The Immense Love of God

This post is about the immense love of God and how we make it smaller than it actually is. Thinking about the story Jesus told about the wheat and the weeds in Matthew chapter 13 (24-30, 36-43).

I want to write about a love that encompasses all: a love that does not wish to reject anyone, a love that is rich in mercy even towards the undeserving.

The trouble is that when I write “even the undeserving”, you are thinking already about someone whose behaviour appalls you- and it never takes us very long to think of recent examples. We say to ourselves (consciously or unconsciously) that such people are the weeds in the world. If only they were uprooted and judged and thrown away the world would be a better place. And at first glance the parable of the wheat and the weeds affirms our view.

But if we think that it’s all ‘very simple’: good people go to heaven, bad people go to hell, we have only given the story a cursory glance. We have listened with shallow ears. We have not thought deeply. We have in fact raced to the end of the story where Jesus talks about “the end of the age” and not paused long enough to think about the biggest question posed by this parable.
The biggest question posed by this parable is neither of these two questions:

But these are not the biggest question that lurks under the surface of this story.
This is one of the very few parables Jesus explains because his disciples ask him explained the story. The very matter of fact literally stick explanation that Jesus gives feels, to me anyway, like a frustrated adult explaining something to a child which the child should have been able to work out for themselves.
“This is this, that is that, the other is the other”.

But Jesus doesn’t answer the biggest question.
Before I suggest what that question is and attempt to answer it, let’s think about why Jesus doesn’t answer the biggest question.
Firstly, it’s because the disciples haven’t asked it – they simply haven’t thought hard enough and secondly it’s because Jesus doesn’t do people’s thinking for them. It is as if he is saying “you want to know what this means?… Here you go, here is a simple explanation but he closes this explanation with that enigmatic phrase “he who has ears to hear let him listen”. In other words “think a bit harder, guys!”

So what is the biggest question that lies below the surface of this parable? What is it that the disciples have missed? In my opinion, here it is:

“why does God leave the world the way it is for so long with good and evil alongside one another?”
So why does he?

I actually gave you the answer in my very first sentence and in the title of this post. He does so because of his immense love.
Most of us read this as a parable about judgement but it is not. It is a parable about the immense, maddening, infuriating, patient love of God who is not willing for any to perish but for everyone to come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9).
Our problem with this story is that we think it’s easy to tell a weed from a wheat.
And we like uniformity/conformity and easy obvious answers. But telling a weed from the wheat is not so obvious (I should know I’m a very uneducated gardener).

The farmer acknowledges the existence of the weeds but he does not allow his workers to pull them up, why not?
In the story, Jesus says it is because the wheat will be damaged but I also wonder if it is not linked to that other instruction of Jesus, the one that in my opinion is most universally ignored.

This is a very solemn and unequivocal instruction straight from Jesus himself and what it says is that it is not our place to decide who is in, who is out, who is a ‘bad ‘un’/lost cause or who for that matter is ‘good’.
Jesus told another very similar story about sheep and goats but in our part of the world we miss the point of this story because we think that sheep and goats are two very different creatures, easy to tell apart. If you have ever seen a flock of Middle Eastern sheep and goats you will know that this is not the case.

The fact is that we are uncomfortable with God’s decision to leave the world as a diverse mix of good and evil. We like things to be neat and tidy.
Here are two pictures, both of a forest but both very different.

In one we see messy, wild growth. In this forest there is more light, more variety and diversity and therefore the soil will be replenished. In the other picture we see a uniform, cultivated forest. But because all the plants are the same height there is less light, there are fewer other plants and the soil will be used up.
If we apply these images to church in which one are we the more comfortable? Isn’t it the case that we feel more comfortable with white, middle-class, well-educated people ‘just like us’ (obviously I write as someone fulfilling all those criteria).
We are uncomfortable when it all gets messy but the reality is that diversity is good for us.

So this parable has taught us that we must
think deeper
not judge
to trust the immense love of God.

And probably most people reading this are intellectually assenting to that sentence “the immense love of God is that he is patient with people who are undeserving” as far as it goes there is nothing wrong with that sentence. You would be hard pushed to disagree with it from a theological viewpoint.
The issue is that whilst there is nothing wrong with the sentence there is something wrong with the way we put ourselves in relation to that sentence.
We grasp something of life changing proportions when we say for ourselves “the immense love of God is that he is patient with me– even though I am undeserving”. Even though God knows my inner faults, my lack of faith, my unwillingness to forgive others, my preoccupation with my own needs and hopes and dreams, my reluctance to share generously of my time, talents or money, my preference for self-preservation rather than self-sacrifice.
God, who called you by name and made you his own has called you to a life of faith for commitment to living within this love of God and living out that love in the world which is a messy place and we are also messy people. And God is infinitely patient with us when we fail.
CS Lewis said the problem with good and evil in the world is not that there is both good and evil in the world but that the line between good and evil goes directly through me. Evil is not “over there” or “those people” evil, even if it is simply ‘petty complacency’ that is within me.
Why else did Paul write about being the greatest of all sinners (1Tim 1:5) Paul owned his own undeservingness. And if we don’t own it, the story of the cross and resurrection loses its power. Because unless we understand that Christ came into the world to die for sinners, of whom I am one, then the cross makes no sense.
You do not understand it until you ‘taste it’ both figuratively and actually. The receiving of the bread and wine is meant to give us a visceral sense of the cost of God’s immense love. Christ came into our world and met ordinary people who treated him extraordinarily badly, they were not exceptional sinners, they were just ordinary people, like you and like me. And yet Jesus said of them “Father, forgive them”.

This is the immense love of God. You have no right to it and you have no right to exclude anyone else from it.