Some of you have been generous with advice about what to give my mother for her 95th birthday. Thank you for your suggestions which ranged from the Camaro one reader was trying to sell to a flower bouquet. It was my wife who came up with the winning idea—a pair of gloves with claws at the fingertips to aid with digging. You see, my mother actually enjoys weeding, a job that many people hate. She says that her new claws are perfect for digging out the most persistent of her garden enemies.
Although I do not have the same enthusiasm for pulling weeds that my mother does, I have found myself enjoying (or at least not hating) it. There is something satisfying about clearing a flower bed of everything but beauty. When I weed, I think of myself as sovereign over my garden kingdom. “You may remain,” I announce to a blooming Pansy. “You shall be cast into utter darkness,” I inform Crabby Grass and Mr. Thistle. Out they go, and immediately I am better able to appreciate Pansy’s delicate beauty.
I expect that Jesus would enjoy Mom’s new claw paws and would probably even join her in an early morning session of weeding. In Matthew 13, he tells two parables that use weeds as a metaphor. In the Parable of the Soils, weeds choke, entangle, and destroy the productive plants that Jesus loves. In the second parable, Jesus passes sentence. “Collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned,” he tells his servants in verse 30. In explaining the parable, Jesus said, “As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 13:40-42)
Does that sentence seem overly harsh? Before you answer that, look at what this judgment accomplishes: “Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father,” (Matthew 13:43) Like the Pansy whose beauty was hidden by the weeds, your glory is being obscured. Anything that diminishes your shine is a weed in God’s Garden, and he will not tolerate it. Weeds will be pulled and destroyed.
Are there weeds in your garden? Jeremiah 5:25b says, “Your sins have deprived you of good.” Sins must be weeded. Don’t make me send my mother and her claw paws.