Friction
Genesis 28:10-19a; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
The Rev. Eric O. Springsted, Ph.D.
Swarthmore Presbyterian Church
July 20, 2014
One of the advantages of having the three lessons that the lectionary provides is that they are often
complementary and reinforce each other. Frequently, for example, it is the case that what one lesson gives in
promise and principle, but rather abstractly, is then played out concretely in the other. In the case of this
week’s lessons, it is the Old Testament that gives the principle and the promise, and the Gospel that says what
it means to live it.
Look at the Old Testament lesson. Jacob has a dream. It is the dream of a ladder standing on the earth and
reaching up to heaven, and the angels of God are ascending and descending on it. And God speaks to Jacob in
this dream, and promises him that all the families on earth would be blessed in him and his children, and also
that he, God, would be with them and would keep them wherever they went. Now, great and future things are
clearly promised in this dream. That is how the ancient church always took it. To the ancient church the
symbolism of the dream consistently signaled the ascent of God’s people to God’s heaven. Thus, often the
ladder was seen as a symbol of the Cross because it is the Cross that leads us to heaven. Some also saw it as a
symbol of the church which also leads us upwards, and because it is through the church that God’s graces, such
as the sacraments, come down; others saw its rungs as the virtues that lead us to heaven; Augustine saw the
angels ascending and descending as a symbol of good preachers who are the angels of God preaching Christ.
This is important for congregations to consider when valuing their ministers.
But, aside from that, what then does the wonderful promise given to Jacob mean in life as we live it? Well, it is
Christ’s parable of the weeds that tells us something concrete about that, at least if we are patient enough to
work through it with him. It is a parable that, like last week’s, involves sowing. In it, a farmer sowed good
seed, Jesus says, but while everybody was asleep an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, so that
when the wheat came up the weeds did, too. The slaves of the farmer ask if they should go and pull up the
weeds. “No,” the farmer says, “don’t do that. For if you do you might well uproot the wheat as well.” “ It
would be far better,” he says, “to wait until the harvest. At that point it can all be gathered into bundles, and
the bundles of weeds can be burned and the wheat can be taken into the barn.”
At first that hardly seems to make things clearer. But Jesus unveils to the disciples who each of the players in
the parable is. He tells them that the sower, once again, is the Son of Man. The field is the world, the good
seed is the children of the kingdom, and the bad seed is sowed by the devil. The harvest is the end of the age,
he says, when the good and evil are separated. His point then in the parable is a simple one and it is direct:
the promise of God in this world always co-exists alongside evil. Don’t expect it not to do so, and don’t expect
the evil, no matter how great the promise, to go away. Once the dream is dreamed, it still has to be lived out
in a world where the dreaming of heaven itself is lived out in a place where evil is always mixed with the
beauty of the dream.
That is something that we need to take seriously. The Christian life is not frictionless. We do not glide easily
and effortlessly from the dreaming of the dream to its fulfillment. We will always meet resistance.
Now, one of the reasons we need to take this seriously is because we don’t always believe it. Instead, we
wonder, we puzzle long and hard, and we are confused by the puzzle of why bad things happen to good people.
Indeed, the very long-lived popularity of Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book by that title – it has been in print since
1981 – indicates that we are bothered by that question; to the degree that we are bothered, we would seem
to assume that good people shouldn’t have bad things happen to them. We assume that once we dream of
immortality, that immortality should be ours. Resistance or friction is unexpected and provides a seeming
contradiction to what we have been promised.
People did not always think this way. In the medieval world, for example, people didn’t ask why bad things
happen to good people. There was no point in asking it, for there was certainly no puzzle about it. Bad things
happen to good people because there are bad people to do those things. That’s just the way it is, and you
would have to be incredibly naive to think otherwise. Moreover, God’s mercy is for those who have suffered
and who are afflicted. So suffering of the good people in this life was actually a sign that God would be
merciful to one in the resurrection. So there was no particular puzzle; it was all working out the way one would
expect things to work out. What did bother the medievals and what puzzled them, though. was when good
things happened to good people in this world. They worried because they were afraid that perhaps they had
fared too well in this life, that they had gotten the benefits of the wicked, and that they would therefore have
to pay in the next life. To them Fortune magazine’s list of the richest people in the world would not have been
a list of the blessed, but a list of the world’s most notorious sinners whose souls were in the greatest danger.
Their faring well materially in the world was the anomaly that would have to be set straight in the final
harvest, the medievals thought.
Now, I am not sure that we always have to follow them on this. One really shouldn’t be suspicious of happiness,
at least if one has a clean conscience. But we do need to know that as we contemplate God’s promise and
accept it for ourselves that we will have to live it out in a world where it will meet resistance, and where there
will be friction because of the conflict between good and evil this side of the kingdom.
We need to know simply so that we are not ignorant or so that we are not surprised. We shouldn’t be
disappointed when the good we are promised doesn’t come to us gliding over a frictionless surface. But we
need to know it also because in that fact of the co-existence of wheat and weeds, and in what Christ teaches
his disciples about what to do with that co-existence, is contained the heart of Christian life. For in the fact
that God’s promises of good always meet with resistance and with friction is born a very specific way of life,
and faith itself. In this fact, is born the need for patience. As St. Paul says in this morning’s epistle lesson, it is
out of the world’s groaning to be born that we learn patience.
Patience is required, of course, simply because good and evil are mixed and will remain so until the kingdom
comes. Therefore we simply need to hold our horses, as it were. Impatience isn’t going to make things happen
faster. But more deeply, as many philosophers have pointed out, and as St. Paul himself makes clear, patience
really is at the heart of what Christian faith is. This is, of course, true insofar as living a Christian life in a
world where good and evil are always mixed up requires trusting, requires believing God, and believing that
God will at the end make the righteous shine the sun in the kingdom of their Father.
But even more deeply patience is the activity of Christian faith. Patience is what Christian faith does in the
world in the face of evil. Now, this might sound rather paradoxical, to say the least. Patience and waiting
would seem to be a lack of activity. So let me explain. In this morning’s parable, when the servants discover
that weeds are growing alongside the wheat, they want to pull them up. But the farmer tells them not to
separate the two. Instead, they are to wait for the end to make that separation so that the wheat is not
harmed. Now, as I read this, at least as it applies to the question of how to live with the existence of evil, the
farmer isn’t exactly telling them to do nothing about the existence of evil. He is telling them not to pluck up
and destroy. He is telling them not to be violent. He is telling them that righteousness will triumph but it won’t
triumph by their trying to destroy evil by attacking it by force. Actually that would just perpetuate violence.
Remember, while in the parable these are weeds, in real life, the evil that is being talked about here is
people. So in this case, righteousness, real righteousness which is what the sower wanted to plant, requires
another way of being. And what is the alternative to violence and force? It is not doing nothing. It is, instead,
simply patience. In this case, patience is not passivity, but is the way of living of the one who is not violent
and does not use force to try to make good appear. In this sense, patience is a way that we treat others, and a
way of life that lives with evil but is not evil.
Let me put this another way. This seems to be a year in which I have been citing the great Russian author Leo
Tolstoy a lot, and I am about to add one more citation to the list. As I have mentioned before, while Tolstoy is
famous for his great novels, Tolstoy himself thought those works were really quite unimportant. The essays and
books that he wrote on religious topics, especially a number on non-violence as a way of life such as The
Kingdom of God Is within You, he thought were far more important. The latter part of his life was spent not
only writing these essays, but also spent in corresponding with thinkers the world over promoting non-violence,
and in personal involvement in the sort of deep social reforms that non-violence requires. He himself was
extremely active in land reform and in projects that would give the peasants and serfs of Russia both land and
education. At the root of his thinking on all these issues, was his reading of the Sermon on the Mount, from the
Gospel of Matthew, which as a philosophy of life he took literally. Hence his insistence on non-violence and the
non-resistance to evil which are the key themes to Jesus’ teaching in that sermon. In time, his work influenced
Gandhi in India, and ultimately even Martin Luther King, Jr. in this country.
Now, Tolstoy got a lot of resistance to his views. The Imperial Russian government, of course, did not
appreciate Tolstoy’s constant efforts to get young men to avoid joining the army and his work was constantly
censored by it. He was forbidden to publish. He also got a lot of philosophical resistance to his views as well.
Other thinkers the world over were constantly criticizing his literal appreciation of Jesus’ teaching as being
unworkable. Imagine, they would complain, if people did not resist evil with things such as police forces and
armies and wars. Evil would run rampant. The idea of non-violence, they would condescendingly concede, is a
nice idea, but it is utterly unworkable in this world where there is evil. Tolstoy’s response was simple: Of
course, it is not workable with human beings as they stand. But these teachings were never meant to be
workable in the world as it stands; they were not given to people as they had ordinarily been. Rather, as Jesus
gave these teachings they were new teachings, and as such they required a new way of life. They were never
meant to fit into the old way at all. They were meant to replace it. And, of course, they had to replace it
because simply to repeat the old violences, which everybody everywhere always does in the name of justice,
just means that the old violences continue unabated. When souls are touched by force, they shudder. In time,
if they are hurt, very often they become calloused and unfeeling, and when that happens they use force on
others to get their way and the cycle of violence continues, even with the best of intentions. In short, when
tries to get good by violence and force, well, then, the weeds win and so does the one who sowed them.
Jesus tells the disciples that they are not to rip up the weeds. He tells them to have the patience that trusts
that God will make good on his promises, and that Jacob’s dream will come true. But in telling them to have
patience he is not telling them to do nothing, nor is he telling them just to have less violence than they
encounter. He is telling them how to live with resistance and with friction. He is telling them that we can
actually move ahead and grow if we use that friction as a way to live well in this world. For example, he is
telling them that to live the dream when one encounters the resistance of violence is to use that friction to
live with compassion and mercy instead of force. It is to give compassion and mercy to the violent who so
desperately need to find another way of life. Similarly he is telling them to give love where there is hate, and
he is telling them to be truthful in the fields where the enemy has sown lies. He is telling them that each
occasion of resistance is an opportunity to live differently. To live like that is the full sum of patience, for it is
trusting that God will provide, and that God will change the world and transform his people. Let us then learn
patience, let us learn and practice God’s own love in a world that is so sorely lacking in it. And in doing so, let
us dream of the ladder that ascends to heaven.