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Gentle Jesus, meek and mild
Look upon a little child
Pity my simplicity
Teach me Lord to come to thee.

That was the first prayer that I ever learnt – it was the one that my mum prayed with me every night until I was old enough to pray for myself and by that time of course it was firmly implanted in my memory and in my spirituality. What I’ve subsequently learnt is that it’s the first verse of a hymn by Charles Wesley, which, I suppose, gives it a little more gravitas.

Of course, I understand that it isn’t a prayer or a hymn that’s popular with many people nowadays. It goes hand in hand I suppose with those Sunday School pictures that many of us grew up with, pictures often by local born artist Margaret Tarrant, of a benign and loving Jesus surrounded by well scrubbed children and western European woodland creatures – the sort of Bambi meets Jesus pictures that adorned the walls of many a classroom.

And the pictures and the prayer have probably been thrown out. Yet there in the depths of my spirituality, for better or for worse, ‘gentle Jesus’ remains embedded. I’ve been taught instead that Jesus was not meek and mild, that he was tough, that he threw out the money changers from the temple with force and with real anger, that he could turn on someone fiercely, argue passionately with them, that this was not a man who was a pushover as the meek and mild label would lead us to believe.

But perhaps the truth, like most truth, in fact lies somewhere between the fierce and the gentle Jesus.

It all came back to me when I read again the parable of the wheat and the weeds. Here was a householder sowing his field with good seed – then an enemy comes and sows weeds among the wheat. Nothing is obvious until the seeds germinate and grow and the plants begin to be seen. As soon as it’s apparent what’s happened the slaves alert their master. Understandably their first instinct is to go and weed the field.

But the householder’s a wise man. He knows that pulling up the weeds will only do damage to his wheat and ultimately to the harvest. He has a more gentle approach – let them both grow together and then just before the harvest the slaves can go out and do the weeding.

The writer of the book of Wisdom recognises this gentleness as being part of the very nature of God. ‘You are sovereign in strength, you judge with mildness, and with great forbearance you govern us’. I find it a marvellously compassionate view of God and a rounded one too – strength with mildness, governance with forbearance – it’s the God that the more childlike aspects of my spirituality resonates with.

I’m no gardener and so I daren’t say much about it. But I know that when I moved into my house there was what I thought looked like a rather messy plant by the front wall. So in an effort to make things look neat – which is how I like gardens – I took the secateurs to it and hacked away. As I was attacking the plant a neighbour passed by and expressed some alarm at what I was doing. ‘Oh, it’ll be alright’ I said with ill-founded confidence, believing that plants love nothing better than a good pruning.

My brothers and sisters, the terrible truth is that it took seven years for that plant to begin to flower again. It survived but I’d brutalised it. I hadn’t understood that that plant does not appreciate being hacked about and reacts accordingly. Now I let it look messy but enjoy its delicate pink flowers every spring.

St Paul in his letter to the Romans reminds us that we’re the children of God – children, heirs, not slaves. And so he says there’s no need to ‘fall back into fear’. And in order to reinforce what he says he tells us how we should speak to and of God – we should call him ‘Abba! Father!’

You’ll have been told many times but I want to remind you again, because it’s the most staggering fact, that Abba is the Aramaic word for father – but not father in the formal adult sense but in the affectionate, childlike sense of our word ‘daddy’. To call God ‘Abba’, as Jesus does and as we’re encouraged to do, brings us into a personal and intimate relationship with the God who created us, with the God who will judge us.

The writer of the book of Wisdom goes on to say, ‘you have taught your people that the righteous must be kind’. We see the gentleness of our all-powerful God and we’re taught to be like our heavenly father, that as his children we should be like him, that righteousness and kindness go hand in hand.

And that gentle kindness is how God deals with each one of us.

The second half of the Gospel for today is an explanation of the parable. It’s similar to the explanation of the parable of the sower that we heard last week in that it unpacks the parable in a completely allegorical way. Many people suggest that this explanation was added much later to the text – that Jesus didn’t spell it all out in this way. So if we didn’t have the explanation what might we understand the parable to be about?

Well it might be about you and it might be about me. It might be about the fact that in each of us there’s good seed and bad seed growing, that wheat and weeds grow side by side in the soil of our soul. It might be an acknowledgement that very few of us are all bad and very few of us are all good and that most of us are like that field.

And it might be about God being gentle with us, allowing the good things in us to grow, not wanting to damage us, treating us as a good and loving parent would and showing us in his own self how we can live and how we can change and how, ultimately we can deal with those weeds. So rather than it being about goodies and baddies it’s about you and me, mixed up, very real people – but loved and cared for by the God who we call ‘Abba, Father’.

And that means that you must be gentle with others and you must be gentle with yourself – not damaging anyone else, not damaging yourself. Be gentle with each other, as God is gentle with you.

This is a gentle place in which we are now gathered. The only thing that will be broken in this church today will be bread. Jesus, gentle, merciful, broken for you and for me, is the bread that we eat, is the wine that we drink. Gently the broken bread is laid in our hands, gently we eat it, knowing that with this bread the Lord fills his ‘children with good hope’ and with a parents love and with divine patience watches us grow and blossom – gently dealt with by a God of supreme, powerful, awesome gentleness.

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