One of the hardest words in the English language might just be

this little one.

Maybe.

I don’t like ‘maybe’ much. I prefer certainty, I prefer knowing who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s the hero and who’s the villain, who is lying and who’s telling the truth, who is the wheat and who is a weed. Maybe you feel the same – it makes the world feel safe and make more sense. If we can name the problem, we can solve it.

Maybe that's why today's parable is a little unsettling.

A farmer plants good seed in his field. During the night, someone scatters weeds among the wheat. The servants discover the problem and immediately offer a solution.

"Shall we pull up the weeds?" It's exactly what most of us would do. Sort it out. Get rid of the problem. Separate the good from the bad. But Jesus says "Let both grow together"

What an awful idea? Surely the weeds will steal nutrients. Surely they'll spoil the harvest. Surely something needs to be done. And perhaps that's precisely where Jesus wants us to pause. Maybe life isn't as simple as we'd like it to be.

The weed Jesus speaks about isn't an ordinary weed. It's probably darnel—a plant that looks remarkably like wheat while it's growing. Until harvest, even experienced farmers struggled to tell the difference. That's important. Because the servants, like you and me, are convinced they know what's wheat and what's weed. The experienced farmer is not certain. Maybe because experience teaches humility. Maybe because wisdom knows appearances can deceive. Maybe because rushing to judgement often causes more damage than the original problem. Maybe we’ve been wrong sometimes…..

If I'm honest, my life is a tangle of wheat and weeds – there’s kindness growing alongside impatience, there’s humility tangled up with pride, there’s the temptation to believe that I’m right, therefore someone else must be wrong, there’s judgement wanting to look like acceptance. If God started pulling up every weed in my life tonight, I'm not sure how much wheat would be left standing. Luckily for me, God seems much more interested in slow transformation than in immediate change.

We human beings, on the other hand, often want immediate change. Fix it. Judge it. Cancel it. Condemn it. Move on. But not much grows that way. People don’t, relationships don’t, churches don’t.

Maybe that's why Jesus asks us to resist becoming the harvesters before the harvest. There's an old Chinese story about a farmer whose horse ran away. The neighbours came and said, "How unfortunate for you." The farmer replied, "Maybe." The horse returned with seven wild horses. "What wonderful luck!" "Maybe." The farmer’s son broke his leg trying to tame one of the wild horses. "How dreadful." "Maybe." The next day soldiers came recruiting for war but left his injured son behind. "How fortunate." "Maybe."

Life keeps refusing our simple conclusions. Maybe. Imagine what our world would look like if we said "maybe" more often. Perhaps this is what Paul is reaching for in our reading from Romans. He speaks of a creation that isn’t finished yet, a world that carries beauty and brokenness side by side and he invites us into something deeper: "we hope for what we do not yet see."

Maybe hope is trusting that God's grace is quietly at work in the whole field, even when we cannot yet distinguish what will finally bear fruit. Maybe. I think it might actually be a holy word. The little word that creates space for grace. Because Grace sees beyond what is, to what might yet become. Grace looks at a field where wheat and weeds grow together, where the sun shines and the rain pours on both the good and the bad, and says, "we’re not finished here yet." So let us leave this place a little slower to condemn, a little quicker to hope, and a little more willing to believe that, in God's hands, every field still has a harvest waiting to happen.