Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
Proper 11, Year A - Sunday, July 23, 2023
Romans 8:12-25
Matthew 13:24-30,36-43
“The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” is an episode from the original Twilight Zone series which aired on March 4, 1960. Written by Rod Serling, the creator of the show and one of the main writers, it showcases his unflinching insight into the human condition in the form of a science fiction parable that spoke to 1960s America and, because there is nothing new under the sun, applies to our world as well.A bright flash crosses the evening sky. Curious, a group of Maple Street neighbors gather outside to ponder the event. Then the strangeness commences - lights flicker, then power goes out, rumors of alien invasion creep in from the edges of the darkness. Fear rises in a slow boil. The neighbors, so nice, so like us, grow desperate in their need to understand what is happening and reassert normalcy and control in the face of events that make no rational sense. Maybe someone knows something. Maybe someone is keeping a secret. Guns appear, one is used to kill. The fear turns to mayhem - everyone against everyone. The irony of the title is that the monsters never appear on Maple Street, they don’t have to - the monsters are already there - they have been there the whole time. The fear of something monstrous outside has hooked these neighbors to become the thing they fear in order to conquer the foreign presence, and they infect each other. As the episode ends, the camera pans out from Maple Street to a nearby hill, where we see a pair of otherworldly invaders observing the madness.
One says to the other, “Understand the procedure now? Just stop a few of their machines, and radios, telephones, and lawnmowers - throw them into darkness for a few hours and then sit back and watch the pattern.”
“The pattern is always the same?”
“With few variations, they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it’s themselves. All we need do is sit back and watch.”
“I take it this place, this Maple Street, it is not unique.”
“By no means, the world is full of Maple Streets. We go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves. One to the other, one to the other, one to the other.”
Rod Serling adds this epilogue to what we have just seen:
“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices… For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own - for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”
The irony in the episode is that the aliens understand human nature at a deeper level than the humans. Rod Serling living in 1960 America sees the procedure in action. The country had just come through the McCarthy era and was in the depths of the Cold War and ongoing racial segregation in the South. His call is simple and profound - we must look at what we are doing to each other and stop the slide to self-destruction. The ones who proclaimed themselves the purifiers, the gatekeepers, the greatness-returners, employed evil language and behavior in the name of defending what they believed was right and moral.
But Maple Street leaves us in despair, without a solution or an alternative other than the knowledge that collective prejudice and suspicion turn us into monsters. What is lacking is a larger narrative, some hopeful mode of resistance to patterns of suspicion and violence, and the promise that the world is held in loving care and is moving toward a just resolution that sets it right and sets us free.
Jesus created worlds familiar to us with surprising twists and unexpected turns. We call them parables. He, too, holds up a mirror, warns us about what lurks within us, but does not leave us there. He models and offers a way of being that expands the possibility of what we can hope for and beckons us to live with the memory of a future that informs how we live in the present.
Continuing from the parable of the soils we heard last week, the good growing plants that bring life are an image of we who have heard the word and put it into practice. If the parable of the soils locates the identity of a disciple as one in whom life grows and flourishes, then the parable of the weeds and the wheat speaks of living our identity.
This week the wheat seeds are sown, an enemy sows weeds among the wheat, both grow, and the crisis point is what to do now. The slaves inquire about pulling out the weeds, but the landowner knows better than to do that before the wheat is ready for harvest. He is the Christ figure, the voice of wisdom and perspective in the parable. He can perceive what is below the surface and in the future: “Let both of them grow together until the harvest”, he tells the slaves. The landowner loves the field. He asks the slaves to trust him. It may look like the wheat is about to be ruined, the slaves want to fix the problem, but the mystery is that the best action in that time before the harvest is no action. With patience, at the right time, the wheat’s full head of grain will appear and the field will yield a harvest of good food.
The surprise of the parable is that the workers are not prevented from doing evil or exhorted to do good, but restrained from doing what they understand to be good and helpful and that precisely in that forbearance is the preservation and preparation for the harvest they desire. In the world of the parable, what the slaves see is not all there is, what they fear happening is not going to happen, what looks like death is actually the only way to life.
The “let them” here is the same word sometimes translated in other places as “suffer”, “permit”, or “forgive”. In the world of this field in its mixed state of wheat and weeds, as an image of our world, the only option available to us if we want to get any usable grain out of it is to refrain from acting on what seems good in the moment, trust a larger, longer perspective, and wait in belief that what feels like helplessness in endangering the wheat is actually faithfulness in saving it. “Let them both grow together” is not passive resignation. It does not mean that we ignore the weeds, pretend they are wheat, or that the wheat is to become weeds because it is next to weeds, or that the crop is ruined. What it does mean is that God alone intervenes and separates and enacts ultimate and righteous judgment.
When so much Christian language is about doing, going, success, growth, and effectiveness, this parable serves as a check and corrective on our over-inflated ideas about our roles and engages us to be cooperative participants in and witnesses to this larger and longer process of redemption that is totally designed by God, in God’s control, and unfolding in God’s time. Most of us are not going to go out intending to harm. But we are prone to the subtle ways we collude with evil in the voice that says, “maybe God is a little slow, maybe God needs a reminder, a push. Could we pull out a few of the weeds, please? We would feel so much better!”
The human vocation is not to eradicate evil from the world. As good and important are our efforts to pray for, model, and declare reconciliation, healing, peace, justice, and equality, we will be doing that until the end of the age because there will be a need for it. Domination in the name of justice, for right ends, is still domination. Disdain and judgment toward those who we believe are wrong, who in fact may be perpetrating harm, is not justifiable because we have now added our harm to their harm. The social frenzy of demonizing the other as if we can remain separate and untouched by the demonizing is the dynamic Jesus is naming here. The wheat cannot untangle its roots from the weeds without killing itself. Beware any rhetoric which assuredly points toward the guilty, the unclean, the dangerous, and promises to purify the field and guarantee a utopian world of safety and protection - the procedure is being restarted. Robert Capon says about this parable, “The only result of a truly dedicated campaign to get rid of evil will be the abolition of literally everybody.”
In the end, God does what only God can do in God’s way and time - is liberate creation from sin and evil and death. In the end, the landowner gets everything and the enemy gets nothing but a lost night’s sleep. This is a hard, but necessary look at ourselves, our power, and God’s justice. Real power, then, is to refuse to go down with the weeds, to remember that hope is forbearance and justice is carrying on with growing in the face of that which seeks to destroy us. It may not look like it today, we may not be able to imagine it yet, but the harvest is coming. The wheat is going to be fine.
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