So who are the weeds? | a sermon on a tough parable

A sermon by Jamie Howison on Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43 

In a book first published in 1968—a book still in print today—the author Martin Bell offered a reflection on tonight’s parable that caught my imagination when I was still in high school, back in the late 1970s. The book is called The Way of the Wolf, and it combined Bell’s short stories with his musings on biblical questions, and even some original song lyrics. Bell was an Anglican priest in ministry in the States, and somehow his writing had made a deep impact on the leaders of my Young Life group here in Winnipeg. I still have my hardcover edition of the book from my high school days, and time and again I’ve returned to his unique and often deeply insightful writing.

And so here, in my 37th year of ordination, when the parable of the wheat and the weeds comes up in the lectionary—or the wheat and the tares, as the King James Version has it—I find myself back in a book I’ve been returning to for some forty-five years.

You’ve just heard the parable read aloud, along with the interpretation Jesus offers to his disciples once the crowd he’s been teaching has disbanded. “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field,” Jesus says, “but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away.” And no, the householder says to his servants, don’t try to uproot the weeds now, as you’ll also tear out the good wheat. Let it be until harvest time, and only then divide the wheat from the weeds; from the tares. “Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned,” he says, “but gather the wheat into my barn.”

And then when the disciples—so often a bit dense, and hoping that Jesus will bring about a victorious kingdom that will push out the Roman empire and in which they will reign at his left and right hand—when the disciples ask for an interpretation of this teaching, what he says seems at first to divide humanity rather neatly. He says, “the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil.”

And this is precisely where Martin Bell got me struggling, with his brief essay called “The Wheat and the Tares.” This is how he begins:

The kingdom of God, Lord, is like so many things. Yet nothing at all that I have ever known. Perhaps my poor head will never even grasp a single strand from your complex multiplicity of images. But the story about the wheat and the tares will always be hardest of all for me to understand. Because at the end the man burns the tares. And if the tares represent people. Lord, I’ll never understand that. Never.

And fair enough. I struggled with that question too, when I was yet going to high school and faithfully attending my Young Life group. Are some of us by nature wheat? And if so, are some by nature the weeds? How is God’s grace truly gracious, if tucked in my DNA is something that looks like wheat, while tucked in the DNA of my neighbour is the stuff of weeds? I’m not talking here about the worst of my neighbours either; those who I can only call “neighbour” through gritted teeth. I’m not talking about the architects of the drug trade that plagues many of our neighbourhoods and pulls the lives of so many people to pieces. No, I’m talking about the poor guy whose life has been tanked by those dealers, and who stands out on the corner of Broadway and Osborne hoping to get enough change to get is next hit. I’m not talking about the corrupt businessperson who quite happily builds substandard homes in the earthquake zone of Turkey. I’m talking about the broken and complicated woman who used her last Lira to pay the down payment on one of those suites the day before the buildings started to collapse. Doesn’t that poor guy whose life has been compromised by the drug trade and that complicated woman who has just lost everything because her substandard building collapsed into dust when the ground shook deserve something like a bit of grace?

Was I born with the birthright of wheat, while others—and the others aren’t ever far from view, if you keep your eyes open—were apparently born with the birthright of the weeds, the tares?

Here Martin Bell continues:

The Kingdom of God is like so many things. I hope that the parable of the wheat and the tares is about our universal condition of sinfulness and alienation. I pray, Lord, that in the end it will be this alienation that is destroyed and the whole of humanity is gathered into the Kingdom. If so, then there is no longer any mystery as to the identity of the stranger who sowed the tares. He is none other than I, myself. And there comes to my conscious awareness a new appreciation for the old saying that I am my own worst enemy. We have each of us sown the tares, and we are all of us virtually strangled by them. If this is what you are telling us, Lord, burn the tares that we have sown in order that humanity might breathe! Burn the tares and gather your children into your Kingdom. I hope that’s what you meant by the parable of the wheat and the tares. I believe that’s what you meant. I’m betting my life that’s what you meant… [because] if the tares represent people. Lord, I’ll never understand. Never. Amen.

Jesus was not always an easy teacher, and for every beloved thing that he said there comes something else that is hard and troubling and perplexing.

And perhaps that wasn’t at all accidental. He wants to shake us, and to shake us from any all too easy conclusions about what he “really” meant. He wants the priest who has been standing in a pulpit for over 36 years to have to contend—yet again—with the hardest things. How else am I kept honest? Too easy to love “gentle Jesus meek and mild,” but not so easy to follow the Lord who pressed his followers right to the wall with teachings that disarmed them. And disarm us. This Lord whom we follow can exact a demanding price, particularly of those who walk this road over decade after decade after decade. He wants none of us to take him or his way for granted.

And yet, and yet. He is also the Lord who bore the worst of us on a cross, and as he looked down on those who were killing him said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Who do you suppose he was looking at as he said that? Roman soldiers. The temple authorities who had orchestrated this whole death scene. The crowds of onlookers, curious enough to come out and watch yet another crucifixion on that awful hill. Not an innocent one among them. Forgive them, Father, for they haven’t got a clue.

And in John’s account of the crucifixion story, what does Jesus say right before he breathes his last? “It is finished.” It is accomplished. It is done. For all of the madness of this death scene—this public execution—there is nothing more that needs happen. It is finished. It is accomplished. We are forgiven, redeemed, claimed as God’s own. Right there, on that garbage dump outside of the city walls of Jerusalem, “it is finished.”

In that light, on that awful day, who was wheat and who was a weed?

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. (Romans 8:1-2)

All of us. All of us wheat. Because in him and through him, the very idea of weeds doesn’t stand a chance. All we have to do is believe that.