GOP Gospel: The Wheat and the Weeds

[tealin]

Day 13 of my Lent project. For background, please read this.

A reading from the Gospel according to the GOP:

He put before them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, "Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?" He answered, "An enemy has done this." The slaves said to him, "Then do you want us to go out and gather them?" He replied, "Yes, clear out every weed, and put down mulch so that no new weeds will sprout. If you find a stalk of wheat whose roots are so entangled with the weeds that pulling up the weeds will uproot the wheat also, then that wheat is no better than a weed and shall be cast into the fire with them. For the weeds will only choke the wheat, and clearing the field, even if some wheat is lost, will allow the rest of the crop to flourish."

Matthew 13:24-30
He put before them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, "Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?" He answered, "An enemy has done this." The slaves said to him, "Then do you want us to go out and gather them?" But he replied, "No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn."

Comments

[brainwane]

This one provokes thought in me, because -- not that I am an experienced agriculturalist, with wheat or anything else -- the revised parable makes a kind of intuitive sense. Get rid of the weeds! Weeds will choke out the wheat! But. If I treat every stalk of wheat as sacred, and if weeds can just grow together with wheat in more-or-less peaceful coexistence, then my intuitions shift.

"If you find a stalk of wheat whose roots are so entangled with the weeds that pulling up the weeds will uproot the wheat also" versus "in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them" speaks to whether there are any acceptable losses (as with the 99 sheep and the 1 sheep), and whether collateral damage is particularly likely (the "if you find a stalk" in the revised version).

Really appreciating the sort of .... subtle kaleidoscope you are building with all these illustrative, concrete examples.

[tealin]

There's a great little bit prior to the destruction of Sodom* and Gomorrah, where Abraham presses God on collateral damage (Genesis 28:22-33) and basically gets God down to 'if there are ten righteous people in this city, I will forgive the entire city for sake of those ten.' So yes, the emphasis does seem to be more on every life being valuable, and collateral damage undesirable, even if the majority do not, perhaps, do quite as well as they would otherwise.

There is quite a lot in Jesus' ministry that seems to go against 'common sense' – and yet, when people try it, it often works, like he came to deliver us some sweet life hacks. Behavioural zoology has demonstrated that what we consider to be 'common sense' is what we share with primates and even much simpler animals, as far as a sense of fairness and damage limitation, whereas a lot of what's in the Bible is directing us deliberately to second-guess this intuition with a cheeky little 'I know it sounds crazy, but it just might work ...' The Housing First approach to homelessness has been proven again and again to work, but fails to be implemented more broadly because people consider it 'unfair' that some people should be given a home when others have to work for one – even though the programme ends up costing the taxpayer less. It makes sense that offering housing as a reward should encourage people to get back on the straight and narrow, and that giving them 'dessert first' removes the incentive to change, but it turns out not to be true!

Terry Pratchett puts forward that 'humanity is where the falling angel meets the rising ape', and so much of this stuff feels like trying to nudge us more to the angelic side and away from the ape. But being an ape is comfortable and unchallenging, and it's easy to rest one one's 'common sense' and not even try the alternative.

For that matter, recent studies on the soil biome and biodiversity suggest that long-term monoculture is actually detrimental to crop fertility, so maybe it's not even as bad of agricultural advice as it sounds!

*Looking at his whole story again, the sin of Sodom seems not to be so much gay sex as ... gang rape? Considering that 'sodomy' tended to carry a rather rapey connotation through most of history, one has to wonder at it being carried over into consensual relationships. There's a great article on how 'homosexuality' has only appeared in English-language Bibles since the 1940s, and previous to that it was either 'sodomy' or 'pederasty,' which is more in line with the Greek word which denoted paedophilia, also a coercive situation ... I should dig that up again.