Pulling Weeds

As I finished The Colours of God, the parable of the weeds from Matthew 13 was very much in my mind. They provided me with some interesting insight and things to ponder.

They talked of how God says to us here that we don't have the capacity to make a distinction between what is truly good and what is truly evil; between the wheat and the weeds, 'In other words, God is saying, "I'm not wigged out by the fact that there's evil and good growing together. As a matter of fact, in your well-intentioned attempts to root out the weeds, you're actually pulling out more of the good than the bad- please, just leave the whole field alone." He's telling us not to be weed-pullers...hands off, trying to rid the world of all evil and start getting okay with living in a world of risk and potential harm. God is telling us to relax and just go in and enjoy the field...'

Then as I re-continued this current book (see last post) I came upon additional thoughts which I thought I'd share (although he's making perhaps a different point, he is talking about the same story),

'As the parable develops it's point, though, the enemy turns out not to need anything more than negative power. He has to act only minimally on his own to wreak havoc in the world; mostly he depends on the force of goodness, insofar as he can sucker them into taking up arms against the confusion he has introduced, to do his work. That is precisely why the enemy goes away after sowing the weeds: he has no need whatsoever to hang around. Unable to take positive action anyway- having no real power to muck up the operation- he simply sprinkles around a generous helping of darkness and waits for the children of light to get flustered enough to do the job for him. Goodness itself, in other words, if it is sufficiently committed to plausible, right-handed, strong-arm methods, will in the very name of goodness do all and more than all that evil ever had in mind'.