Wheat and Tares

First off we have to affirm that we are exceeding complex and contradicted and this is our gift and our lot for it brings us to fruition, albeit the hard way. The greatest evil can produce in us the greatest good with the intervention of faith.  If you want examples of this consider those women in the heritage of Messiah, Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba. Tares are impervious to faith.

Van Gogh. Sheaves of Wheat. 1890.

We weave a web of choices around us all our lives that condition everything else that happens one way or another. To hold a child for school until 6 instead of 5 conditions all his relations thereafter in the people he knows. It is easy to see in a child, what influences are brought or not to bear in their lives, but not so much in our own, which we cannot see so well, like the choices we did not make, omitted, obfuscated, feared, compromised.

 If we are going to proceed in a grownup fashion with our suffering and engagement with the societies of the world where we live and love, the institutions that both control and benefit us, hold us in place until we are ripen in thought in the only realm that matters, the spirit, then we have to realize these evils are there to form us to a purpose, but it is up to us to do it. It is a struggle every day, as that saying goes, submit yourself to the Lord, resist the devil and he will flee from you. That suggests the repulsive power to evil we become, the danger to it, so ask the question how can we be so formed? How can we become so real that the wind separates the wheat from the chaff, the spirit blows the chaff away? I throw them together into the air in front of a fan, if there is no wind. The wheat has density, mass. Gravity causes it sink, but the chaff has no density, no being in itself and it is carried off.  This throwing into the air is how my gracious and great chow chow Blessing would alert me to the quarter size desert tortoises in our lawn in those years when those two seasoned adults I had adopted gave birth to clutches of dozens. They were impossible to see in the grass so Blessing would either pick them up gently and lay them at my feet, or throw them up into the air in play so I would see. She never hurt one. This is no fun process, suffering confinements in the seed head while we grow the choices of discrimination and learning in the refinements of all of us together.

So how are we to speak of the things it is impossible to speak, This Wheatfield with Crows, for which we have no words but the images surround us day and night and we can hardly put them in any order but still they surround us, the travesties, abuses, rejections  oppressions galore. And if we do speak them the greater fabric of our lives can come apart, for they were, are things done to us by those we love, who we trust and this trust  betrayed proves these souls a traitor to the bonds of love. The answer to this long and short, to these rhinoceroses upon the piano, is we have to bear it, for life makes it so. So look at it and weep, but there is  the beginning of bearing one another’s burdens, that deepens in us the compassion for our own sins and forgiveness by bearing another’s. Bu realize the cord pulls another and the whole ball can unravel in a second if we speak the truth, so speak it, let the wind of the mountain blow upon the marsh and dry it up and blow it away, but speak it to the one person you can trust, all you can bear, and leave the rest, the horrid particulars, the step by step silent. And go on. Each morning leave the house before dawn at first light and walk in the bird song and know that everything that has breath praises and join in.

That is the personal response to childhood sufferings. Yes most of it happens to us before we can defend ourselves and then we live the rest of our lives with it buried. So let us give attention to these forces against the child. First they think they are righteous and good. Know that for a fact. They will not admit to less. But that’s what chaff does. It holds the wheat in place, pressing upon it until the wheat throws it off. That is a personal force against the child, every child, everyone who comes into the world, who leaves that situation and cleaves unto its own desire. But there is a social force against the child more, that is the tare. It grows right up beside the wheat, looks just like the wheat. You cannot tell them apart at all easily. We can surmise from Macbeth the chaff will smile and smile and be a villain. We can surmise that every salesman, every NLP practitioner has learned to force and fake empathy upon you to gain your trust to capitalize your soul, merchandise your mind. But if we bring it more to home, to teachers, leaders, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, senators, neighbors, pastors, you can keep naming them, we can’t tell them apart until they betray us, then we are thrown back into the beginnings of our betrayals. It’s not an easy road. And know this, to confront these is not the way.

There is a pyramid of authority among those leaders who have worked hard to qualify for their position. Scratch the patina and you will find misdoing and deception. That's how they qualify to their superiors. We're not talking about how they qualify to their followers who have a lower standard of delusion. The tares think they’re wheat, the lords think they're sheep, the guilty think they're innocent.

If you mess with those who transform themselves into the apostles of the Messiah they will accuse you, but it wouldn't look that way. Tares among wheat. Wolves among the sheep even to the point where the counterfeit wolf/shepherd lies down with the lamb, what Dante calls the shepherd wolf, a particularly virulent form of tare.

What is the way?

The weeds growing are not simple weeds but close counterfeits. False wheat. “Since the poisonous weeds look so much like wheat, do the weeds know that they are weeds? Do the weeds in Wheatfield with Sheaves 1885 believe themselves to be wheat? And since weeds traditionally rob the soil of nutrients and take aggressive control over garden plot, and since the weeds are often said to “choke” the plants, wouldn’t the aggressiveness of Wheatfield with Lark, 1883 be a sign of weedness rather than wheatness?” Bishop Owles.  Roman law prohibited sowing darnel among the wheat of an enemy. Nazis tried to land infected rats off the English coast, airlifted hoof and mouth disease to England, but the Allies counter dropped potato beetles.The field is the world but St. Augustine points out that the invisible distinction between "wheat" and "tares" also runs through the Church: He was in the world and the world was made by  him and the world knew him not the parable of the Leaven indicates.

Van Gogh Wheatfields  The Wheat Fields is a series of dozens of paintings. In 1876 Van Gogh was assigned a post in Isleworth, England to teach Bible classes and  preached in the Methodist church. in southern Belgium where he doctored and ministered to coal miners. He had a six-month trial at a small salary and preached in an old dance hall, established and taught Bible school.

Wheatfield with Sheaves. Van Gogh

 In 1885 he described his painting of peasants as the most essential contribution to modern art. The digger and ploughman were also symbols of struggle to reach the Kingdom. Contrast this with Michelangelo who celebrated the heroic men of renown and  empire. It takes some getting used to see beings for what they are, not models of excellence, but rulers of the world who in Psalm 149 are  fettered with iron, kings bound with chains executed in judgment, which honor all saints have to execute vengeance in song on the powers of the air to the glory of HalleluYah.

 However, the final judgment will be the "ultimate turning-point when the period of the secret growth of God's kingdom alongside the continued activity of the evil one will Peasant Burning Weeds 1883 be brought to an end, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear," which occurs after biblical passages with a hidden meaning (see Luke 14:34-35 and Mark 4:1-9).

 

According to non-literal readings of Jesus's explanation, "the children of the evil one" and Wheatfield with Crows 1890 "the children of the kingdom“ are something else than humans. Origin: the devil sows tares— that is, evil opinions— over and among natural conceptions… those who become conscious that they have received the seeds of the evil one in themselves shall wail and be angry against themselves; for this is the gnashing of teeth. 

St. Gregory of Nyssa “Scripture means by the good seed the corresponding impulses of the soul, each one of which, if only they are cultured for good, necessarily puts forth the fruit of virtue within us.  But since there has been scattered amongst these the bad seed of the error of judgment… the seed of anger does not steel us to be brave, but only arms us to fight with our own people; and the power of loving deserts its intellectual objects and becomes completely mad for the immoderate enjoyment of pleasures of sense… Therefore the Husbandman leaves those bastard seeds within us, not for them always to overwhelm the more precious crop, but in order that the land itself (for so, in his allegory, he calls the heart) by its native inherent power, which is that of reasoning, may wither up the one growth and may render the other fruitful”  St Macrina; Van Gogh painted wheat fields: Hidden meanings? Wheat Field with Crows? Yvonne Korshak  analyzes the painting and reveals various images hidden throughout the canvas. These images include a giant bird filling the sky, a "cloud presence" and a Gabriel-like trumpeter within the clouds (shown in the detail at right)

The enemy sows the tares. Jacob have I loved but Esau I have hated written from beneath, not above, shows how Jacob cheated E and feared him before their reunion. But Jacob sought in a prayer that E would not kill him and prevent the promise. Many layered. Brothers, Jacob and angel of Esau, Abel and Cain, the two Enochs. Perez and Zerah – Judah’s daughter-in-law, Tamar, widowed, did not want to be childless, wrapping her face in a veil and disguising herself as a prostitute. She intercepts Judah on the road and he sleeps with her. The result of their union was Perez and Zerah (Genesis 38:12-30). From Perez would come the family of David (Ruth 4:18-22).

 Ephraim and Manasseh –not directly stated that the two sons of Joseph and Asenath were twins, but there is reason to believe they were. First, Genesis mentions they were both born “before the year of famine came” (Genesis 41:50). Second, two conceptions are not mentioned in the text. Third, if they are twins they fit nicely into the pattern seen in the lives of Isaac and Judah: both their younger twins inherited the birthright, just as the younger Ephraim was blessed first by Jacob (Genesis 48:19). Jacob promised that both Ephraim and Manasseh would become patriarchs of a multitude, which began a traditional blessing said in Israel: “God make you as Ephraim and as Manasseh” (Genesis 48:20).

Is the evil in Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown satirical or real? The evil in the good. The preaching of strife in Paul. Salvation even in the midst. The pastors say tares are there to practice our tolerance, that maybe they will see who they are. Tare DNA is fixed as wheat and only want to take over, have dominion.

We are so utterly caught in our own web but at the same time it is also somehow wound around us too. It becomes synchronist when we realize this, that it is both our own choosing and something more. So if you have a peculiar history in some regard, say enthusiast religion stemming from genuine experience of transcendence, and you start to seek where it leads in the world then you are going to come up against the more beautiful counterfeits that also somehow do you good. Like chaff meant to hold the wheat in place while it ripens but that the wind drives away.

Only to those immersed in the web, seduced from their own identity, is any of this unbelievable. The believers outnumber the observer, they are willing to compromise every sense impression out of a desire to do good, whatever good is to countenance embezzlement, abuse , exploitation, profit taking, rejection. And the irony is is does them some good. Who knows what doubts and faith the soul must redeem itself from, what reparation?

Gustave Dore

The tares think they’re wheat, the lords think they're sheep, the guilty think they're innocent. If you mess with those who transform themselves into the apostles of the Messiah they will accuse you, but it wouldn't look that way.  

There is a pyramid of authority among those leaders who have worked hard to qualify for their position. Scratch the patina and you will find misdoing and deception. That's how they qualify to their superiors.We're not talking about how they qualify to their followers who have a lower standard of delusion.  It is the nature of weeds to be aggressive. 

Sheep among wolves. Tares among wheat. The wolf lies down with the lamb is what Dante calls the shepherd wolf.

The weeds growing are not simple weeds but close counterfeits. False wheat. “Since the poisonous weeds look so much like wheat, do the weeds know that they are weeds?