Readings
Isaiah 44:6-8
Psalm 86:11-17
Romans 8:12-25
Matthew 13:24-30,36-43
Today’s Gospel passage picks up where we left off last week. Jesus is continuing to teach in the metaphor of seeds and wheat. And we are once again presented with an agrarian image that would have been quite familiar to those who first heard this parable.
Unlike last week, however, there is a darker element in today’s story. Jesus tells us that the kingdom of heaven is like someone who sowed good seed in his field only to then have it sabotaged by someone who sows weeds among the wheat.
Now the weeds to which this parable refers are called “Bearded Darnel” and it is a poisonous plant. Known commonly in Jesus’ time as “devil wheat” this is a particularly insidious weed as it blends in with wheat and is difficult to identify until the heads appear. Further, devil wheat, like many weeds has invasive roots which infiltrate the root systems of the plants around it.
So, it’s no wonder that when the servants discover the presence of this noxious weed they immediately go and ask if it should be pulled out, but the farmer tells them to leave it until the harvest because if it is pulled out early it will pull out the good plants with the bad. No, the servants are instructed to wait to collect up the weeds at harvest and burn them and put the good wheat in the barn.
Again, like last week, Jesus does something that is relatively rare for the parables. He explains what the parable means. In this parable Jesus is the one who sows the good seed, and the devil is the enemy who sows the weeds. The field is the world, the good seed are the children of the kingdom, and the weeds are “the children of the evil one” (in other words the bad people). He tells us that the harvest is the end of the age and that the reapers are the angels. He then equates the fate of the weeds and the wheat to that of those who do evil versus those who are righteous, namely that one group will face punishment and destruction while the other will be blessed.
It would be easy for us to read this lesson and think that it is a story about who is in and who is out. It would be easy for us to assume that those of us who try to be good and avoid doing evil are the wheat in this story and that all the bad guys of this world are the weeds. In fact, it is this very thinking that has led Christians for centuries, if not millennia, to be about the task of rooting out evil in the church and in the world.
But friends, be attentive to the story. In the story our job is not to clear the field of the weeds, nor is our job to reap the harvest and burn the weeds. No, our job is to be the wheat and to leave the question of the fate of the weeds to God.
We are being called to be righteous. To live in a right relationship to God. To follow in the way of Jesus and to be the embodiment of Christ in our own time. But that is not as simple as it seems.
The truth is that none of us are perfect and all of us have done things that were less than righteous. The world, for better or for worse, is not black and white. We live with varying shades of gray and all of us miss the mark from time to time. Further, while we may function with the best of intentions, it does not preclude us from missing the mark nor does it eliminate the possibility that we not only participate in, but further the brokenness of the world.
We now live in a world and a society where it is easy to become convinced of the rightness of our position to the exclusion of all others. We now have crafted news sources that will play to our biases and worldviews convincing us of the rightness of what we believe while never once challenging us with the ambiguity of the world or facts that conflict with what we believe to be true. And if that is not enough, thanks to social media, it is even easier to marginalize or demonize those whose positions we find difficult or offensive.
All of this has created a dangerous environment where the temptation is to root out the evil before our eyes and to claim the position of the righteous.
But, as I said earlier, our job is not to get rid of anybody. Our job is to be wheat and not weeds. Like the cautionary tale of Dr. Faustus, we best be careful when we set about the task of rooting out evil, for we may well discover that we have become the very thing we wished to eradicate.
Yes, we are called to be a people who work actively for justice and peace and not simply tolerate the evil in our midst. But we do not do it by destroying the other. Our calling is a higher and more difficult one. We are being called, as followers in the way of Jesus, to seek and serve Christ in all persons, to love our neighbors as ourselves, and to respect the dignity of every human being. And that applies to everyone and not just the people we agree with.
Will that eradicate the weeds among the wheat? No, it won’t. But it may well move the hearts of some away from weedy behavior. It may well help us recognize wheat where we presumed only weeds. And in the end it may help us address the ways in which we ourselves are more like weeds than wheat.
Even so, the message of love from last week is implicit in this week. God cares about the world. God recognizes the presence of the weeds and will not abandon us. And ultimately God will gather us into God’s kingdom and into God’s love.