Wheat and Weeds

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This last week, our back yard at home has been transformed. That space from beyond our deck to the property line has long been a chaotic mess of weeds and random plants and old reddish-colour wood chips. It was an eyesore. Now – with a fair amount of planning and the help of landscapers – it has become a beautiful oasis of colours and textures, a delightful multisensory garden of plants for Irene and me to enjoy. We’ve already seen chipmunks and raccoons and even a few rabbits tentatively making their way through the new garden from one set of trees and dense undergrowth to another. But I know that before long, even the most lovingly-planned garden can be invaded and overgrown by weeds, ready to reclaim their stronghold again in our back yard. And without some regular ongoing maintenance and weeding, the beauty and order of our yard will revert to the chaos it once was. 

 

And so it’s with some sense of irony that we read today from Matthew’s gospel about the parable of the wheat and the weeds. I chose this text back in April because it’s the gospel passage chosen by the lectionary for this Sunday, but it’s even more timely now that I’ve pondered this matter of weeds again firsthand. 

 

Those of you who are gardeners will know what I’m talking about. Perhaps you’re familiar with Murphy’s First Law of Gardening: When weeding, the best way to make sure you’re removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant. And, of course, there is a corollary to that law: To distinguish flowers from weeds, simply pull up everything. What grows back is weeds. Weeds are the bane of every gardener. 

 

Weeds have a way of getting in there, growing, and if you aren’t diligent in pulling them, of taking over. And that’s what makes this parable told by Jesus so intriguing. So let’s spend some time pondering this story our Lord tells, and the explanation he gives.

 

 

In Matthew chapter 13, Jesus is in full story-telling mode. He recounts one parable after another, and each one has something to do with the nature of God’s kingdom. And Jesus’ point in all of them seems to be that the kingdom of God is never quite what you would’ve expected. The Parable of the Sower that we looked at last week made clear that even though the “seed” of God’s Word is powerful enough to change the world, at the same time its strangely vulnerable, too. It can be snatched away by birds, burned up by the sun, choked by thorns. The parables of the Mustard Seed and Yeast in the dough indicate that the kingdom, by all outward appearances, is far smaller and more subtle than you might guess.  God’s kingdom is the most critical and decisive reality in the world, but it doesn’t it doesn’t come in the flashy, showy, spectacular way you’d expect it to.

 

And that is what’s shocking to the crowds who listened to these stories Jesus tells, and also to his befuddled disciples, who ask Jesus to explain the parable he’s just told. Apparently God would rather work behind the scenes.  Apparently changing people’s hearts is more of a quiet and gracious business than a noisy and forceful affair.  What’s more, the growth and spread and influence of this kingdom of God is going to extend throughout the whole world -- but until the final judgment, it won’t ever exist in a pure state.  And to make that point Jesus tells a parable. Like last week, this one too is about seeds and farming, but now Jesus talks about a farmer who sowed good seed, but weeds have been planted there as well, and they’re growing up right alongside the wheat.

 

The kingdom of Heaven, says Jesus, is like a farmer who planted good seed in his field. It’s interesting that Jesus twice specifies that the farmer sowed “good” seed.  What other kind of seed would you sow? Perhaps the stress is placed on the “good seed” in order to contrast it with the “bad seed” that is sown by the enemy. Late at night, while the farmer was asleep, an enemy comes and sows weeds into the field. 

 

Barbara Brown Taylor tells about the time her husband Ed was an undergraduate at Georgia Tech University, and late one night he and his college fraternity brothers sowed kudzu seeds— have you ever heard of kudzu? It’s been called “The vine that ate the South” due to its invasive nature; it smothers every other plant around it and it’s almost impossible to get rid of —  they sowed kudzu seeds on the freshly manicured lawn of one of the rival fraternity houses -- and waited with glee for the weed to take over the unsuspecting grass. And since kudzu grows at a phenomenal rate, it apparently didn’t take very long. 

 

Jesus says while the farmer and his servants are asleep, an enemy comes and tries to sabotage the crop by sewing weeds among the wheat. And when the wheat sprouted up through the ground and the heads of grain began to form, then the weeds showed up too.

 

The offending weed referred to here is most likely a weed called darnel, which naturally grows in fields across the Middle East. Indeed, grains of darnel have been found in a 4,000-year old Egyptian tomb. It’s a weed that looks just like wheat as it’s growing up.  Until the heads of the wheat are fully formed, you can hardly tell the difference.  But it’s not wheat. Inside the grains of the darnel there’s a poisonous fungus that can make people very sick if too many of its small black seeds turn up in the bread dough. [Wenham, Parables of Jesus, 57]

 

Upon discovering these weeds, the servants speak with the farmer, asking him: “Do you want us to go and pull up the weeds?”  ‘No,’ the farmer answers, ‘because as you gather the weeds you might pull up some of the wheat along with them. 30 Let the wheat and the weeds both grow together until harvest. Then I will tell the harvest workers to pull up the weeds first, tie them in bundles and burn them, and then to gather in the wheat and put it in my barn.’” (GNT)

 

Friends, what should strike us is how odd the farmer’s response is, because plucking these weeds out of the ground right then and there would have been the logical thing to do. As Scott Hoezee says: 

 

The last thing you wanted was for the darnel to go to seed because then even next season you’d still have a field full of weed seeds.  But contrary to all agrarian good sense, the farmer tells the hired hands to leave it be. They’d sort it all out later at the harvest.  If Jesus’ listeners knew anything about farming (and presumably a lot of Jesus’ audience did know about such things), then the shock of this story is the idea that any farmer would do nothing about a situation like this. But that’s probably a clue that this story is not about agriculture but instead it’s about theology.   

 

So why does Jesus tell us this parable in the first place? What’s he trying to tell us about our lives? What’s he trying to tell us about the world in which we live? What’s he trying to tell us about life in God’s kingdom? 

 

 

First of all, I think Jesus tells us this parable to remind us that life as we know it is a mixture of good and evil. Now that may sound like something Captain Obvious would say, it’s so self-obvious, but bear with me. 

 

It’s a question philosophers as well as ordinary people have continually speculated about: Could God have made a better world? Could God have created a world with more happiness and less misery? I remember reading the definition of an optimist and a pessimist. The optimist believes this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist is afraid the optimist is right!

 

The Bible contains no arguments about possible worlds that God might have made. But it does recognize that this world is both a place that is full of God’s glory, filled with everyday miracles if we have the eyes to see them, but also a world that is achingly heavy with troubles and heartaches, with poignant and painful tragedies. An enemy has sown bad seeds among the good.  And both grow together ... the wheat and the weeds… side by side … intertwined ... until the time of harvest. 

 

Good and evil are entwined throughout our lives in unpredictable, unavoidable, and perplexing ways. 

 

 

In a thousand ways, our lives can be disrupted by forces beyond our control as well as by our own foolish choices. And Jesus reminds us in this parable that the sinful and the tragic are woven into the fabric of our daily existence. We are living with the weeds.

 

We who love and follow Jesus are living simultaneously in two different worlds. Jesus announced in this and his many other parables that the revolution of God has begun, that God’s kingdom has come into being through the life and ministry and death and resurrection of Jesus, God’s Son. But the arrival of God’s kingdom did not put an immediate end to the evils of this age. The kingdom was inaugurated by Jesus, but the old order has not yet been done away with. The weeds are still very much present in this world.

 

We live in the “in-between time” -- between Christ’s first coming and his second coming -- and during this interim period, we have one foot in the old world of sin and evil and disease and death that is ebbing away but still very much with us, and another foot in the new world, the new order of things, God’s kingdom, the world of grace and mercy, the world of wholeness and forgiveness, the world of abundant and eternal life.

 

Good and evil, those who are loyal to God and those who aren’t, will live side by side in society until the end of the age. This mixture is part of the mystery of God’s kingdom. To put it another way, Jesus is telling us that God’s kingdom is both present and future. It is already here, yet it is still coming. It is here in the love and power which Jesus demonstrated; but it is still to come in its judging glory. It is here in its life-changing power; it is not yet here in its world-shaking majesty.

 

So this parable teaches us that until Jesus returns, there will always be a hostile power in the world seeking to destroy the good seed.  Our experience is that both kinds of influence act upon our lives, both the influence which helps the seed of the word to flourish and to grow, as well as the influence which seeks to destroy the good seed before it can produce fruit at all. [William Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew, Vol. 2, 74-75] We are living with the weeds.

 

 

But I think there’s a second reason Jesus tells us this parable. Jesus not only wants to remind us of the true state of the world in which we live; he also wants to teach us the incredible value of every person, by showing us how much the farmer values the wheat. 

 

Clearly in our parable, the wheat is extremely precious to the farmer. He refuses to lose any of it in order to get rid of the weeds. That’s a familiar theme in the gospels, isn’t it? The shepherd who leaves 99 sheep to find the one sheep that is lost; the woman who searches the house from top to bottom to find the lost coin; even the gathering up of those 12 baskets of leftovers after the feeding of the 5,000. 

 

In God’s economy, nothing is wasted. Nothing good is counted as expendable. No one is unneeded or disposable. And this is important to bear in mind when we grow impatient with God’s role in human history. 

 

As the prophet Habbakuk once put it,

or cry to you “Violence!”and you will not save? (1.2)

 

Or as the prophet Jeremiah once asked: 

Why do dishonest people succeed? (12:1)

 

Or ask the apostle Paul puts it in his letter to the Romans: 

How long must creation keep on groaning with pain, like the pain of childbirth? (8.22)

 

I suppose we usually focus more on the stubborn persistence of evil than on the slow emergence of good. But this parable reminds us that God loves goodness even more than God hates evil. 

 

In the Greek tragedy that bears her name, Medea kills both of her sons in savage revenge against her faithless husband. When he asks how she could have done such a thing, she replies, “Because I hated you more than I loved them.” 

 

But dear friends, for God, hate can never be a stronger emotion than love. The farmer says, “Don’t try to pull the weeds out; you will kill some of the wheat.” In the very act of rooting out evil, something of eternal value might also be damaged. And he can’t allow that to happen.

 

Now it’s extremely important to say that when the farmer in the parable forbids the servants to go and weed out the field, this is not a call to passivity in the face of evil. This is not a divine command to ignore injustice in the world, or violence in society, or failures in the church. It’s not a message that we shouldn’t try make the world a better place. 

 

No, it’s a cautionary reminder that we cannot make the world a perfect place. It is a realistic reminder that the servants do not finally have the wisdom to get rid of all the weeds, because in doing so we’d probably cause more harm than good. Jesus seems to be telling us that this side of eternity, sometimes it hard for us to distinguish between the good and bad, so don’t be too hasty!

 

As the great Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn once put it, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”  So we need to be patient with other people, as patient as God is with us.

 

William Barclay comments how this parable teaches us “how hard it is to distinguish between those who are in the Kingdom and those who are not.”  A person who appears to be one thing on the surface may well be something quite different on the inside. “We are much too quick to classify people and label them good or bad without knowing all the facts.” [William Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew, Vol. 2, 74]

 

And it teaches us not to be so quick with our judgments. If the reapers had their way, they would have tried to tear out the weeds but they would have torn out some of the wheat as well.  Judgment had to wait until the harvest came.  No one who sees only part of a thing can judge the whole; and no one who knows only part of a person’s life can judge the whole person.” Only God can, because God alone knows us fully. And so we must leave the judgment to God. [William Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew, Vol. 2, 74]

 

At its very heart, this is a parable about patience. The focus of this parable is not just about what will happen to the weeds at the end of the day, but about how the wheat should react up until the time of the great sorting out, the final harvest at the end of the age.  

 

The farmer in the parable seems to believe that the weeds themselves won’t threaten the wheat–the two are able to grow together.  The weeds don’t threaten the wheat but instead the threat comes from how we react to the weeds.  The danger is not being in the presence of sin but trying to self-righteously root out all the sin we see around us!

 

And that means that the real challenge presented to the church by Matthew 13 is finding the strength to resist the temptation to take matters into our own hands and start yanking up every sinful thing we see every time we see it.  As John Calvin said long ago, this passage is meant “to restrain and moderate the zeal of those who fancy that they are not at liberty to join in a society with any but pure angels” [John Calvin, A Harmony of the Evangelists, commenting on Matthew 13:39].  In other words, if you’re looking for a perfect church, made up of perfect people, Jesus is saying you’re never going to find it. “The church is a hospital for sinners on the way, not a museum for saints who’ve already arrived.”

 

 

I believe there’s one final reason Jesus tells us this parable. Jesus not only wants to remind us of the true state of the world in which we live (that we’re living with weeds); and to keep us from prematurely judging other people; he also wants to teach us that God is not yet finished with this world. That’s the good news of this parable. There will come a final harvest, says Jesus, a final reckoning, when weeds and wheat are separated, finally and forever. In other words, God’s Judgement will come, but God alone is the Judge.

 

The parable of the weeds is inevitably about the second coming of Christ and the last judgment. Now this can be a problem for some of us in the mainline churches. We seem to have ignored or downplayed or even forgotten these themes in our life together. But it’s clearly a central part of what our Lord Jesus taught us; indeed the One who spoke about God’s love most deeply is the same person who spoke about God’s judgment most firmly. If you don’t believe me, read the last section of Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount, where he talks about the narrow and wide gates, about true and false disciples, about wise and foolish builders.

 

This parable teaches us that judgment does come in the end.  Judgment is not hasty, but judgment comes.  Humanly speaking, it may feel like goodness never receives its reward and that evil people continue to escape the consequences of their actions, but a new world is coming where all the wrongs will be put right, and all the oppressed will be set free, and all those who’ve been voiceless will be able to speak, and all those who’ve suffered deeply at the hands of others will be fully healed, inside and out. One day, as the prophet Amos put it, justice will roll down like waters, and God’s righteousness like an ever-flowing stream (Amos 5.24)

 

But having said all this, let’s remember that “the only person with the right to judge is God.  It is God alone who can discern the good and the bad; it is God alone who sees all of a (person) and all of that person’s life.  It is God alone who can judge.” [William Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew, Vol. 2, 74-75]

 

God is not yet finished with this world. And God isn’t finished with you and me either. Evil is temporary; only the good will endure. In the meantime, dear people, let’s strive in the power of God’s Spirit to be good wheat, to live in God’s garden as faithfully and obediently as possible, instead of trashing the weeds around us —  and to leave the rest to God. 

 

And let’s follow the apostle Paul’s admonition to the Romans...a passage that could well have been Paul’s own sermon on the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds: 

 

¹⁶ Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited. ¹⁷ Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. ¹⁸ If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. ¹⁹ Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord…. ²¹ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

 

Let’s pray: Dear Father, help us to wait in patience for your coming Kingdom. Keep us from waiting with faces darkened by doubt or uncertainty, and keep us from attempting to take your judgment into our own hands. Instead, may the assurance of that future glory start us shining in us and through us right now as our lives are lit by your love and grace. Through Christ, the conquering Son of Man. Amen.