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The Sixth Sunday Of Easter
O God, who hast prepared for those who love thee such good things as pass man's understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards thee, that we, loving thee in all things and above all things, may obtain thy promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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The Sixth Sunday Of Easter
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Scripture citation(s): Matthew 13:24-34a
A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
on
Matthew 13:24-34a
✛
Good, Evil and Imperfect Judgment
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It seems that there are some prayers that God cannot answer. This evening’s reading from Matthew is trying to explain why at least one kind of prayer, and at least for now, goes unanswered.
The prayer runs something like this: “Why, God, do you allow wickedness in the world and in the church? Why are there people and institutions that thwart your intention for the good of all things? God, please put an end to wickedness!”
Why doesn’t God answer this prayer? Why doesn’t God put an end to wickedness? Saint Matthew directs our attention to the parabolic image of “wheat and tares together sown.” In this parable of Jesus, the wheat is what Jesus has sown; it’s good seed; it’s what God wants in the world. The weeds (the “tares” of the old language) have been sown amongst the wheat by an enemy of God. The servants of God come to him in distress about the weeds. There are a lot of weeds, which presents the problem. Normally in agriculture weeds are uprooted lest as they grow they choke out the good plants. But here there are so many weeds that uprooting them is impossible. That is to say, there are so many weeds that their roots have become entwined with the roots of the wheat, and to pull up the weeds would at the same time pull up, and thus kill off, the wheat. The servants of God want the weeds removed. But God says, No, not yet.
Which, being interpreted, means something sobering about our situation. Good and evil are so intertwined in our world that it is impossible to separate them one from another. Every human attempt to draw the line between good and evil, between guilt and innocence, can be at best only a crude approximation. Whatever evil we may get rid of, we do so only at the cost of getting rid of some good as well. There is no such thing as true or perfect human judgment.
For an image of evil in the world, an image of power and ideology and falsehood that cost millions upon millions of lives and endured for decade upon decade, let us take the forced labor prison camps of the former Soviet Union. The great chronicler of the history and use of those prisons in the service of the ideology of lies was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose magnum opus is The Gulag Archipelago. You can read that work, and go through hundreds of pages, all of them numbing and sickening, and it would be easy to think: there’s evil, that’s it, evil is out there in that system. It then can be, as it was for me, quite a shock to arrive at a section where Solzhenitsyn speaks personally. He himself had been imprisoned for some minor ideological aberration, and had several brutal years in the camp. But in this remarkable passage I’m remembering, Solzhenitsyn reflects back on his own education, the accidental factors that led him into mathematics rather than something else. He realizes that, had things gone but a little differently, he might have been part of the system, a guard, maybe even a torturer, rather than a prisoner. And he writes: The line between good and evil goes through every human heart.
Now this is not to say that there aren’t better and worse regimes in the world, and it is not to say that we are incapable of distinguishing between them. Indeed, there are regimes so bad that we should not shirk from calling them evil. But the truth of our situation is that there are very severe limits on what we are able to do about evil. Of course, we should do our best to make the world a better place, even as we do our best to make ourselves better persons. But no matter what people of good will are able to do, the government is going to be impure; indeed, let us be frank, the church is always going to be impure; our friends will always be impure; and yes, even our own hearts. The line between good and evil cuts through . . .
Yet it is an ignoble response to our predicament, and in fact a betrayal of faith, to say that since we cannot effect the separation of good and evil, we really don’t need to concern ourselves about them. Nonetheless this is a common attitude. We see it in the easy relativism that speaks of “my truth,” as well as in so many other ways. We don’t want to judge others, for the very good reason that we know judgment can curl around and bite us on the backside. “Which of you is without guilt?” asked Jesus. “Let him cast the first stone.” We turn away, limping from the exposure of our own compromised position.
But it would be ignoble to say good and evil are merely subjective and unimportant and just different points of view, that sort of thing, on the grounds that if we affirm their reality, it will cut our own heart. Better to take the medicine of self-awareness and say: There’s evil in the world, and it’s here in my heart too.
Return with me, please, to Jesus’ parable. We saw that the roots of wheat and tares are intertwined everywhere. That’s what makes it so hard to have right judgment in the state, in the church, with our friends, or in our hearts. But thanks be to God the parable goes on! There is an answer to the cry of the servants of God that evil be identified, named, separated out, and destroyed decisively for ever. At the end God will send his “reapers”—a different group from his servants, and presumably to be identified with the angels—who will separate the weeds from the wheat. The longing for this to happen—which is the longing for the consummation of all God’s good purposes for creation—is put beautifully in a famous harvest hymn: the Lord our God shall come, and shall take his harvest home; from his field shall in that day all offenses purge away. . . . Even so, Lord, quickly come to thy final harvest-home; gather thou thy people in, free from sorrow, free from sin; there, forever purified, in thy presence to abide.
Human judgment is necessary; we’d have no government without judgment, no church either, and no self-understanding. Nonetheless human judgement is ever crude, blunt, imperfect, and costly in terms of good. The good news is that human judgment is only provisional, for the time being, a kind of interim grace that God has given us. For there is also God’s judgment, which will be perfect, liberating, purifying, the fire that makes strong, establishing the reign of truth and goodness for evermore. Until that great day (for which we pray every day: “thy kingdom come”)—until that day let us try to remember two truths. First: we should not be too eager for judgment to come. Let us judge only as we must. But as we await the judgment of which we are incapable (the judgment of God), let us (the second truth) not get too cozy with evil. We cannot get away from evil in any aspect of our life. But we will not live with evil for ever.
