Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

This week feels like a Parable of the Weeds Among the Wheat kind of week. I hadn’t planned on preaching on the gospel lesson this morning when I first read the assigned Scripture readings for this week on Monday. But after what I shared at the beginning of worship, the wildfire smoke and the smell of burning wood, and everything else going on in the county, State, and Country that seems really chaotic, I sensed the Spirit pointing me towards this parable, The Weeds Among the Wheat.

This story is a parable. Its parable cousin is our gospel reading from last week, the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13. In the Parable of the Sower, Jesus explains that God’s word won’t always find good soil to take root in and grow and bear fruit. Sometimes there are rocks, thorns, and birds which will eat and choke the seed (which is God’s word, the gospel message). The Parable of the Weeds Among the Wheat continues Jesus’ agricultural images to teach us about God and God’s ways.

The Parable of the Weeds Among the Wheat goes like this: Jesus said the Kingdom of heaven (which is his phrase in the gospel of Matthew that he uses to describe God’s world) is like a man who planted good seed in his field. But, at night, while he and his employees were asleep, an intruder came and trespassed into the man’s field and sowed weed seed among the wheat seed. Of course, no one knew this happened until everything started sprouting. If you’ve ever farmed or gardened, you know what happens next: the weed seeds start growing faster and taller than the wheat seeds. When the man’s employees saw this, they questioned his choice of seed. “You planted good seed in your field, sir,” they say, “Where did these weeds come from?”

“An enemy did this,” the farmer responds.

Being good and faithful employees, the volunteer to start weeding. But the farmer knew better than to let them go at it. Instead, he reminds them of the consequences if they start yanking the weeds out. “When you pull up the weeds, you might also pull up the wheat,” he tells them. “Let the weeds and the wheat grow together until the harvest time,” instructs them. “At the harvest time,” he says, “I will tell the workers, ‘First, gather the weeds and tie them together to be burned. Then, gather the wheat and bring it to my barn.’”

This is a parable. Parables are like Jesus’ version of Aesop’s Fables. Jesus uses parables all of the time in the gospels to teach us about God. Here is the thing about parables in the Bible, they may not be real in the sense that this farmer may not have been an actual farmer. But there were people like him, and weeds are a real problem when you try to grow things. So, Jesus uses these real life things to teach us something about God, God’s ways, God’s kingdom, and our responsibility as followers of Christ. Parables are stories that teach a moral or spiritual truth.

The second part of the gospel reading is Jesus’ explanation of the Parable of the Weeds Among the Wheat. He starts by telling about who each of the characters in the parable represent – the farmer who sows good seed is the Son of Man, the Lord Jesus himself; the field is the world that God created; the good seed are the children of the kingdom, those who join Jesus’ cause and follow his ways; the weeds and thistles are the children of the evil one, those who oppose Jesus’ cause and try to thwart his ways; the enemy who sows the weed seed is the evil one; the harvest time represents the end of the age, the end of history as we know it; and the angels are the farmworkers who will do the apocalyptic harvesting.

Jesus explains that this parable is about God’s judgement. The parable is about the line in the the Apostle’s Creed when we say what we believe as Christians, “He will come again to judge the living and the dead.” This parable is a way of talking about what that means. The parable of the Weeds Among the Wheat is about the account that every single human being, and human societies will have to give before God for what we have each done and what we have each left undone. 

According to the parable, the wheat stands for the righteous – those who have done what is good, moral, and upright in their lives, those who have set their hearts on doing God’s commands, which can be summarized like this: love God and love your neighbor as yourself. The righteous, the wheat, do this even when it is hard and costly to them. In contrast, the weeds are those who ignored or opposed their responsibility to follow God’s commands. The weeds are those who refuse to love and honor God and love their neighbor as themself. Instead, they chose the way of greed, wrath, lust, and ignorance and their misery spoils the farmer’s field and contaminates it with weeds.

The ironic, the strange, part of the parable is the farmer’s instruction. The farmer (who represents Jesus, the Son of God, in the parable), tells his employees not to go weeding. You’d expect him to get angry and to start ordering people to yank up the weeds. But in Jesus’ part of the world, the farmer’s instruction to let both the wheat and the weeds grow together makes some agricultural sense. In Palestine and Israel, where Jesus lived, the roots of the wheat stalks were much shallower and weaker than the roots of the weeds. If someone yanked up the weeds, they’d probably also pull up the wheat and ruin the harvest. Instead, the farmer’s plan is to just wait for the harvest to sort out the mess.

Remember, this is a parable, so it is designed to teach us something hard. The first hard thing we learn is that the wheat field, which stands for the world, is not a perfect place. The Scriptures talk of the world being good and that God loves the world, but the Scriptures do not talk about the world being a perfect place this side of Christ’s coming again to judge the living and the dead. The human desire is for things to be perfect. But if that is our goal we will probably always be disappointed. Instead, working for what is good is probably far more spiritually, morally, and emotionally productive. 

Second, we learn that our job is not to be weed whackers. The temptation is always to fight fire with with fire, to respond to anger with anger, to give back and hit back twice as hard as what you’ve got. As Christians, we are not to fight evil with more evil. It’s as our grandparents probably taught us – two wrongs do not make a right. We all know that, but in actual human life it is really tempting to fight fire with fire, to respond to every wrong that has been done against us or someone else with force and violence, whether violent force or violent words or a violent spirit. But God is the judge of the living and the dead. As Christians, we are to put down the gavel because it is not for us to be the judge, jury, and executioner. To be sure, we are to resist evil. That is the promise we make in our baptism. But, we are not to fight fire with fire. It’s as the saying goes: whoever keeps company with a wolf will eventually learn to howl.

The final instruction in the parable is this: trust God to deal with evil and wrongdoing. That’s not to say there aren’t consequences to wrongdoing now. We also are called to resist evil and oppression. That’s a promise we each make in our baptism. But this parable is what is called an apocalyptic parable, it deals with things at the end. And at the end of the day, this side of heaven, we have to trust God to deal with evil and wrongdoing. The promise of the gospel is that God will set the world right. It may not come on our timeline or in our lifetime, it probably won’t. But Jesus wants to focus our attention on trusting God to sort out evil and wrongdoing so that we can focus our actions on living a good, decent, and moral life here and now and for the rest of our days. The biblical word for this is to live a righteous life.

Thanks be to God. Amen.