Weeds vs. Vegetables

In preparing for Bible sharing tonight I meditated on Mathew 13: 24-43.  This is the parable where an enemy sows weeds into a field of wheat.  They both are allowed to grow side by side until harvest time.  As the weeds and wheat are picked, the weeds are thrown out.

You get the point.  We are the wheat living in a secular world of weeds and that's the way it will be until the end of time.  God will harvest the wheat.

My meditation brought me to the reality of my own garden.  I couldn't allow both to grow because I had too many weeds.  The weeds would have chocked my vegetables and herbs.  I had to cover the garden in landscaping cover, then cut holes in it to plant my vegetables.  The landscaping cover suppresses the weeds. 

Why couldn't I allow them both to grow?  Because the weeds were overpowering.  The soil was not good, rich loam.  The soil was too full of weeds.  Now there's a parable for you.

Don't plant in bad soil.

ZNH

You are never too old to learn.  Today at Mass I learned about zananiah.  The gospel was the parable about the weeds. Matthew 13:
24-30.  The homilist explained that the weeds that were sown were particularly insidious because they look like wheat for 2/3 of its growth.  This wheat in early Hebrew was called zananiah.

Naming this weed zananiah is interesting.  In Hebrew it is ZNH. 

References in periodicals archive?

The vanishing Hebrew harlot; the adventures of the Hebrew stem ZNH.

The Hebrew stem ZNH (as translated into the Latin alphabet) has a generally accepted lexical meaning of "commit fornication, be/act as a harlot.

In other words, it had the equivalent of F#*! You.  Interesting that it was used by the enemy of the sower.

The Angels Can't Pick Out The Weeds

The prayer group decided to have a plant sale, to raise funds for the parish.  How could the pastor, Father Diotrophes object to that?  He couldn't think of any good reason to object, but he knew he was going to wish he could say no.  Whatever this prayer group attempted to do always involved him and trouble.

The day came.  They didn’t have much, just one table of plants.  Most of them were sold at Saturday’s Mass.  The early morning Sunday Mass left only a few sickly plants and Father suggested that they end the sale and dispose of those plants. 

He thought they did.

They didn’t.  They thought it was such a waste to throw away living plants, so they planted them in the garden --the pastor’s garden.  The prayer group thought the pastor would like these plants.  They’re called bishop’s weed.

Little did they know that bishop’s weed is notorious for taking over a garden.  Bishop’s weed  grows quickly and chokes out the other plants.  Lucky for the prayer group, Father Diotrophes never could figure out how the goutweed came to his garden.  He had a dickens of a time trying to dig it out.  In addition, somehow the pastor picked up poison ivy.

While the pastor labored to rid his garden of the weeds, the prayer group was reminded of Matt. 13:24-30, the parable of the weeds being planted among the wheat.  The farmer let them both grow together.  At the end of the season, the wheat could be easily distinguished from the weeds, and so the wheat was harvested.

In this case however, the native garden plants weren't allowed to grow because the bishop’s weed/goutweed, choked everything in its way.  The prayer group was wise to stay under the radar, in this case.