Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“He put before them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away.’”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, February 12, 2023
by Dr. Kimberly Leetch, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: God’s kingdom is far more vast and welcoming than we like to think.
As much as we’d like to claim they are all about us, at the core, these parables are about God’s kingdom, specifically how vast and expanding it is.
The first parable tells of a kingdom that includes wheat sown from good seeds growing alongside weeds sown by the evil one. We tend to focus on the end of the story, where the reapers harvest the good and destroy the evil. Instead, we might look more closely at the kingdom as it grows. In the parable, the wheat and the weeds grew up together.
What does this say about the world we live in now? Even if we were to self-righteously point out who we consider to be weeds (which is a terrible act, and in no way would Jesus encourage us to be judge and jury like that), we have been called to grow up alongside all people. The master of the field directed the servants to leave them alone because trying to pluck up the weeds would also destroy the wheat.
In other words, trying to bring down those we classify as bad, only serves to bring us down too. (Or if we’re honest with ourselves, who’s to say we are the wheat? Maybe we’re all weeds.)
Jesus’ point is that the kingdom is far stronger and more vast than we can imagine. The kingdom is much wilder and more unruly than the tidy way we like to keep things. It is uncontrollable and valuable just as it is. Maybe instead of trying to control it, we could learn to let it be, focusing more on living fully within it.