Leave It Be

Remember from last week: Jesus told parables designed to tease the mind into insight. The closest literary form we have to the parables of Jesus is not a metaphor or a simile, but a riddle. Jesus’ parables are mysterious in the sense that they are difficult to understand, or perhaps more accurately, to accept. They “challenge us to look into the hidden aspects of our own values, our own lives. They bring to the surface unasked questions, and they reveal the answers we have always known, but refuse to acknowledge. Our reaction to them should be one of resistance rather than acceptance….Therefore, if we hear a parable and think, “I really like that” or worse, fail to take any challenge, we are not listening well enough.” (Amy-Jill Levine)

Let’s listen carefully, “The Kingdom of Heaven, life the way God intends it to be is like a farmer who sowed good seed in his field.” Pretty clear. God is the farmer, who plants good seed. “But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away.” This is Jesus’ answer to the problem of good and evil. If God is good, why is there evil in the world?
William Barclay teaches that in Jesus’ day if your neighbor didn’t do what you wanted, you might threaten to sow weed seed in his field. Sometimes it was actually done, and Roman law outlined the punishment for it. While it wasn’t common for your neighbor to carry out the threat, the presence of evil and suffering in and amongst the good was common, just like it is today. And when did it get planted? When everyone was asleep.

It seems to me this is the first lesson of the parable. When you and I are not paying attention, evil weeds get planted. It happens even in our closest relationships. Schedules and work keep us from connecting with our spouse and our children. And then, one day, it’s too late. Signs of trouble have been missed. Devastating choices have been made. We hadn’t noticed the weeds growing in and amongst the wheat. And now, they have taken root.

It is easy to not notice the weeds growing, the young plants look just like the wheat. The crowd gathered at the sea shore would have known what weed Jesus meant. We call it bearded darnel. Early on, it is nearly impossible to tell it from wheat. Only when it puts on the grain can you tell the difference. The seeds are similar in size and shape, but the beaded darnel seed is a slate-grey color. But by the time you can tell the difference, the roots of the wheat and the darnel have grown together and are so intertwined that you can’t pull up one without uprooting the other. So, they have to be harvested together, and then the darnel has to be hand picked out after the threshing before it is milled. The bearded darnel seeds are slightly poisonous and have a slightly bitter taste.

This is the second lesson of the parable. You can’t tell the difference between the good and the bad plants until it is too late to pull the weeds without killing the wheat. Presbyterian Pastor, Dr. Mark Davis remarks about the seeds, “There have to be easier ways to destroy a crop than to plant weeds among them, so that nobody notices until the seeds begin to sprout. This evil act of enmity is not simple vandalism. It is an act of systematic imitation. It is systematic in that the root systems of the wheat and the weeds are intertwined to the point that pulling up one might result in pulling up both. It is imitative in that the weeds will also take root and grow, just like the wheat. In other words, the enemy operates by very deliberately cultivating something which acts very much like the wheat it is meant to destroy.”

So, you have to let them grow together. Rev. Dr. Tom Long says that “…the parable presents the realities of the church; there are weeds as well as wheat ‘in the pews.’ The church is like the field in the parable. Weeds are entangled in the wheat; good and evil are mixed together. What does the parable say about such a situation? It assures us that this is not the way God wants it to be, nor will it always be this way.” But for now, we wait. For now, God waits patiently. Why? It is not that God likes seeing weeds all throughout his fields. It is not that God doesn’t have judgement for the evil in the world. It is that to fail to be patient will mean that some good wheat will be uprooted as well, and God won’t do that. Nor should we. That’s the hard part of this parable to hear. It takes us out of our comfort zone to leave wrong alone, to leave people who we see are not doing God’s will, not living with God’s grace, in the church.

Presbyterian pastor Joanna Adams asks, “Do you ever think your church would be better off without those other people who are so wrong-headed and argumentative and with whom you vigorously disagree about important matters?

On a vastly greater and more serious scale, there are extremists all over the world today who believe they have a mandate from their god literally to destroy those whom they deem to be enemies of God. Surely the Christian church in a world so polarized and filled with terror because of religious excess, surely Christ’s people have a special responsibility to bear witness to a better way.
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once put it: ‘God’s purpose is not wrathful judgment. God’s purpose is redemption, and the road to redemption is by way of reconciliation. Only in that way will the world finally be saved.’ Today’s parable warns us against relying on our human capacity to know fully the mind of God. It also suggests that what might appear to be good and pure to us might not necessarily be either one.” And it instructs us to be patient and let God be the judge.

Because, in the end, the wheat and the tares will be separated. And there will come good from the tares. This is good news – even though it is hard for us to hear. Because it is easy for us to point to weeds in the field out there, it is even fairly simple for us to find some weeds in the church family and in our own family, but the truth is, there are weeds growing in us, too. And they won’t be separated until the wheat is fully grown and ready to be harvested. And when they are separated, the weeds will be used for fuel. In arid Palestine, there aren’t trees. There are some bushes and succulents, but there is little fuel to burn. The evil in this world will not be for nothing. It serves as fuel for God’s Kingdom. God uses it to cause us to have energy!

So, what do we do? Just let evil continue unchecked? Rev. Dr. Jim Somerville tells about what his congregation did. He says, “I asked the people at my last church to imagine what would happen if we adopted a policy of weed-pulling, if we drew a circle around the little town of Wingate, North Carolina, and made a vow that no evil would cross that line, that no weeds would grow within that border. I said, “You know, you and I could spend the rest of our lives protecting that boundary, standing shoulder to shoulder with pitchforks and clubs, making sure that we kept drugs and alcohol and pornography and gambling safely on the other side. I think it would take all of our energy and most of our time. But what if we did it? What if we succeeded? What would we have? We would have a town characterized by the absence of evil, which is not the same as a town characterized by the presence of good. And maybe this is what Jesus was talking about all along, that it’s better to have a wheat field with weeds in it than a field with nothing in it at all.

When that church in Wingate began a ministry to the children of a nearby trailer park, we had to decide what kind of ministry it would be. We could have chosen to root out all the sources of evil in that place-to chase down the drug dealers and the deadbeat dads, to confiscate handguns and arrest child abusers. Instead, we chose to put up a basketball goal, to tell stories from the Bible, to put our arms around little children, and sing songs about Jesus. And two years after we started that ministry, two years of going out there Saturday after Saturday to do those things, I got a note in my box at church with five words on it: “Adrian wants to be baptized.” Adrian. The terror of the trailer park. That little girl who had made our work most difficult during the previous two years. Who would have guessed? Instead of pulling weeds in the field where she lived, we just tried hard to be wheat, and somehow Adrian saw that and fell in love with it and wanted it for herself. After she was baptized, there was a little more wheat in the field. And because she was there, soon, there was even more.”

The world is full of weeds, but it is also full of wheat. As the workers left in the field, it is not our job to decide what is worth growing and what is not. It is our job to lovingly tend the plants as though they are all wheat.

Those who have ears, let them hear.