The Art of Waiting
For almost five hundred years, people stood beneath the vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel admiring the muted earthy browns and grays of Michelangelo’s palette. Turns out, though, the artist actually worked in vivid shades of blues and greens. The white was crisp, and the reds were fiery. The colors are so alive they would later startle people who thought they knew what the ceiling looked like. What they had seen was the residue of candle smoke, incense, dust, and glue.
Modern restoration experts knew that Michelangelo had painted into wet plaster, which meant the color was bonded to the finish of the wall. When the fresco was dry, he went back and deepened the shadows on the surface. Then came centuries of grime, and a subtle gloom bonded itself to the work. It was stuck in a way that it couldn’t be removed without risking the art itself. If they tried to clean too deeply, Michelangelo’s finishing touches would be stripped away. They moved forward slowly over nearly a decade, but even now, art conservators still argue over whether the restoration went too far. Identifying the intentional brushstrokes from the later shadowed film was nearly impossible, and so we are left wondering if the current version is too bright. Imagine that. Even the experts can’t decide.
Surely it would be easier to tell wheat from weeds, but Jesus dispels that idea with his parable. He says an enemy crept in and sowed weeds among the wheat. The “false wheat” is a plant so much like wheat that no one can tell them apart until the heads ripen. By then, the roots of the weed and the wheat have braided themselves together. In the parable, the farmer knows that to tear out the weeds would mean losing some of the wheat. Let both grow together until the harvest, he says. The sorting must wait.
When the reapers bring in the final harvest, the sorting will be slow, stalk by stalk. Even though the farmer’s patience will come at a cost, the farmer will not risk the wheat. So, to save the wheat, the weeds must be tended at the same time. I think that same restraint may be asked of us. People sometimes struggle with deciding what belongs and what does not, and when we do decide, we still find ourselves second-guessing our decisions. I suppose the art conservators could have scrubbed harder. I suppose the laborers could have just started yanking out every suspect weed. I suppose we could try to decide who is actually worthy of love and hospitality. But at what cost? Through this parable, Jesus teaches that our patient God would rather wait out a whole season of weeds than lose one single head of wheat. When it comes to deciding who belongs, we can trust God’s patience. So, we tend the whole field because we were not asked to be experts at sorting; we are called to become experts at loving.
