Wheat and Weeds
Wheat and Weeds
Matt 13:24-30, 36-43
Another parable He put before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the householder came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then has it weeds?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’
The servants said to Him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he said, ‘No; lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds 1st and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn’…
Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples came to him, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” He answered, “He who sows the good seed is the Son of man; the field is the world, and the good seed means the sons of the kingdom; the weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the close of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the close of the age. The Son of man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.”
SERMON
It’s gardening season, literally, and liturgically! Over these next few weeks, we’ll focus on Jesus’ gardening /farming parables about the kingdom of heaven on earth. Last week’s parable compared God with an extravagant farmer, sowing the seeds of love and hope everywhere, confident in the abundance and great potential of the seeds to take root, anywhere. This week’s parable compares God with a farmer, scanning this earthly field, accepting the mixture of wheat and weeds within it, or tune in next week – how the kingdom of heaven is like a tiny grain of mustard seed. Today’s parable is a core teaching, appearing in the 3 synoptic gospels. This version comes from Matt’s gospel. No one can say for sure how accurate a reporter Matt is, writing in 90AD, but one thing is certain: He warms up to any parable about judgment, and the end time. This theme seems to fit today’s world, with global anxiety running high these days – about the future, wars, poverty, the environment, the economy, the nation, the church. Some of us fear an apocalypse, and others hope for one.. as we wrestle with a world that is messier, and weedier, than we’d like it to be.
Of all the Gospel writers, Matt is the only one who goes on and on about the end of the world, the only one who mentions a furnace of fire where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. His is the only Gospel that contains the wise and foolish virgins, or the division of the sheep from the goats, or today’s parable about the wheat and the weeds. Of all the Gospel writers, it is Matt who most wants a clear-cut creation, in which things are black or white, good or bad, in which people are faithful or wicked, blessed or cursed, those who are in (with ears to hear) and those who are out (who do not hear).
Of all the gospel writers, only Matt sets up 2 versions of this parable: one version is told to the crowds, and another version, the insider’s explanation, is told to the disciples themselves – again, Matt’s discrimination between insiders and outsiders, between those with ears to hear and those without. To the insiders, the message is clear: “Never mind that there seem to be a lot of weeds/tares in the world right now. Hang in there, be patient. When the last day comes the wheat will be vindicated, while the weeds/tares will go up in smoke.
It may have been a comforting message at the time, them, and now, to those who ask, “Why is the world such a mess? What can we do about it? if God is really in charge, why isn’t the world, a beautiful and pure, amber fields of grain? “It appeals to those who ask, “Do you want us to go and gather the weeds, God?”
But for others, today’s parable is not comforting at all – it has the opposite effect. Matt may have been clear that there are only 2 kinds of people in the world – the wheat and the weeds – but it is a clarity that escapes most of us, we who have encountered both kinds w/in ourselves, w/ in our neighbors, and w/in the world. Most of our fields are full of mixed plantings, or worse. Sometimes I think that if I examined mine closely I wouldn’t find wheat or weeds anymore. They’ve grown together for so long that a hybrid’s more likely, a mongrel seed that’s a mixture of both. So the business about gathering and burning the weeds tends to make me a little nervous, and the burning question is: Which am I? Wheat or weed? Good soil, or bad? Blessed or cursed?
Parables rarely answer such Q’s directly. They’re more like dreams or poems, delivering their meaning in images that talk more to our hearts than to our heads. Parables are mysterious, and their mystery has everything to do with their longevity. Left alone, they teach us something different every time we hear them, speaking across great distances of time and place and understanding.
But according to Matt, Jesus doesn’t leave today’s parable alone. According to Matt, he takes his disciples aside and gives them the key: “I’m the sower, the field is the world, the weeds belong to the devil, the wheat to the kingdom of God”. Everything equals something else and when I hear it laid out like this I wonder, “Jesus, why he didn’t’ you just say so in the 1st place? Some scholars say it is how he avoided arrest; some say it was how he winnowed his listeners. Others say he never explained his parables at all, but that some who recorded his words could not stand their ambiguity, (like matt) and took the liberty of making these later additions so that no one who heard them later could misunderstand.
Not that it matters much, except to remind us how much we love explanations, which are after all so much easier than mysteries. A parable washes over you like a wave full of life and light, but an explanation – well, an explanation lets you know where you stand. and all of us, on some level, want to know where we stand, just like the servants in today’s parable.
The servants are so eager to please. They see something wrong, all these weeds in their boss’s best field and offer to fix it. “Do you want us to go and gather the weeds?” they ask, wanting to be faithful servants, to be counted among the sheep, to be counted good. The weeds they are after are darnel – tares, if your Bible is the King James Version, or Lolium temulentum, if you know your weeds – a plant related to wheat, that looks like wheat, that hides out in wheat but that is poisonous in the end, causing blindness and even death if too many of its small black seeds turn up in the bread dough.
Palestinian farmers learned to deal with it early, uprooting the darnel once or twice before harvest so that they did not have to separate seeds by hand. To let the wheat and the darnel grow together posed an unnecessary risk, but one that this morning’s sower seems willing to take. He is eccentric, even by ancient standards – reluctant to let his servants weed his field for fear they’ll uproot the wheat, sure that an enemy is responsible for the problem in the 1st place. By modern standards he seems a little paranoid – I mean, how many of us assume that the weeds in our yards are the work of our enemies? Weeds grow by themselves, and most of us have them, not only in our yards, but in our lives: thorny people who weren’t part of the plan, sucking up sunlight and water meant for the good plants, not weeds, some are just irritating, like poison icy, others, are deadly. The Q is what to do about them?
“So you want us to go and gather them?” the servants ask the master? That’s the common sense solution.. pull them up, cast them out, cleanse the field. We’ve seen a lot of this throughout human history, and see it still today, whenever violent means are used to try to destroy the weeds, the wheat is also destroyed. Countless numbers of innocent lives have been destroyed in our recent attempts to root out the evils of terrorism in the world, and in the process, we become more like the weeds we are trying to destroy.
Wherever people try to purify the fields by hostile means, they’re doing what the servants wanted to do, without permission, because the master said no..
“No” the master said, “for in gathering the weeds you’d uproot the wheat along with them. Let them both grow together until the harvest time. “
It think there are some key reasons why the master said no. 1st of all, sometimes it’s really hard to tell the difference between a good plant and a bad one, especially when it can act both ways, like the wheat and the tares. We’ve all had the experience of uprooting the raspberries by mistake or protecting something interesting that turns out to be a thistle. I don’t know what makes us think we’re smarter about ourselves or about the other people in our lives. We’re so quick to judge, as if we we’re sure we know the difference between wheat and weeds, good seed and bad, but that’s rarely the case. Turn us loose with our machetes and there is no telling what we’ll chop down and what we’ll spare. Meaning to be good servants, we battle the weeds and end up standing on a pile of wheat.
Or else we do not, because we have the good sense to listen to the sower, whose orders sound foolhardy if not downright dangerous. Leave the weeds and the wheat alone; let them both grow together, he says, letting us know that he doesn’t share our appetite for a pure crop, a neat field, an efficient operation; letting us know that growth interests him more than perfection and that he’s willing to risk fat weeds for fat wheat. When we try to help him out a little, to improve his plan, he lets us know that our timing is off, not to mention our judgment, and that he does, after all, own the field.
Far better that we limit our focus, within, to the field, within ourselves, and courageously bring to the light of day, to see the glorious mixture of wheat and weeds that is within us, and within everyone. It’s natural to want to separate out the weeds, throw them out, and rid ourselves of everything we don’t want to know about ourselves. But in doing so, we end up separating them from our conscious minds, and repress them deep within the shadows of our unconscious, where they continue to drive our actions. Far better to bring the glorious mixture of wheat and weeds into the light of conscious thought, and learn to live with greater compassion for ourselves and others. We’ re all a mixture of wheat and weeds!
Hear another parable of the wheat and the weeds. One afternoon in the middle of the growing season, a bunch of farmhands decided to surprise their boss and weed his favorite wheat field. No sooner had they begun to work, however, than they began to argue – 1st about which of the wheat-looking things were weeds and then about the rest of the weeds. Did the Queen Anne’s lace pose a real threat to the wheat, or could it stay for decoration? and the blackberries? They would be ripe in just a week or 2, but they were, after all, weeds – or were they? and the honeysuckle – it seemed a shame to pull up anything that smelled so sweet.
About the time they had gotten around to debating the purple asters, the boss showed up and ordered them out of his field. Dejected, they did as they were told. Back at the barn he took their machetes away from them, poured them some lemonade, and made them sit down where they could watch the way the light moved across the field. At 1st, all they could see were the weeds and what a messy field it was, what a discredit to them and their profession, but as the summer wore on they marveled at the profusion of growth – tall wheat surrounded by tall goldenrod, ragweed, and brown-eyed Susans. The tares and the poison ivy flourished alongside the Cherokee roses and the milkweed, and it was a mess, but a glorious mess, and when it had all bloomed and ripened and gone to seed the reapers came.
Carefully, gently, expertly, they gathered the wheat and made the rest into bricks for the oven where the bread was baked. and the fire that the weeds made was excellent, and when the harvest was over the owner called them all together – the farmhands, the reapers, and all the neighbors – and broke bread with them, bread that was the final distillation of that whole messy, gorgeous, mixed up field and they all agreed that it was like no bread any of them had ever tasted before and that it was very, very good. Let those who have ears to hear, hear.
