The Fear of God

Jesus tells of a field in which an enemy sows weeds among the wheat. The servants want to uproot the weeds immediately, but the master forbids it, lest the wheat be damaged. At harvest, the wheat and weeds are separated. Jesus later explains: The sower is God himself. The field is the world. The good seeds are the children of God. The weeds are the children of the evil one. The enemy is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age. The angels perform the final separation.

The parable Jesus tells here is the whole story of humanity: from Adam and Eve and the fall of creation from relationship with God through to Jesus’s return to judge every person, gather all things back to God, and bring all of creation to completion. There’s an epic battle. But it’s not what you think. It’s not an epic battle between good and evil. Good has already triumphed through the Cross because there, Jesus bore our choices to separate ourselves from God, evil. We saw this battle play out when Jesus is cast out into the desert by the Holy Spirit, foreshadowed already in the book of Job. Satan tempts Jesus with everything by which you and I are tempted for he is of flesh just like you and I: hungry, fearful, alone, without power. And Jesus turns again and again, all the way to the Cross, to God. Evil is overcome, and has always been so, by Christ upon the Cross. 

The epic battle that goes on then isn’t between God and Satan. Spoiler alert: God has won already. The epic battle is within us and between us. And it’s a daily one. We ourselves are the battleground, the heaven and hell. Heaven and hell are not places per se. Rather they are our own struggles to let go of our pride and presumption; our envy and jealousy, our greed and our despair; it is the battle we wage with one another with childish ignorance and naive presumption that we are right and they are wrong; that what we see and how we understand, is God’s own wisdom.

The battle between good and evil is whether we allow our own rendering of the world to become an idol we worship, cherish and protect at all costs, or whether we allow what God has already written on our hearts and minds, and into the fabric of this world, to be revealed to us as we follow Jesus; and are pressed, pulled, challenged, chastened as we stay with him, as we remain faithful. 

But note something about this passage. The servants expect immediate judgment and so ask the sower if in fact they should pluck up the fruitless weeds. The sower says no. For God does not judge immediately. I came for the sick to bind up and to heal; to offer mercy and restoration. What we find instead of knee jerk judgments and action akin to our own myopic judgment and responses, is God's astonishing patience.

The delay before harvest demonstrates God’s mercy, freedom, and offering to us the possibility of repentance. The present age is therefore an age of divine longsuffering. One in which it appears to us all too often - in our vast fields of the weeds of our own lives and those of others - God the sower is not there. Yet the planting and growing season is not one of the sower's absence but of his patient waiting so that the weeds might yet - in following Christ - become wheat.

In this time of waiting, Jesus comes with a warning to wake us up: “Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!" 

Listen carefully to this part. Jesus does want us to fear hell. That is, to fear life without truth, without God. This is not to cause anxiety or panic, but rather such fear is intended to drive us to him; away from the sorts of false promises of power, control, self reliance and certainty in worldly things that Satan offered to Jesus in the desert, and to the currently difficult and often arduous calling to follow Jesus; to bear the way of the Cross that call for compassion, sacrifice, and self control in the face of a world that insists you topple your enemies.

In God’s time, we will come before him face to face in a decisive confrontation with truth where everything will be burned away like chaff. So Jesus’s call to follow him is a warning and a plea to properly fear God: it’s a provocation to seek and not presume, to ask, to confess, to accept correction, discipline, redirection, to submit ourselves to his whittling, so that we can follow him where he goes; into a relationship with his Father that we cannot fully understand or get to ourselves. “Fear God and give glory to Him, for the hour of His judgment has come; and worship Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and springs of water,” we hear in Revelation 14. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.”

As my doctoral supervisor noted to me: “If we do not fear God we do not know God; we have missed the mark on who God is. True fear is that displayed by Peter, James and John when they bow down at Jesus’s transfiguration; still getting it wrong when they try to build three shelters, but in a humbled posture of reception fitting God’s holy presence; or John the Baptist, “repent for the kingdom of God is at hand, I am not worthy to untie his sandals.” After all, how can God forgive us if we never repent? And how can we truly repent if we do not know who it is we have blasphemed? Divine grace, in its awesome and miraculous form, is recognizable only in the context of our fear of God.” For it is only through awe, reverence, bowing a knee, confession and repentance, that we might get out of our own heads and open ourselves to receive the one whom we will one day see face to face; the one that will transform us from weeds into wheat. AMEN