Text: Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 Revised Standard Version (RSV)
The Parable of Weeds among the Wheat
24 Another parable he put before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field; 25 but while men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. 26 So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. 27 And the servants[a] of the householder came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then has it weeds?’ 28 He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The servants[b] said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ 29 But he said, ‘No; lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. 30 Let both grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”
Jesus Explains the Parable of the Weeds
36 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.” 37 He answered, “He who sows the good seed is the Son of man; 38 the field is the world, and the good seed means the sons of the kingdom; the weeds are the sons of the evil one, 39 and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the close of the age, and the reapers are angels. 40 Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the close of the age. 41 The Son of man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, 42 and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth. 43 Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
Old Blue Eyes sums it up:
“And, as funny as it may seem
Some people get their kicks
Stompin’ on a dream;
But I don’t let it, let it get me down,
‘Cause this fine old world, it keeps spinnin’ around.”[1]
I don’t think there’s ever been a person who hasn’t wondered at times why evil exists. Every kid on every playground knows about this – “It’s not fair! He hit me first! Why do I have to have a time-out?” You’re driving along, minding your own business, well in your own lane, obeying the speed limit, when wham! Somebody hits you, and then speeds off. You’re left to deal with the accident report, your insurance company, and all the inconvenience and expense of getting your car fixed – not to mention any downtime from injuries suffered. And you might ask that old question, “What did I do to deserve this?” (My answer to that question is: Nothing.)
On Friday, I got an email from heavy.com, one of the email lists I subscribe to, with the following subject line: “5 Teens Laugh and Watch Disabled Man Drown to Death.” The article reads in part: “Footage filmed by five Florida teenagers shows them harassing and laughing at Jamel Dunn, 32, after the disabled man entered and drowned in a retention pond in the city of Cocoa. Police say that the teenagers, age 14 to 16, watched as the man drowned at Bracco Pond Park.
“According to CBS, the teens were smoking marijuana in the park when they warned Dunn, who walked with a cane, to not enter the murky water. Dunn did so anyways [sic], and soon after encountered problems with staying afloat. Police add that they aren’t sure if Dunn was trying to commit suicide or not, as he had just had an argument with his fiancee.
“Dunn’s last minutes of his life were filmed by the teens.
“The teens made no move to call the police throughout the video and continue [sic] to laugh at Dunn.
“Dunn’s demise was only realized after the video was released by the teens on social media. Florida Today reports that the teens showed little remorse once they were found by police. They cannot face charges because they were not directly involved with Dunn’s death.”[2]
This is the face of evil, my friends.
Thank God that most of what we encounter in daily life doesn’t rise (or sink, as the case may be) to the level of “evil.” Still it’s often a matter of degree, not kind. Whether it’s a dustup on the playground, a fender bender, or something much, much worse, the common denominator is always that the “good guys” lose, while the “bad guys” win. Or so it seems.
Pastor Steve Cole writes, “We all wrestle with the difficult age-old questions, ‘Why do the wicked prosper?’ and ‘Why do the righteous suffer?’ It is especially hard when you have done right and you get penalized, while the guy who did wrong got ahead. You were praying and counting on God’s promises, but things did not turn out the way you had expected. It seems as if God did not even hear your prayers. But the guy who scoffs at God is doing great. You begin to wonder, ‘Why follow God when all I get is trials? If there is a God of justice in heaven, why doesn’t He do something about all the injustice in the world? Is it worth it to follow the Lord?’”[3]
And, to be sure, these are not new questions. The ancient prophets of Israel asked these same questions thousands of years ago. Jeremiah railed against God, asking
“Righteous are you, O Lord,
when I complain to you;
yet I would plead my case before you.
Why does the way of the wicked prosper?
Why do all who are treacherous thrive?”
(Jer. 12:1, ESV)
And even Job asks a similar question:
“Why do the wicked live,
reach old age, and grow mighty in power?”
(Job 21:7, ESB)
Or, as we might put it today, “Why do nice guys always finish last?”
Eighteenth-Century philosophers also took up the issue. The German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz coined the term “Theodicy” for the topic, which, in its most basic form, is the attempt to answer the question of why a good God permits evil to exist.
Leibniz concluded that, though evil exists, this world we live in is still the “best of all possible worlds.” His conclusion has five parts:
- God has the “idea” of infinitely many universes;
- Only one of these universes can actually exist;[4]
- God’s choices are subject to the principle of sufficient reason, that is, God has reason to choose one thing or another;
- God is good;
- Therefore, the universe that God chose to exist is the best of all possible worlds.
So, given that God is infinitely good, and that God created this world, this is the Numero Uno universe.
Fine; so why do we still have people running into us on the road and then driving off? Why do we still have all the rotten and evil people in this world that we read and hear about? Worse, why do we unfortunately sometimes have to deal with them? Leibniz wrote, “’I do not believe that a world without evil, preferable in order to ours, is possible; otherwise it would have been preferred. It is necessary to believe that the mixture of evil has produced the greatest possible good: otherwise the evil would not have been permitted.’ In other words, if a world without evil is more perfect in any way, then evil would have not happened, and the world without evil would be our world instead. God put evilness in the world for us to understand goodness which is achieved through contrasting it with evil. Once we understood evil and good, it gives us the ability to produce the ‘greatest possible good’ … Evil fuels goodness, which leads to a perfect system.”[5]
The phrase “mixture of good and evil” kind of rings a bell. It reminds me of the words of Edward Wallis Hoch, which go like this:
There is so much good in the worst of us,
And so much bad in the best of us,
That it hardly behooves any of us
To talk about the rest of us.[6]
Each and every one of us, whether we want to or not, has to recognize that we are not perfect or without blemish. We reflect in our own persons Leibniz’ mixture of good and evil.
Case in point: Jacob. It would be easy to get dazzled by the ladder and the angels running up and down it, but the first question we should ask is: What’s Jacob doing out there in the first place, anyway?
He’s out there in the back of beyond because he’s been a very naughty boy. He’s on the lam. He’s just stolen his brother’s birthright through deceit. This act – stealing Esau’s birthright – wasn’t like just “misappropriating” a few coins out of his brother’s pouch. A birthright was a very sacred thing. It bestowed more than just a blessing on the person receiving it, who was almost always the eldest son – it conferred on him the authority of the father himself, made that son the next in line as the family’s leader, and granted that son the bulk of the father’s lands and property. It was, in other words, the foundation of their entire society. They didn’t have written wills; you couldn’t just visit your friendly neighborhood lawyer and have one drawn up that everyone had to follow. When a father bestowed his blessing on his designated heir, it was both a sacred tradition and a legal transfer.
And this is what Esau had forfeited – for a bowl of soup! – and what Jacob had taken; so – not surprisingly – things are kind of hot at the moment back home in the tent of Isaac and Rebekah! So Jacob prudently decides to take a little vacation and wait until things cool down.
Juliana Claasens, Professor of Old Testament at the University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch, South Africa, writes, “[W]e encounter Jacob on the way. Jacob is portrayed as a fugitive fleeing for his life; a vagabond somewhere between a conflict-ridden past and an uncertain future.
“At exactly this point of limbo, landless, rootless and with no real prospects for the future, God meets Jacob at a place of no particular significance and transforms it into the house of God.”[7]
Jacob has committed one of the greatest and least forgivable crimes anyone in his society could commit, has fled in fear of his life – yet God comes to him and uses him to turn a nondescript piece of nowhere into a holy place. This just boggles the mind, doesn’t it?
And that is the point – or at least one of the points – of the passage.
It is a reminder that God can and does choose whomever He wants to fulfill his plan and to further His goals. God can take anybody – anybody – no matter who – to effect His work in the world. It is to Jacob, the usurper of the natural order of things, that God repeats again – for the 8th time, actually – the promise that Jacob’s family will receive a land of their own.
That is exactly what happened. And a thousand years or so later, we find Jesus telling today’s confusing parable.
Another parable about seeds, just like last week, and yet not like last week. This week, we have the added element of weeds growing up among the stalks of wheat.
What does all this mean?
First off, as our old friend Prof. David Lose writes in his blog post for this week, this parable “is not an explanation of evil, nor is it an invitation to divide the world into ‘wheat’ and ‘weeds,’” – so much for our tried-and-true ideas about “separating the wheat from the chaff”! – “nor instruction to do nothing until God comes in judgment.”[8]
Dividing our world into “us” and “them” is always problematic, and never helpful. As Pogo told us decades ago, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” The simple fact is that sometimes we are the wheat, and sometimes, despite our best efforts, we are the weeds. And sometimes, to make it even more confusing, we are both at the same time.
That is the ambiguity of our lives that we are forced to live with. How lucky we are, then, that our God, who could rip us weeds out of His garden right now, and be done with the job, stays his hand and grants us the grace to also be wheat!
In today’s Gospel, Jesus doesn’t engage in a discussion of why the enemy sowed the weeds. He doesn’t waste time on the question of why evil exists. He just recognizes that it does, and moves on.
And aren’t we often like the servants in the lesson, too? There they stand at the edge of the field, and they see with dismay and even anger that someone has come along in the dark of night and sown weeds among the wheat, and they want to just rush right in and start yanking those weeds out, even though that would risk damaging the wheat. “An enemy has done this! We must set things right!”
When those we love find their cancer has returned, and they, with dogged determination, fight a valiant fight, only in the end to lose their lives; when we find that our damaged relationship with another – friend, spouse, child, whomever – simply can’t be repaired; when, through no fault of our own, a job ends; at these times we know, and know to very marrow of our bones, that this world is not the world God intends, nor is it the way God has designed it (Leibniz’ view notwithstanding).
God does not will evil, or pain, or suffering for us. Not ever. When bad things happen to us, the cause is always to be found much closer to home. We can say, we must say, “an enemy has done this, not God.”
The proof that God never wants us to suffer is the cross itself. The cross of Christ is the supreme testimony that evil happens but is not strong enough to overcome God’s love.
And here’s the best possible news: In the end, it’s not up to us to sort out the wheat and the weeds, but God. Our job is to work against the evil we see in the world, our communities, and in ourselves – but at the end of the day, we rest secure in the knowledge that evil will be – has been – conquered by good. We don’t have to burden ourselves with passing judgment – God will do that. All we need to do is care for our corner of the world.
Sisters and Brothers! Let’s strive always to be the wheat and not the weeds!
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
[1] Dean Kay Thompson/Kelly Gordon, “That’s Life,” © 2008 Frank Sinatra Enterprises, LLC., sung by Frank Sinatra
[2] http://heavy.com/news/2017/07/teens-watch-disabled-man-drown-youtube-video/?b2np=d
[3] Cole, Steve, https://bible.org/seriespage/lesson-7-what-do-when-evil-prevails-malachi-217-36
[4] This was, of course, long before Quantum physics gave us the mind-blowing concept of multiple universes existing simultaneously;
[5] “Best of all possible worlds,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds
[6] Edward Wallis Hoch, Marion (Kansas) Record, (1849 – 1925)
[7] Claasens, Juliana, “Commentary on Genesis 28:10-19a,” July 17, 2011, Working Preacher, https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=968
[8] Lose, David, “Pentecost 7A: On the Question of Evil,” July 20, 2017, “…in the Meantime,” http://www.davidlose.net/2017/07/pentecost-7-a-on-the-question-of-evil/