I don’t know if there are any Archers fans in the house. I am not a devotee but like for many people it’s been part of the background noise of my life with different members of the family over the years being ardent fans, and it being on at the sort of times of day one is chopping vegetables or washing up.
One storyline you may remember was Peggy Woolley’s desire to give £500,000 towards a legacy project for farming in Ambridge. It was nailbiting who would attract this grant, in the end it was neither her organic farming son, Tony, nor or her nephew David, but her great niece Pip who won the competition for a re-wilding project. In a dramatic twist in the story, Archer money did not remain in the family, Rex Fairbrother and Kirsty Miller, both of whom have history with members of the Archer clan now manage the rewilding project.
The characters have wrestled with competing visions of stewardship, inheritance and responsibility, discovering that caring for creation is rarely straightforward. Those fictional conversations are not unlike some very real debates taking place within the Church of England today, including at General Synod, where its members amongst other debates asked how our faith should shape our care for God’s creation; a question was raised about how 30% of the Church’s land could be given over to re-wilding. Some of the attendant disapproval reminded me of the debates in the Archers about 5 years or so ago when all this came up there. Beneath these practical questions lies a deeply theological one: what kind of world has God entrusted to our care, and what sort of stewards are we called to be?
It is no coincidence that today’s Gospel is also about a field.
Jesus tells of a farmer who sows good seed, only for an enemy to sow weeds among the wheat under cover of darkness. The servants are horrified when they discover the problem. Their instinct is immediate and understandable: “Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up?”
The master says no.
“Let both grow together until the harvest.”
That answer feels unsatisfactory. We need decisive and immediate action. We expect good to triumph visibly over evil. Yet Jesus insists that God’s kingdom often grows in ways that demand patience rather than haste.
The detail matters. The “tares” or darnel closely resembled wheat until harvest time. Pull them up too soon, and you would destroy the wheat along with the weeds because their roots had become intertwined.
The servants simply cannot see clearly enough.
Perhaps that is the point.
Our first reading from Isaiah comes from another time when appearances suggested that evil had won. Israel is in exile. Jerusalem has fallen. Babylon seems invincible. Yet into that despair comes God’s magnificent declaration:
“I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God.”
History, Isaiah is saying, is not ultimately written by emperors or armies. It belongs to God.
That same confidence is at the heart of Jesus’ parable. The weeds do not prove that the farmer has failed. Nor do they mean that the harvest will never come. They simply remind us that we are living in the middle of the story rather than at its end.
The Odyssey continuse to captivate us nearly three thousand years on. Nolan’s film is an astonishing evocation of the Greek epic, as faithful as any three hour film can be to 24 books of poetry. Odysseus’ long journey home is so much more than an adventure, let’s not mistake it for a Christian tale, but it has influenced our culture in myriad ways. One of many moving aspects is how the enduring love between Penelope and Odysseus contrasts strikingly with the other fractured marriages the Trojan war causes. There are echoes here of Norma’s new novel she will present to us later.
The Hero Journey endures because it resonates with living life without seeing the ending.
The Christian story is different from Homer’s in one decisive respect. Odysseus survives largely by his own cunning. The Gospel tells us that our hope rests not in cleverness but in God’s faithfulness. The Lord who declares in Isaiah, “I am the first and the last,” is the same Lord who promises that the harvest belongs to him.
That is why Jesus warns against rushing to judgement. Jesus reserves that final ingathering to God alone, well reflected in many harvest hymns.
We are called to keep sowing good seed. To nurture faith where we find it. To resist evil without imagining that we ourselves can finally separate wheat from weeds – in this life there is not a weed or sin free field.
In a world that demands instant verdicts, outrage and certainty, the patience of God can seem pretty scandalous. Yet it is precisely that patience which gives space for repentance, for growth and for grace.
The field is God’s, weeds and all. The harvest is God’s too, his alone to divide wheat from tares.
History is God’s, however much we try to conquer it.
Like the servants in the field, the enduring Archer farming clan in Ambridge, we labour faithfully without pretending to know everything. And like all pilgrims on a long journey home, we walk in hope, confident that the God who began the story will also bring it to its glorious fulfilment. Amen.