“The righteous will shine like the sun, in the Kingdom of their Father,” says Jesus in the Parable of the Wheat and weeds. Pause for a moment to think of that. He means us. Even though we are often so unrighteous in the here and now!

My very first encounter of the “righteous shining like the sun” was in the face and very presence of a Methodist minister.

I was 10 years old. My school – Methodist College, in Sri Lanka – held a series of lunchtime talks. I went out of curiosity – curiosity about the tall, smiling stranger I had glimpsed walking with the principal. Sitting in the second row, I listened to the Rev George Good, a Methodist minister. (When I came to Belfast, and met his daughter, I realised he was from here!). I didn’t understand much of what he said then. But the radiance in his face drew me back, day after day that entire week. It was much later, as a young adult, that I realised the presence and love of God was shining in him.

Scripture tells us of those whose encounter with God leaves them with a radiance in their faces – Moses, who was “not aware that his face was radiant because he had spoken with the Lord.” So much so that, when Aaron and the Israelites saw him, they were afraid to come near. We have Stephen’s trial where his accusers saw “that his face was like the face of an angel.” We have the transfiguration – where Jesus himself is transformed, and his face “shines like the sun.” But in the here and now, we too can bear the glory of God to those around us. We can shine with his radiance.

Today’s parable is one in a series about the Kingdom of God and we who enter it. Next week we hear the rest of them. Last week we heard the first – the Parable of the Sower – and its challenge to us: what sort of hearer of the Word of God are we? Do we hear and forget, or hear and bear fruit?

Today’s Parable of the Weeds and Wheat comes with a clear explanation from Jesus: the field is the world, the good seed are the children of the Kingdom of God, the weeds, the children of the evil one, and their sower, the enemy.

When the slaves tell the Master about the weeds, he tells the slaves not to uproot them because they could by mistake pull up the wheat. The weed – a kind of rye that some commentators say was noxious – resembled wheat in the early stages of its growth. “Leave them till the harvest and only then will they be separated,” the master tells them. And in the Kingdom of God, at the end of time, when the wheat is harvested – the righteous will shine like the sun.

But note – until then, the wheat and the tares co-exist. In fact, at first they are almost indistinguishable.

What does this mean?

It means that, in the here and now, we who are of the Kingdom of God are not always distinctive or recognisable. We may even be mistaken for the noxious weeds. There is no perfect church, there are no perfect Christians, and the Kingdom of God is not complete. Like the wheat, we are still growing. We are on a journey of knowing God, encountering him and being transformed into his likeness. But. because we are fallen and human we fail; we appear sometimes to be so far from what we are supposed to be.

Our Old Testament story is a good example. (Some weeks ago, Paul, our Rector, preached on Jacob and his character. Jacob’s story is sometimes our story: scheming, ambitious, crafty, exploitative. None of us are exempt from the fallen nature described so well in Genesis 1.) In today’s reading, Jacob encounters God in a magnificent dream. He sees a ziggurat of the Ancient East, with its giddy steps reaching to the pinnacle of the tower – the heavens where the gods were supposed to dwell…where priests and divine beings traversed. A stairway of communication between the realm of earth and heaven. In his dream the Lord stands, not far away, but beside Jacob, and gives him an incredible promise. God would bless Jacob and would never leave him. God would keep his promises. Jacob’s response is awe and fear. He builds an altar.

But read on, and you discover that Jacob hasn’t changed much: He is still scheming, plotting, crafty and exploitative. Yet God works with his failures and imperfections – and transforms him. This is the story of all the biblical characters we encounter – fallen, failing humans whom God accepts and enables. This is our story too.

In Romans 7, just before today’s passage, the Apostle Paul wrestles with his fallen nature: “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…I know that nothing good dwells within me… I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.”

Yet Paul has hope, as Romans 8 tells us. Paul explains that we live in a fallen broken world, waiting and longing for God’s final redemption. 

The world, he says, looks for the coming of the Kingdom. That final day when God will restore all Creation. We live not by the flesh but by the Spirit, because we are his children. Yet, we groan inwardly while we wait – because, like Jacob, and like Paul, we struggle with our not-so-nice natures. Like Jacob, we are blessed with great gifts. God is our Father, and he gives us the presence of His Spirit. We are his children and we have the right to call God “Abba, Father” – the intimate name chosen by Jesus for God – his Father, and ours. Kenneth Bailey, in Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes, talks of a Middle Eastern mother being shocked to hear the word “Abba” used for God – because it was the first word on a child’s lips for its human father. We underestimate this gift of intimacy God gives us…no other religion or faith offers such intimacy to those who worship God. Old Testament Jews could not have conceived of it – they did not pronounce the name of God, it was so Holy.

We live in the “now and not yet” of God’s time. We live in a Long “now,” between Jesus’ first bringing of the Kingdom of God, until he returns in glory at the end of time. We are the wheat that is not yet fully distinguishable from the weeds. It is an imperfect world. A fallen creation and fallen humanity. And we ourselves as Children of God live with the longing of the final restoration.

We will someday shine like the sun, says Jesus. Not a Northern Ireland sun – that slightly lightened area of cloud that suggests a hidden sun. Not a shy sun, but the Middle-Eastern, dazzling, terrifying sun. The kind of sun I knew in Sri Lanka, where by 8am you could barely look out of the window into the sky for fear of blinding yourself. That’s how we will shine!

C. S. Lewis, in one of his sermons, refers to this shining as “the glory as brightness, splendour, luminosity,” where “we put on the splendour of the sun…and shine as the sun.” He goes on to suggest something that bears thinking about:

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.”

He continues:

All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal…it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”

In the Sermon of the Mount, Jesus tells us that we are the Light of the world…shining in the darkness. Even if we do not yet shine like the sun.

We are called to be transformed, transfigured by God – to reveal something of God to the world. Despite our fallen nature. Despite our failures. Despite our being so like Jacob.

.Like the Minister I met as a child, like Moses, like Stephen, we can reflect the radiance of God to our world. May God enable and transform us to do so.