Weeds and Wheat.

Matthew 13:24–30, 36–43

July 23, 2017

I.

Teaching in parables, Jesus says that the Kingdom of Heaven is like someone sowing good seed in a field.  The field is the world and the sower is himself, the Son of Man, the truly human One, who is also God’s living presence among us.  

This is what Jesus comes to do.  He comes to add the leaven, the salt, the seed to the field.  He comes to bring into the world its own transformation into what God originally intends it to be.  He brings into the world the witnesses and agents of the destiny and fulfillment of God’s plan.  Through Jesus God reminds the world of its true self, seeking to change it from being a place of fear, death, violence, and doom, to becoming the marvelous realm of abundance, shalom, justice, and love God creates.  

To make this happen God calls, gathers, transforms, and sends people.  In the previous agricultural parable, the seed is the Word, which is to say, Jesus.  Here it is the church, which is also to say, Jesus.  Jesus is always the seed, the leaven, the salt, the light.  As Jesus is the embodiment of God, so we the church are the embodiment of Jesus Christ.

Jesus already makes this point back in chapter 10 when he says to the disciples that “whoever welcomes you welcomes me and whoever welcomes me welcomes the One who sent me,” and in chapter 11 when he says “no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”  We are Christ in the world, and therefore we are also God’s agents, God’s presence, God’s hands and feet, in the world.  We are the ones in and through whom Christ and therefore God is planted in the world.

Unfortunately, most of us are not aware of this.  We have reduced the faith to a mere religion, with its institutions, rules, labels, rituals, traditions, and differentiations.  We have made it a mere predicate of our lives, but not our identity.  It is something we do and have, but we don’t realize it is something we are.  

In this condition we are, as Jesus says, “asleep.”  And because everyone was asleep, an enemy skulked up and spread around some different seeds, weeds.  These weeds are a particular plant, called darnel, which looks a lot like wheat.  But what makes a weed a weed is that it doesn’t produce anything of value.  Wheat produces grain people can live on… weeds don’t.  Darnel, in fact, is poisonous if you try to eat its grain.

The opportunity for this adulteration and corruption of the field is that Christians, followers of Jesus, habitually underestimated their own role, function, and identity.  Their unawareness left an opening for false believers, people who claimed the name of Christ, but did not participate in the mission; people who went through the motions of Christianity, but did not live in obedience to the life Jesus commends and blesses in his beatitudes: poverty of spirit, purity of heart, gentleness, peacemaking, mourning, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, and enduring persecution.  Instead they followed an ego-centric, self-righteous shadow version of Christianity, grasping for exactly the money, fame, and power that Jesus rejects back in chapter 4 when the devil offers it.

II.

So we end up with a world in which there are at least two different kinds of seed, or Christians.  There is the good seed of people who live in Jesus’ simplicity, non-violence, generosity, and love.  These are the ones whom Jesus refers to as “the children of the Kingdom.”  They see from the higher, more inclusive perspective of heaven.  Their lives are characterized by forgiveness, acceptance, wonder, and joy.  

And they are out there in the world doing their yeasty, salty thing, being accomplices with the poor, the excluded, the disenfranchised, and enslaved, and the sick.  They are continuing Jesus’ ministry in terms set out in chapter 11.  “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”  They are doing Jesus’ work of healing, empowerment, inclusion, liberation, education, and feeding.

But there is also the bad seed of people who may look like Christians in some superficial way, but who in every respect do not follow Jesus.  They merely use Jesus’ Name to justify and rationalize their own hatred, fear, anger, shame, and desire.  Instead of being agents of God’s Kingdom, they advocate for some fantasy about “the way it used to be.”  

Jesus calls them “the children of the Evil One.”  They don’t do Jesus’ work; they do what they want to do.  They do what seems best to them.  They follow the impulses of their own minds and hearts.  They take, acquire, extract, exploit, exclude, judge, dominate, oppress, and consume.

Faced with this act of violence in which the wheat field is adulterated and corrupted, the householder, presumably God, responds with patience and forbearance.  Knowing that to disrupt the field by trying to extract the weeds in the middle of the growing season will potentially hurt the fruitful plants, and knowing as well that eventually harvest time will come when the two can be separated without harming the wheat, and when it will be easier to distinguish them, the householder says leave them all alone.  In spite of the weeds, the wheat will get what it needs to bear good fruit.  The soil is abundant and rich enough for that.  

The householder refuses, in other words, to react out of an ideology of scarcity.  That’s what the Evil One wants and expects.  The Evil One assumes that the householder will react out of rage and anger, and obliterate the whole wheat field in a fit of righteous indignation.  But no.  The householder responds with a patience that rests in a knowledge of the truth.

The weeds cannot prevent the wheat from being wheat.  The wheat will endure to the end.  It may not be convenient or comfortable to have to grow in an environment full of cheap imitation knock-off versions of yourself.  But the wheat has only to be true to itself to prosper.

In the end, of course, at harvest time, the workers will be able to separate the wheat from the weeds, saving and storing the former, and committing the latter to the fire.

III.

The obvious lesson of the parable is first to inspire Jesus’ followers to keep the faith in spite of obstacles and resistance.  Don’t get discouraged about the fact that so few people get it.  

Secondly, the parable discourages any attempt to identify and purify weeds from the church.  Such a violent purge would go directly against what Jesus is all about, which is grace, acceptance, forgiveness, and love.  Such an act of judgment itself would indicate that there was no real wheat here at all, just two sets of weeds duking it out for scarce resources.

At the same time, and in the same spirit, I want to suggest that the parables live on several different levels.  Just as there are weeds and wheat allowed to persist in the field, and the field is the world, there is also an inner world for us, and weeds and wheat persist together there as well.  

Martin Luther famously describes the human being as simul justis et peccator, which means “at the same time justified and sinner.”  Anyone imagining that “we are wheat and those other people are weeds” has fallen into the judgment trap.  Because the fact of our existence is that each of us is both, which means that no one is in a position to condemn another.

  

Each of us produces the good fruit of discipleship, justice, and love, and also the bad fruit of greed, anger, gluttony, envy, and the other sins.  We can be right in tune with Jesus’ Way… and miss the mark terribly, falling into violent thoughts and actions.  Sometimes the very same action can exhibit both  horrible selfishness and miraculous selflessness, depending on our motivation an how we choose to look at it and frame it.

If we are all both weeds and wheat, and the approach recommended in the parable is not to ruthlessly attack and rip up our bad side in order to preserve our good side, since we can’t always tell the difference anyway, and the very act of such interior violence is counter-productive, what do we do?

We need to practice noticing when we are acting out of our destructive, self-righteous, self-aggrandizing, self-justifying darnel sides, exhibiting our consuming desire for wealth, fame, and power.  We have to wake up, and become aware of our own bigotry, our own propensity towards violence, our own addiction to I-me-mine sensibilities, and our own willingness to do harm to others.  We have to notice when we are falling short of Jesus’ example and teachings.  We have to admit the godless destruction we are wreaking in the world in the name of our ideology, our nation, our race, our religion, our tradition, and our success.  For all of us break all 10 commandments in spirit every day, before lunchtime.  All of us are unconscious weeds pointlessly sucking up and wasting creation’s energy, most of the time.

IV.

That’s what we have to let go of.  That’s what is blocking the Image of God, which is our true nature, from shining in us, and from us into the world.  We have to let go of the foreign adulterations added to our good nature.  We have to let go of our ego-centric “old” selves.  

Wheat doesn’t just represent the Body of Christ in a parable.  It is the Body of Christ in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.  It is the way Christ gives us to remember him and his presence within us.  It is the way the Word becomes flesh, our flesh.

So when Jesus uses this parable he reminds us that we are the wheat when we allow his life, which is to say his humility, non-violence, forgiveness, welcoming, healing, and liberation, to mature in us and be expressed in our actions.  We identify with and feed our true Selves as wheat that brings joy and sustenance into the world.

We never get rid of our inner weeds in this life, but we may focus our attention and energy on letting our nature as wheat — producing the good fruit of discipleship, peace, justice, and love — shine forth in us.  Then we become the ones God has planted in the world for change and blessing.

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