verses 36-43, the good sewer is the Son of Man and the bad sewer is the evil one, the devil I suppose. The parable tells us that the good and the evil will grow together until it is harvest time “when all causes of sin and all evildoers” will be thrown into the furnace.
The thing is, I don’t know anyone who is entirely wheat or anyone who is entirely weed. To see the world as black or white, good or evil, saved or unsaved just doesn’t seem right or accurate. Life is complex, people are complex, and when we make the effort to walk in another’s shoes coming up with confident judgments about the eternal fate one deserves gets harder and harder to do.
What I do think we learn from this parable is that God’s kingdom is good, God’s end, God’s goal, is Good. Heaven is good; it is so full of God and the abundant, eternal love of God, that there’s just no room for anything that is not of God. Therefore sin will be burned away, evil will be burned away, injustice and oppression will be burned away. And, since it is the discples’ prayer that earth might be like heaven, (“Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven”) it is our job to work toward God’s good ends.
Gregory of Nyssa was a 4th century theologian who had a great concept of hell. As he saw it, even hell God used redemptively. Even hell God used as a way to bring out what was good in people and to remove what was bad.
Imagine a big thick rope that extended through either side of a wall. On the one side the rope was pure and unblemished. On the other side the rope sat in water. It was swollen, frayed, dirty, and knotted. Debris attached to it, barnacles grew on it. You are that rope, Nyssa suggested. Hell is the process of being pulled through the hole to the pure side, having all the corruptions ripped off so you could be the rope you were created to be.
Our Old Testament passage for today, this vision of Jacob’s ladder extending between heaven and earth, is what inspired me to reread Flanner O’Conner’s little story “Revelation.”[2] But, as I came to the end I realized that it was pretty pertinent to this whole “weeds vs. wheat,” “burning in judgment” matter as well.
Have you heard of it? It’s the story of a good white Christian woman named Mrs. Turpin who is waiting with her husband in a crowded doctor’s office. There would be room enough for her to sit if the dirty, unkempt child in the corner knew enough not to take up two chairs and if his doting grandmother weren’t so oblivious to everyone else in the room and would tell the kid to move over. Mrs. Turpin does her best to be pleasant, but with the exception of the other well dressed woman waiting her turn, Mrs. Trupin was disgusted by everyone else in the room. It gave her plenty of time to thank Jesus for not making her colored or even worse, white trash. Mrs. Turpin expressed pleasantries with the well-dressed woman, along with some opinions, which the white trash woman accepted as an invitation for her to join the conversation. All the while an angry, anti-social teenager made horrible expressions and stared daggers at Mrs. Turpin.
After one particularly disturbing expression the teenager’s book flew across the room and hit Mrs. Turpin above the eye, knocking her to the floor. By the time she’s gained her wits the girl is upon her choking the air from her lungs.
It took some effort, but eventually doctors and nurses were able to liberate Mrs. Turpin from her attacker. The girl was sedated and sent away in an ambulance. But, before she goes Mrs. Turpin says, “What do you have to tell me, girl?” And the girl snarls, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.”
Now, Mrs. Turpin knows that the girl is a lunatic and out of control. And yet even so, the words stick. She can’t help but feel that the whole thing happened for a reason. She can’t help but feel like somehow its part of a message from God.
So, later at home, at the farm, she’s hosing down her pigs and railing against God. “Why me?” she cries. “Its no trash around here, black or white, that I haven’t given to. And break my back to the bone every day working. And do for the church… How exactly am I a hog?… There was plenty of trash there (at the doctor’s office.) It didn’t have to be me. If you like trash better, go get yourself some. If trash is what you wanted why didn’t you make me trash?” She goes on and on and finally ends her rant by screaming out to God, “Who do you think you are?”
That’s when Mrs. Turpin sees her own version of Jacob’s ladder. A purple streak cuts through the sky extending from the fields into the dusk and on the streak is a vast swinging bridge going “upward from the earth through a field of living fire.” Upon the bridge were hordes of souls “rumbling” toward heaven. “There were whole companies of white trash, clean for the first time in their lives.” There were all sorts of undesirables: colored people, freaks, lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.
Here’s the best part of the vision. “And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who like herself had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”
She was shocked to see that even what she thought was good about herself was being burned away.
In Jacob’s biblical vision he discovered that he was on holy ground. “How awesome is this place!” Jacob exclaims. In a way I think that that is Mrs. Turpin’s discovery as well. She now realizes that she is not the holy ground. But rather, she stands on it with the rest of the weeds and the wheat that are blessed to be there too.
I don’t know all it means to be saved. There’s lots I’m looking forward to learning. But, I think it begins here with visions like these ones and the discovery that we’re all on sacred ground.
[1] http://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2014-07/two-hospital-rooms
[2] The Complete Stories
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