Unitarian Universalist Meeting of South Berkshire

 

 

November 28, 2004

 

  

“Healing and Coping”

 

 

Rev. Kathy Duhon

  

           

            Jesus preached in the synagogues, and in other places, and he did healings, as we heard in the two readings from the Gospel of Matthew today.  In scholarly studies of the Christian scriptures, and from the evidence of the time, it seems clear that the folks who followed Jesus truly believed that he was doing healings.  He wasn’t the only one – there were other faith healers in the Mediterranean at the time – but Jesus stood out. 

The Biblical experts can find relative agreement that some of his teachings, as recorded in the gospels, were what he very likely said, however, there is good scholarship pointing out that some of the sayings ascribed to Jesus, perhaps many of them, were probably an accretion, what his followers added as interpretation or enhancement.  They weren’t trying to re-write history because history hadn’t been invented yet.  At that time, the way you preserved the truth was by telling it and handing it on, and it was fine to insert your own ideas.  So Jesus said many of the things in the Bible, but sometimes we cannot tell how much of what is written he actually said or how he said it.

The parable we just heard is traditionally called “the wheat and the tares”, but since no one tends to know what “tares” are – they are weeds found in grainfields – the modern designation is the “planted weeds”.  This parable is considered only distantly related to what Jesus actually said, although it is in both Matthew, which we read, and in the more recently discovered Gospel of Thomas.  That means it was probably in an oral tradition that both relied upon.  A later section in the same chapter of Matthew has Jesus interpreting the parable as being about the Judgment Day, and this part is considered to be only Matthew’s opinion and not at all what Jesus actually said.  What I am hoping to do is interpret this parable in such a way that it may reflect the original meaning that was handed down from Jesus’ teaching by oral tradition, which I may be wrong about, but hopefully the interpretation will still be useful.

Here is what the Gospel of Thomas says:  “The Kingdom of the Father is like a man who had [good] seed.  His enemy came by night and sowed weeds among the good seed.  The man did not allow them to pull up the weeds; he said to them, ‘I am afraid that you will go intending to pull up the weeds and pull up the wheat along with them.’  For on the day of the harvest the weeds will be plainly visible, and they will be pulled up and burned.”

Jesus used agricultural images regularly, and often in ways that did not bear much resemblance to actual farming practices – and not because he was a carpenter and not a farmer, but because he used surprises and twists to get peoples’ attention.  He would have known that weeds do not come from an enemy sowing them in your field, but are simply part of farming.  Before I go further with trying to understand what Jesus might have been intending with the words that Matthew and Thomas have given us for this parable, let me insert a somewhat similar wise story from the tradition of the Islamic Sufi, Mulla Nasrudin.  I believe it will help illumine the parable.

“Mulla Nasrudin decided to start a flower garden.  He prepared the soil and planted the seeds of many beautiful flowers.  But when they came up, his garden was filled not just with his chosen flowers but also overrun by dandelions.  He sought out advice from gardeners all over and tried every method known to get rid of them but to no avail.  Finally he walked all the way to the capital to speak to the royal gardener at the sheik’s palace.  The wise old man had counseled many gardeners before and suggested a variety of remedies to expel the dandelions but Mulla had tried them all.  They sat together in silence for some time and finally the gardener looked at Nasrudin and said, ‘Well, then I suggest you learn to love them.’”

Nasrudin, like Jesus, was known for telling stories that contained information that strayed factually, that was only marginally related to the actual way of doing things, such as gardening.  Nasrudin knows that most gardeners can get rid of dandelions, perhaps by the traditional method of pulling them out, and so do his listeners.  Maybe the story made them feel that the weeds were so entrenched, with such huge root systems, that pulling them out would have damaged the flowers, which is what Jesus’ parable was concerned about with the wheat.

Jesus and Nasrudin were both healers of souls, and I want to look at these stories with that in mind.  This helps me to believe that the core of what is written in Matthew and Thomas was said by Jesus authentically, and with a different meaning than usually ascribed, one of healing rather than judgment.  I believe that Jesus and Mulla were saying that the weeds and the dandelions are what we find in our lives that we do not want to be there, the stuff that feels like it is choking out our beauty and our strength; the stuff that can make us physically ill and emotionally overwrought.  These weeds may represent the external bad things that happen to us, that we certainly righteously can blame upon “an enemy”, an outside source that causes us harm.  I have a feeling, though, that Jesus was good at poking fun, as was Nasrudin, and that they were talking more about our internal weeds.  After all, we try to blame all our faults on outside conditions, which is as ludicrous as blaming an enemy for planting the kinds of weeds that are usually found in grainfields.  And anyway, problems that come to us from the outside must be dealt with from within as well.

Just as Jesus may have been reminding his followers that we tend to place the blame for our faults elsewhere, or concentrate too much on the enemy and not on our response, Mulla was demonstrating another thing we usually do.  When there are problems in our lives that we’d like to get rid of, we consult the experts and try a variety of cures.  We read this book, or follow that new regimen, or listen to what someone we trust recommends.  Maybe we try all these ways of rooting out what we don’t like in ourselves.  Maybe we only half try them, which we suspect is what happens in Mulla’s story.  But whatever we do, we are not going to easily uproot the deepest parts of our lives that we do not like.  Our impatience, our sloppiness, our anger, our insecurity, our greed, our need to be liked – none of these will simply be removed from our lives without disrupting some of who we most essentially are.  And certainly the external issues – the betrayals and antagonisms from others, from enemies and friends alike, are not easily pulled out of our souls.

We come to the part of the story that is similar in both Jesus’ and Mulla’s tales – the weeds are deliberately left to grow.  Now, they are only left to grow after attempts to get rid of them have failed in Nasrudin’s story; and in the parable, they are left to grow after they are deemed too entrenched to remove without hurting the wheat, but in both stories, it seems better to leave them be.  In the parable, at harvest-time, it will be easy to destroy what is not wanted, while Mulla is supposed to learn to love his weeds. 

Our weeds are all internal, whether they are our unliked traits, that we had best learn to love, or they are awful things done to us by an enemy.  What is done to us is taken within and becomes something that we must wrestle with inside.  Healing has much to do with acceptance, although it is in the realm of Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous serenity prayer – “God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”

Jesus and Mulla Nasrudin were telling folks that some healing is mostly about coping.  You weed what you can, you try as best as you can to remove what is harmful to your life, but in the end, some things are intractable.  Sometimes healing is having the “grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed.” 

“We are all dying.  We are all living.  We are all suffering.  We are all healing.” {from reading for 2 voices}  The grace note from Kathy Fuson Hurt was a painful reminder that life is ungentle, that suffering wounds us.  If we stayed with only our own suffering as a private lament, the harvest would be one of weeds alone.  If we turn our pain to the service of others, then we are what Henri Nouwen called “wounded healers”.  As Kathy Hurt says, “Though wounded past all healing, because wounded past all healing, I can heal others and so be made whole.”

At the harvest/healing time in our lives, when we reckon what we have produced and what kind of flowers we are, which can come at any moment that we pause to consider the meaning of our lives, the stuff we did not like will easily be separated out for the rubbish heap.  Who we are is the whole grain, the beloved flower.

I am reminded of one of my favorite Martin Luther King, Jr. sayings, and though it’s not agricultural, it’s from the images of the natural world.  “If it were not for the wind in my face, I could fly like an eagle.  But if it were not for the wind in my face, I would not be able to fly at all.”  The part that we think we are healing from, that piece that was planted by an enemy, that is like a great wind against us, is the same deeply ingrained aspect of our being that lifts us up and helps make us who we are.

The other thing about this quote is that King did not exclude his enemies.  Wisdom stories can often be entered from many angles.  Jesus and Mulla could have been saying that we need to accept our enemies, live with them, learn to love them, appreciate that they are part of us and help make us who we are.  I want to finish with one of those extraordinary stories of soul healing that comes from the heart of suffering at the hands of an enemy.

Irishman Brian Keenan was held hostage for four years in Beirut, Lebanon.  He was beaten and brutalized.  He said that he knew the terrorist mind because he had grown up in Belfast.  “I could see the man, a man not defined by Islam or by ethnic background, a man more confused than the man in chains, a man more hurt and anguished than the man he had just beaten.”

Keenan was chained to another prisoner, and they found solace in the psalms and in devotional moments.  He said, “We talked not of a God in the Christian tradition, but of some force more primitive, more immediate and vital, a presence rather than a set of beliefs…In its own way our isolation had expanded the heart not to reach out to a detached God but to find and become part of whatever God may be… In the circumstances in which we found ourselves physically chained together we both realized an extraordinary capacity to unchain ourselves from what we had known and been – to set free those trapped people and parts of ourselves.  We came to understand that these trapped people included our own captors and we were to incorporate them into our healing process.”

I invite you to bring into your healing process all the weeds of your lives, to learn to love them and to know that your oneness is beyond this suffering, and your healing is real and true.  Amen.