Don't Be A Weeder

Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43

7-20-14

Jesus is talking again about farming, gardening, growing things.

This time it’s not about the soil, but about the plants.

The parable of the wheat and the tears or weeds

Wheat Field Dream
Bob Orsillo, photograph

This parable always gives me some hesitation

The initial thing I think after reading it is that the people of the world

are divided into good and evil.  There are good people and bad people and there’s nothing that can be done about it.

Jesus explanation of the parable says just about as much.

It gives me hesitation

because I don’t think that you can’t just divide

the people of the world into good and bad,

black and white, good guys, and bad guys.

I truly believe that each one of us

is saint and sinner simultaneously –

simil ustus et piccator in latin to quote Martin Luther.

Each person that is convicted of a seriously horrible crime

has a tender heart for something-  even if it’s been hidden for years.

And each perfectly angelic church lady

has some anger and resentment and bitterness –

even if it’s been hidden for years.

No one is exulted and no one is written off as a completely lost cause.

The thought that some people were just born evil and come from

the devil just doesn’t give me a lot of lee way to think that there is hope. The weeds in my garden just don’t gradually turn in to

cucumbers and tomatoes even with all the care in the world.

 

And for humanity and systems, and institutions and countries,

that’s the hope I have really: That new life will be made from old.

And I think I’ve learned this from Jesus.
Some from Paul and some from Luther of course.
But originally, I’m pretty sure this comes

from other things that Jesus has said.

And besides that I’ve seen it happen.

I’ve seen identified weeds in my lifetime bear good fruit.

So when I read that some people were just planted by the

evil one just makes me think that I have to read more closely.

And if we don’t jump to the easiest conclusion,

and we look again, we see that Jesus doesn’t

want us to divide the world into good and evil,

Jesus is saying to do the opposite.

With the parable of the wheat and the weeds,

Jesus is saying there is good in this world and there is evil

And that is just an observable fact. It is there.

We know that there is good, we have seen it:

Compassion, love, and kindness

people sacrificing themselves and their own lives for strangers.

generosity, innocence. We know that God supports this

and helps this to grow and flourish.

But Jesus says there is also evil in the world.

We don’t need proof of that, we can see it

just like the disciples could see it.

Just look at the news in the past two days:

Russians and Ukrainians at war with each other

shoot a innocent passenger jet out of the sky killing 300 people

Israel has started a ground assault on a poor ghetto

inside their own country.

And children are coming alone to our border by the thousands

escaping the horrible poverty and violence in their own country.

Jesus says that these good and evil exist, together.

These two realities grow together in our world.

But when the servants ask the master if they should go

and identify the weeds and take them out

the master says, “No. If you take out the weeds,

you’ll take out the wheat. Let them grow together.”

This is the important part of the parable that maybe gets overlooked:

The master says: Don’t you take out the weeds.

So, we are not supposed to be spending our time

plucking those things we identify as evil.

Our job is not to identify weeds and take them out.

We are not supposed to try and eradicate evil

by removing certain people. It is not our job.

Which is interesting because throughout history,

Christians have kind of gravitated

to this task of eradicating those they identify as evil.

There is this feeling, that if we could just get rid of all the bad people

the good would flourish. Look in our history:

the crusades, the inquisition, witch hunts, countless other “cleansing” wars and invasions, the KKK, the Holocaust, the war on drugs,

the war on terror. The idea is lets get rid of the bad people,

so then the good people can be happy and the world would be great.

Sounds good in theory.

But the reality is,

every attempt at rooting out evil by destroying people

has-  in the process of doing it - produced more evil.

As we can see with Israel and Palestine -

 far more wheat is destroyed than weeds.

And more interestingly, to extend Jesus parable:

It has turned the weeders into the weeds

that they’re trying to get rid of.

All our attempts at eradicating evil creates more evil.

Jesus is saying that we can’t get rid of evil.
So we should not become zealous weeders.

God doesn’t need our help on that end.

Life is too ambiguous from our angle to be doing that.

And we don’t just see this in global politics either.

We experience this in our own personal lives too.

Every good decision is laden with ambiguity as well.

-Do we focus on our career or do we stay home with our family?

-Do we stay in the city or do we abandon the inner city schools and

move our kids to a better school system?

-Do we lay good employees off

or do we risk letting the whole business go under?

And we know our hearts are filled with wheat and weeds as well.

Saint and sinner simultaneous.

Simul Ustus Et piccator in latin.

To bring us back to where I started.

And knowing that is actually freeing.

Trying to fool ourselves into thinking that we could possibly

achieve a weed free world, or that our life could be weed free,

or that our hearts could be weed free

is an expectation that we can’t live up to.
That is what leads to our misery and destruction.

  So what can we do?

Just let evil take over? Of course not.

What we can do is help the good to grow strong.

Our job is to tend to the garden

and treat the weed and the wheat the same.

Foster more love, more generosity,

more forgiveness, more justice -

in our lives and in our world.

Let the love and grace of God fall on both
the good and the evil without regard
for which is wheat and which is weed.

As the servants of God, we are called to

treat the bad with the same compassion

as we treat the good.

God will sort it out in the end.

And we trust that in God’s creative hands,

The righteousness that exists

in all of the world will shine like the sun.