July 17, 2011 - Pentecost + 5

Wheat vs. Weeds
Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43
Pentecost + 5 – July 17, 2011

It's no wonder to me that when the disciples get Jesus alone, they pull him aside and say, “Explain that parable to us please.” Because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense on the surface of it. Jesus tells the crowds this story about the kingdom of heaven, and it's yet another farming parable – this one about weeds among the wheat. In this story, he says, a man goes out to his field, and sows good seed, but then, in the dead of night, while everyone is sleeping, an enemy comes along with weed seeds and plants them right alongside the good wheat seed, sneaking away before anyone can realize what he has done. Now when the slaves of the householder realize what has happened, when the wheat begins to grow and they see that it's not just wheat sprouting up, they go and ask the man if he wants them to do what any good farmer or gardener would do - “Do you want us to go and gather the weeds?” Because everyone knows that you don't want weeds to get a toehold in your garden. Give a weed an inch, and it'll take a mile, right? Weeds will take over the garden given half a chance, or at the very least, they'll make it harder for the plants you want to grow to grow. So at the 1st sign of weeds, you want to get out there and get rid of them, right? Give your other plants a chance to get established and not have to compete with weeds for sun and water and nutrients.

But that's where this parable gets a little strange. Because the landowner tells them the exact opposite of what we would think... He says to his workers, “No. Leave the weeds alone. Let them grow together until the harvest time, and we'll deal with them then.”

The disciples are understandably confused about this. Let the weeds grow? Even knowing as they do that this is clearly not just a story about wheat and weeds, it doesn't make sense.

Now my guess is that they were probably all too willing to get out there and start weeding up the bad seeds among them. Many scholars think that that was the case in the community that the author of Matthew was writing to. They think that there were different factions in his church, people who saw themselves as good and righteous wheat and some others among them as bad, evil weed that needed to be uprooted and gotten rid of, and they were just the ones to do the job!

We see this all mentality all around us. We experience it in ourselves. To hear Jesus say through the parable that we should just let the wheat and the weeds grow up together and take their course and trust that it'll all be sorted out in the end doesn't sit well with us. It's often not enough for us to trust Jesus' words that at the end of time, the weeds will be gathered up and burned, that the angels will collect all causes of sin and evildoers – we want that to happen right now, especially as we hear stories of awful things happening in the world around us, tales of violence and tragedy, of people who take advantage of the weak and vulnerable of our world and our society. And when we see these things happening, when we witness sin and evil taking place in the world, we want to uproot those things. We want them not to get a toehold in the field around us and in our lives, and it is confusing and frustrating to hear Jesus say, Never you mind, just leave 'em alone for now.

But as confusing as those words may be, when we step back, we see that there is wisdom in them – because our vision is masked. We may think, like the servants in the parable, that we can tell the difference between the weeds and the wheat, but that reality is that it is not always so easy to recognize what is wheat and what is weed, to be positive about who is evil and who is good. The weed Jesus is talking about in his parable looks remarkably like wheat. It's not until they are both fully grown that you can really be sure which is which.

That's true of us and our ability to see into the hearts of people too. It can seem so easy on the surface to label someone else as a bad seed and want to eradicate them. But we cannot know in our limited perspective what another person may come to be. I think of someone I reconnected with at my class reunion last weekend, a man who in our younger days was awfully “weedy” - and I kind of mean that literally. He was a drug user and a drug dealer and for a lot of years, people just kind of assumed that that's the way he would always be. But there he was at our reunion, proclaiming the goodness of God and how God was at work in his life and had brought him out of that life – and how God is now using him in the lives of young people at his church, using those weedy experiences to help others avoid them. And still, I think there are probably some who would see him, covered in tattoos and listening to heavy metal music, and would just assume he's the same old weed he always was.

But God sees something different in him. I imagine that God always saw the wheat that was possible to grow in his life, the part of him that would produce a bountiful harvest in God's field. Jesus gives us this cautionary tale about being patient, about not judging others too quickly because he knows, so much better than we ever can, that God can transform weeds into wheat.

And thanks be to God for that, because the truth is, we're all some interesting hybrid of wheat and weeds growing together, not just in the same field, but in the same person! And on any given day, from just looking at us, we're just as likely to be taken for weeds as for wheat. The good news is that Jesus, the sower, is patient. He can wait it out until the end, working in us and even in the ones we think are destined to remain weeds forever to bring forth a harvest of grain.

In the meantime, our job is not to judge others. In this parable, we are not the servants who want to do the weeding. We're not the angels who will be responsible for the reaping. We are called to be wheat – and except maybe in some strange sci-fi movie, I'm pretty sure you've never seen wheat get up and start attacking the weeds around it. Wheat grows. Wheat produces grain that feeds and nourishes others.

So go, grow. Be wheat in a weedy world. Let God take care of the weeding.

Amen.