Jesus’s parable of the weeds among the wheat challenges us to see evil in the desire to pluck weeds when we know it’ll kill the wheat.
good and evil in our midst
Proper 11A | Matthew 13:24-30,36-43
I’m starting to think every sermon should start out the same way. Something kind of like this:
Remember: Jesus is teaching his disciples about discipleship. This is not the same thing as simply being a good person. We are called to join in the transformation of the world.
I think we always need that reminder anyway. But reading these parables about sowing seeds and about wheat and weeds, we might find ourselves distracted. Our attention drawn away from what Jesus is actually talking about. We may find ourselves, well, wading into the weeds.
It is natural that a parable that invokes the problem of evil would get us asking questions. Why? How? Where does it come from? Questions that are inherently valuable and necessary. But questions that also steal our focus and drown out Jesus’s intention.
When we get so wrapped up in the problem of evil and God’s relationship to it, into a realm we call theodicy, we’re likely to engage in the very substance of what Jesus warns us about. We will wade into the weeds to hunt them out. To do God’s job.
Theodicy is a fun subject for Pub Theology, but when trying to hear what Jesus is telling us, we should pump the breaks before we slide into the ditch.
We must first acknowledge the existence of evil.
Acknowledge that evil is in the world. That evil is counter to the desires of God. And that we are called to stand in opposition to it.
The wading into the weeds to deal with the why is to deal in the unknowable. But we all know evil. The violence and hatred, the fear and the abuse, the acts of willful theft and wanton destruction. Evil is neither foreign nor external to our lives. We all know evil and have dealt with it.
And by not jumping straight into the past to determine where that evil comes from, we can remain in the present. We can simply acknowledge that evil exists now. The evil of racism has deep origins, for instance, and is intertwined with the development of America. But we must also remind one another that racism is a present evil we must presently stand against.
This practice of acknowledging the presence of evil can also help us confront the problem itself.
We are too easily prone to scapegoating. Rather than name the problem of evil itself, we personify it and make it personal. We name people as evil, pretending that ridding the world of those people is ridding the world of evil. This is the diminutive bridge between tweets and genocide: that evil can be eliminated by eliminating evil people.
This parable doesn’t simply acknowledge the presence of evil, therefore. It commands us to abstain from an evil response to evil. Fighting fire with fire is to set the world ablaze. Like trading an eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind.
It is easy to get lost.
This is a deceptively tricky parable.
We’re tempted to see Jesus’s command to refrain from evil as a call to inaction. As I might paraphrase a more vulgar saying, Forget them all. Let God sort them out. But our minds aren’t limited to such a cruel response.
We often paper over our own indifference with a sense of impossibility. As if hiding the evil is the same as objecting to it. Which is how racism can be an opinion or cruelty can be “free speech”.
But remember, wading into the weeds has a way of trapping us from seeing the bigger picture.
The picture is discipleship; it’s about personal sacrifice and commitment to transformation. The last thing Jesus ever advocates is the passive acceptance of injustice in the world.
Jesus is not telling us to do nothing. And he is (in a sense) telling us not to judge. But he’s offering us a very different picture.
This is about the Kin-dom.
He directly compares this image to the kin-dom. Compare the kin-dom to a world in which evil is present and winds its way among the people so the good and the bad can’t be separated.
Remember the parable he told right before this, about the sower who scatters seed generously in all sorts of places and how birds eat the seed on the path and rocky soil makes it hard for seeds to root down and thorny plants can suffocate.
Think about the world and then imagine a different world. One in which GOD is at the heart of it. In which faith as small as a mustard seed can grow into a shrub that transforms into the tallest tree.
Transformation. Change.
Imagine that. And remember that God is the source of that transformation.
Take that back to our world, with the weeds and the wheat indecipherable. Good and Bad is intertwined. And we’re being called to share in its transformation.
Transforming a culture of death
I mourned this week as several of our neighbors participated in the federal executions of Daniel Lee and Wesley Purkey. I mourned and raged and fought the overwhelming sense of helplessness that surrounds such public and inhumane events. Like the public spectacle of a lynching—a crucifixion that Jesus reminds us is quite literally us strapping Jesus into that chair and pumping him full of chemicals.
Jesus tells us that what we do to one another, we do to him. So we crucified Jesus more than once this week.
What we have done; trying to pull the weeds from the wheat; the very thing Jesus tells us not to do, is not really about ridding the world of evil. It is something far more seductive.
Jesus tells us that that it isn’t our job to do that. It is God’s. Jesus is telling us not to steal God’s job and do it ourselves. To play God.
This, from all the way back in the Pentateuch; from Genesis and Exodus to Deuteronomy; this is the face of sin. To play God. To judge others as worthy of living. That, from the first humans in the garden, that is the true nature of sin. And it is the most repeated sin in history.
This is why we wade into the weeds. To avoid the truth. To avoid the sin of hubris and racism and nihilism and hatred. We don’t want to believe these things about ourselves any more than we want to bear the responsibility for them.
But this is discipleship.
Wrestling with the pain and discomfort of bearing responsibility that extends beyond yourself. That we don’t get to choose which lives are worth living—who gets to count as good and who is bad—that we even get to label people that way. All of the complexity of human beings born into this world, raised in this world, who had teachers and friends and a church.
Each one made in the image of God.
Each one having the potential to change.
Just as Jesus will say in verses 31-32—that even faith as small as a mustard seed can grow tall enough “so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”
Followers of Jesus don’t steal that potential from God.
We work to make that more possible.
We make the Kin-dom present in our lives.
Our homes,
Relationships,
Commitments,
Our work,
Art,
Rest,
Our community,
Country,
World,
All to the glory of God.
We make the world more good. Not by playing God. But in partnership with God.
Through love, hope, and radical generosity.
Sharing the very grace of God so even a speck of faith might remain. Because a speck…God can work with that.