by I’m writing this in November 2020, when everything feels divided up.
Jesus is a multiplier, not a divider. Remember the feeding of the 5000? Multiplication. Elijah and the widow with the little jar of oil and flour that never ran out? Multiplication.
Even when it comes to dividing wheat from weeds, Jesus defies what his audience would have considered to be common sense: pull out the weeds. In the parable, a sower has sown good seed, and the enemy has come to sow weeds among the wheat. The sower in this parable is Jesus; the enemy is Satan. The sower instructs his workers not to cut down the weeds while the wheat is growing because the wheat will be damaged in the process. The sower (Jesus) will divide wheat from weeds at harvest. The sower knows what the workers do not: that their division skills are clumsy, careless, damaging. When we humans divide, everything ends up damaged, both weeds and wheat. Both good and bad. It’s not our job to decide what’s good and what’s bad, to sort worthy from unworthy and cast aside what we determine is unworthy. That job is the sower’s alone. That job belongs only to God.
In the Bible, when Jesus divides, it’s for the purpose of providing, sharing, increasing, multiplying. One verse in particular seems to fly in the face of this. Matthew 10:34 sounds like a dramatically divisive verse. Jesus says He’s come to bring not peace, but a sword, Yup. However, he’s talking about ending a divisive structure of rules, regulations and classes to create one way where all can be reconciled with God through Him, where all can live in unity if they choose to.
“Be fruitful and multiply.” That is the command humans are given all throughout the Bible. The only time Jesus commands his disciples to divide is when He’s commanding them to divide resources to be shared among people so that everyone has enough.
We’re commanded to multiply and leave the dividing to the Divine. This requires humility, faith and a gift.
Without humility, I assume that I know best. I act as if it is up to me to direct my path and probably the paths of those around me, and that I can trust my eyes. This is a weed; this is wheat. Pull out the weed. Oops. Damage done. Once I acknowledge that I am the worker and not the sower, that my division skills are clumsy at best, I humbly go back to watering plants and helping things to grow, gathering together, multiplying. Only in humility can I trust a power greater than myself.
If I can muster the humility required to understand that I don’t know best, then I must attempt faith that God DOES. In order to multiply, I have to believe that God is good, that God is able and that God will provide. I can’t turn my gifts over unless I believe I’m putting them in good, capable, powerful hands.
Once I am humbled and faithful, then I can give my gift, so that it can be multiplied into something way beyond what it would be if I kept it in my hands for my benefit alone.
Multiplying requires freely offering up whatever we have. However meager, a gift freely offered is abundant in God’s hands once multiplied. A little oil and flour. Some fish and bread. One small talent. An open manger in a stable. We step forward in faith. We turn it over. Then God multiplies, transforming my perceived lack, my insufficiency, into overflowing abundance for me AND OTHERS. My gift is transformed into what God intends, which He promises is immeasurably more than I could ever hope or imagine. Just like the perpetually stunned disciples in the Bible, we can’t foresee how our gifts will be multiplied. It always catches us off guard.
Even folks who’ve experienced God’s multiplying for years are slow learners with short memories. And by folks, I mean me. God has multiplied my “not enough” into abundance time and time again. Still, each time I bump up against what seems like lack, I get fearful. I clutch what I have, worried it will be taken or that it won’t be enough. And God turns me back to memories of His multiplication skills in the past, both in Scripture and in my own life, to bring me (sometimes gladly, sometimes grudgingly) to the place where I turn over my gift with trembling hands to His care. And He blows me away with his math miracles all over again.
I’m just a worker in a much larger story where the central character is God, not me. Just like the givers in the Bible stories. Each time God multiplies, he starts with a trinket handed over by some insignificant character in the story. They’re not even given a name. If there were movie credits, they’d be listed as “woman at well”, “boy with fish and loaves”, “woman with oil and flour”. They don’t even have a speaking part. They certainly aren’t in charge of who should get which portion and how it will be divided. They’re just in the right place at the right time with a little bit of something that someone else needs. And they give it. And God multiplies and makes it enough.
Multiplication starts with a gift. “Bring what you have,” Jesus says, “And I’ll make it enough.”
Featured image by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash