Patience

Jesus said to his disciples: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea, which collects fish of every kind. When it is full they haul it ashore and sit down to put what is good into buckets. What is bad they throw away. Thus it will be at the end of the age. The angels will go out and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.” (Matthew 13.47-50)

In the Hebrew tradition, a rabbi is someone who teaches. Hence, the word, when translated, is either teacher or master, indicating someone who is qualified to offer lessons or guidance, particularly in spiritual or scriptural matters. So, it makes sense that Jesus of Nazareth is often addressed in the gospels as Rabbi, particularly when someone poses a question to him, seeking an answer to a quandary.

One of Rabbi Jesus’ favorite tools for teaching, and all teachers have their bag of tricks, was to tell parables, short and simple stories that illustrate some truth. They could be as short as a sentence or two, such as the parable of the leaven that the housewife uses, or as long as a detailed narrative, such as the parable of the prodigal son or the parable of the good Samaritan.

It is important to remember this facet of Rabbi Jesus’ teachings when we look at the section of Matthew’s gospel that we are currently studying in Chapter 13. Within this chapter, we can find five, maybe six different parables, each one used by Jesus to teach his disciples an important truth. The selection from the Common Lectionary for this Sunday has three rather compressed parables back to back.

The first two are very familiar, both of them having to do with buried treasure. In the first, a man happens upon treasure left behind in a field, hides it again, and sells everything he has so he can buy the field that contains the hidden treasure. In the second, a merchant is looking for pearls and is fortunate enough to find one with a high value. He also goes and sells all that he has so he can buy the precious gem.

While there are levels of complexity to parables, these two are relatively simple. Both easily can be understood as the situation of the disciple of Rabbi Jesus who gives up everything he or she has so that they might have something of more value. It is what the fishermen at the Sea of Galilee did when they dropped their nets and it is what Matthew the tax-collector did when he left the money booth behind.

Of course, the contrary is found in the young rich man who, when advised by Rabbi Jesus to sell everything he has, give it to the poor, and come follow him, walks away sad, because he can’t let go of his wealth. The parable of the hidden treasure and the parable of the pearl both make a point to emphasize that the two men are out of their mind with joy in finding the treasure, that is, the way of Jesus, unlike the rich man who is sad because he can’t give up what he has in the hope that he is getting something better in the long run.

The third parable that follows is interesting for several reasons. For one, it is almost a duplicate of an earlier one, using different imagery, but making much the same point. That earlier parable, which we saw last week, was the parable of the weeds in the wheat and the nasty mess that resulted because of the mix of good and bad. In that parable, as we heard, the farmer tells his workers to let the weeds grow with the wheat until harvest time. Then they can separate the kernels of wheat from the trash of the weeds.

So, when Rabbi Jesus tells of a net thrown into the sea that collects fish of every kind, some bottom feeders, some good, we should hear overtones of the earlier parable. Again, we have a mix of good stuff and bad stuff. And, like the earlier parable, somebody eventually sits down and separates the good from the bad. In this instance, it is the fishermen who, once they’re back on shore, get two buckets, one in which they toss good fish, the other in which they toss the bad fish.

As with the weeds in the wheat, there is a deliberate period of waiting. For the farmer, it waiting till the harvest. For the fishermen, it is waiting until they are back on shore. Both parables are making the same point–life is a mix of good and bad and God, the Just Judge, will sort it out in the end. He’s the one whose job it is to divide the good from the bad.

Of course, the parable of the dragnet posits angels as the ones who do the separating. As the parable says, “The angels will go out and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace.” Angels, being messengers of God, can be trusted to do the job right. And, both stories end with bad stuff getting thrown into a fire, which we really shouldn’t over interpret because, after all, trash typically ends up in a fire.

And both make a point of describing how the bad elements end up “wailing and grinding their teeth,” a more intense way of describing the disappointment of the rich young man who walked away from discipleship because he found it too difficult. In other words, those who follow the ways of Jesus end up overjoyed and those who follow their own ways end up mightily disappointed. 

For my part, I like the patient endurance motif in both of these parables, that of the weeds in the wheat and that of the dragnet that has edibles and non-edibles in it. It is a subtle message, not front and center, but clearly an important element in these stories. And, given the circumstances of the early listeners, it rang true. They knew from personal experience that following the ways of the Rabbi did not bring immediate dividends. Oftentimes, just the opposite, including persecution and ostracization. 

Hence, the need for patience. And, as I ponder the parable of the dragnet, I think it might even be telling us to show some patience towards ourselves. Sure, it’s easy to see how we have to be patient with the people we don’t like or don’t agree with, assuming–in our great wisdom–that they will get their just desserts in the end. Certainly there is that element in the parable.

But we also have to extend patience to ourselves because, as pointed out last week, we’re a mix of good and bad ourselves. Rarely, if ever, do we find someone who is totally good or, for that matter, totally bad. Humankind, made of one-part divine inspiration and one-part mud from the earth, generally comes with some of both. And that includes you and me.

As we move through life like a dragnet, we pick up many things, some good, some less good. The good stuff we call virtues; the bad stuff we call vices. And, depending on where we drop our nets for a catch, there can be more of one and less of the other, or, if it’s a really good fishing day, an equal mix of both. Rare indeed is the person who goes through life without a vice or two or three or four.

Generally, we’re well aware of them, at least in our more honest moments, which usually pop onto the screen the last thing at night before sleep comes or the first thing in the morning before caffeine kicks in. We don’t really need a mirror to see our blemishes and our wrinkles. As a rule, we’re battling our demons all day and maybe a good part of the night, so we’re on a first-name basis with them.

That is not to say that there is no such thing as willful blindness on our parts. Some of us may have a special skill set in avoiding an honest-to-goodness moral inventory of our lives. And that’s not necessarily a good thing. Without a pretty good sense of our own moral flaws and faults, we end up making other people’s lives miserable and ours as well. Twenty-twenty vision helps us stay more or less on the road.

Of course, we like to distract ourselves from our faults by keeping an eye on other people’s faults. That’s the oldest game in town. It’s a good diversionary tactic, scrutinizing and salivating over other people’s failures, blissfully blind to our own fiascos, which, as a rule, bear a remarkable similarity to those whom we criticize the most.

Anyway, back to the parable. Assuming we aren’t wasting our time working as private investigators into other people’s lives–and it is a waste of time–we generally have enough self-awareness to know our good points and our bad points, our pluses and our minuses, our virtues and our vices. And, if we’re striving to be a better person tomorrow than we are today–which followers of Rabbi Jesus always strive for–then we know a good deal about our faults.

And, knowing where the work needs to be done, we can do one of two things. We can give up, which is always the easy way out, capitulating to and accommodating our demons. Or we can stay on the job, seeking to become the person we were created to be, battling our demons day-in and day-out, praying for the stamina to stay in the fight.

That’s where patience comes into play. Anyway, the right balance of patience. We need patience with ourselves to face the new day in the hope that we will see some interior improvement at the end of the day. And if not, then we have the patience to try again, and again, and again, accepting the reality that small steps get us somewhere as surely as big steps, just not as quickly.

Of course, we can err on the side of being overly patient with ourselves, which smells much the same as laziness and can slip into complacency, if we’re not careful. But for the serious-minded disciple, the one who is both aware of personal sinfulness and who doesn’t want to swim in the molasses of moral laziness forever, then we direct our efforts to slow, but steady steps towards improvement.

The beauty of the parable of the weeds in the wheat and the dragnet filled with good and bad fish is that the Most High God ends up being the one who sits down with the two buckets in front of him. And, if we’re making any effort at all in becoming a halfway decent person, there is a good chance he won’t throw us away just because we’re a piece of pottery that shows some wear and tear. 

We can be hopeful that he remembers how we looked when he formed us out of mud with his own hands, breathed his life into us, and put us into the world to carry his love to others. And, even if we’ve lost our shine, we can pray he’ll still see something beautiful in us, something worth keeping. And maybe, just maybe, he’ll reach into the mud and begin to patiently patch up our cracks and breaks, confident that we can be made new again by his loving hands.

–Jeremy Myers