Memorial of Saints Joachim & Anne, Parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary
You may recall the “What Would Jesus Do?” phenomenon that took especially young Christians by storm in the early 1990s. It emerged when a young youth pastor in Holland, Michigan resurrected the question on behalf of a grassroots movement she started in hopes of inspiring Christian youth to become more active disciples of Christ. Participants in the movement were reminded throughout their day of this pressing discipleship question whenever they glanced down at their wrists and saw the trademark token of the movement: a solid color woven bracelet featuring the acronym WWJD. Of course, the bracelets (and t-shirts and ball caps and all the rest) also served as identity markers for who was part of this movement—and who was serious about following Jesus.
The phrase was not new in the 1990s. It was first popularized at the end of the 19th century in a very successful novel written by a Protestant preacher. In it, the main character is struggling to square the focus on wealth and comfort he observes among church goers with Jesus’ call to serve the poor. The novel, which sold some 30 million copies worldwide, apparently spoke to an unease many Christians felt at the time.
I never sported one of those bracelets back in the 1990s, but I do recall thinking that wearing a constant reminder that Jesus is the moral standard against which I ought to measure myself in all things held real promise. To my mind this is a question I need to be asking myself each day.
Thankfully, Jesus is here to help me answer it. In the parable from the Book of Matthew, Jesus (while not telling us precisely what to do in every situation) provides crucial and often surprising discipleship guidance that can guide our daily responses to his call.
On the face of it, the story Jesus tells is simple. A man planted good seed in his field. His work completed and successful, he retired for the evening looking forward to a future harvest. Unfortunately for him, an enemy had other plans and, overnight, planted weeds among the good seed. Time passed, and the weeds grew up among the desirable plants. The man’s slaves came to him with a solution—pull out those nasty weeds on behalf of the good plants. A smart (and even obvious) solution to the problem. To his slaves’ surprise, he rejected it. And so, it appeared that, for some odd reason, the man handed victory over to his malicious enemy.
A simple story but for this: the man said no to what seemed an obvious corrective to his enemy’s intervention because he was concerned that if the slaves pulled up the weeds, they’d end up extracting the good plants too. So, he instructed them to allow the weeds and the plants to grow together until harvest when they would all be pulled and sorted.
It's interesting that the man wanted to postpone the weed extraction and just let them grow up with the wheat. Why delay the solution to this “problem” of mixed-up weeds and plants and potentially damaging the wheat by overcrowding it?
To help answer that question, Bible scholars remind us that through this parable Jesus is trying to tell us something important about the Kingdom of God, our place in it, and how we are to be and what we are to do there.
According to this parable, an important feature of the Kingdom is that it is not a homogeneous place. There are real and important differences among the people there. And those differences can bring tension to the Kingdom, even to the point of an enemy acting maliciously. In short, the Kingdom is not perfect. But it is different.
What we learn in this parable, I think, is that in the Kingdom (so unlike the rest of the world) there is no immediate compulsion to separate out the “good” from the “bad” in order to protect the good from the bad as soon as possible. The plants and weeds, though seemingly incompatible may, nevertheless, be allowed to grow up mingling with one another. Eventually, they may be separated from each other. But that is not job one.
So, what does that mean for us? For me, at least, it means that doing what Jesus would do requires, at the very least, patience. If I’m in a rush to decide who is good and who is bad, who deserves to be “in” and who must be thrown out, then I’m not living in step with the pace of the Kingdom. I’m doing what the world does in its quest (we see this a lot these days) to achieve clarity, purity, and security as quickly as possible by purging those understood to be our enemy (whether or not they really are). Instead, to follow Jesus in the Kingdom (this parable tells us) is to wait on the Lord to do the work of discerning and sorting our souls when the time is right to do that. In the meantime, it seems to me, our task is to mingle and grow with our “enemy” and in the love of Christ.
—Susan Trollinger