Wheat or weeds?

We’ve got a string of parables in our Sunday gospels that are all about soil and seed and crops. The metaphor works well for the spiritual life – things take time to ripen and grow in our lives and in our hearts. Seeds are sown in what someone says or some book we read and they bear fruit later in unexpected ways. Things are often happening and shifting in us without our even realizing it, just like seeds grow in the ground without our seeing it. We are always a work in progress.

The parable we just heard, the parable of the wheat and the tares, is a little like the one we heard last week, the Parable of the Sower. It’s intended to answer a nagging question faced by the community of Jesus’ followers then and now: If Jesus is the Messiah, and his message is good news for all, then why isn’t everyone on board with it? Why are there some who refuse to join this movement? Last week’s parable gave the answer that it all depends on our human nature: just as not all soil is good for growing, not everyone is ready to receive the gospel and let it bear fruit in them. That we can understand. But this week’s parable has a slightly different tack: the implication of the wheat and the tares, at least as Jesus explains it to his disciples, is that those who are not part of the Jesus movement are bad seeds, bad from the very beginning. Bad seeds can’t turn into good ones; weeds can’t turn into wheat. So there’s nothing we can do about it until God comes and sorts it all out. You can see where John Calvin got some of his ideas about predestination – the idea that God has chosen only some of humankind for salvation by pure grace. (Not a doctrine we hold in the Episcopal Church, to be clear.)

It’s another time when Jesus explains his own parable in a very straightforward, allegorical way. Just as I did last week, I’m protesting that again. Because there’s an obvious temptation as we listen to this interpretation: if there are children of the kingdom and there are children of the evil one, we might find ourselves feeling pretty sure we know which is which. The bad seed people, well, they’re obvious, right? They’re the ones we disagree with, of course. They’re the ones who cause the problems and commit the crimes. They’re the ones who don’t pull their weight in society or in our community. They’re the ones who took my parking place. Whoever they are, we’re pretty sure we can spot them. Because of course, we must be the good seeds, not them. So them, we can go ahead and judge, because they’re so clearly not us.

Hmm. Nothing like a parable that makes us feel good about ourselves to make me wonder whether we haven’t just walked into a trap. And into a whole set of flashing warning signs too: the seeds of some of our current political violence lie in exactly this kind of thinking.

So maybe we need to dig deeper (get it?) into Jesus’ image, to see things that would have been clear to his listeners but that have gotten lost for us in the translation. One idea often repeated in commentaries is that the weeds in the parable are actually a particular plant, what is called darnel, or false wheat. It looks very much like wheat, and if it were sown among real wheat, their roots underground would be all tangled up together. It would be hard to distinguish it from the wheat, and harder still to pull it up without disturbing the wheat. At the harvest, however, darnel looks different than real wheat – the head of real wheat grows heavy and droops, while darnel keeps standing upright. So if you wait till the harvest, it’s more obvious to separate it out, especially when you’re cutting all the wheat anyway. It’s also important to note that these weeds don’t seem to do any harm to the wheat – they’re just growing there alongside.

So part of the point of Jesus’ parable seems to be that evil isn’t always recognizable as evil. It might even look just like the good, might be all mixed in with it. It takes a great deal of wisdom and discernment to name something as evil, especially when it’s masquerading as the good. And, Jesus is saying, it takes more wisdom and knowledge than we have to do the same with people – none of us can know the heart of another person, really, and so none of us can know what motivates someone to do what they do. We can make laws and name consequences for certain behaviors, because we need to structure society somehow. We shouldn’t tolerate actions that actually do harm to other people. But we cannot ultimately say whether a person is good at heart or not.

And if that ambiguity bothers us, well, maybe we have to read our Bible some more. We have an example for us right there in the Old Testament reading, where we’re working our way through the patriarchs and matriarchs. Today’s story is the beautiful one about Jacob’s dream, where he sees a ladder to heaven. Jacob is son of Isaac and grandson to Abraham, the one whose name will become Israel, the father of the twelve tribes, a nation with a call to be a blessing to the whole world. Jacob has some powerful spiritual experiences along the way as he matures, more than many characters in scripture have. He’s clearly blessed by God, beloved of God, called by God to be part of his work of redemption in the world.

And Jacob is also, to be honest, a jerk. Last week we heard the story of how he tricks his brother Esau out of his birthright. Later he tricks his father into giving him the family blessing that should go to Esau. He’s a scheming double-crosser who, with his mother’s connivance, engineers his family position into the lineage of Israel. His name Jacob means ‘the supplanter’ – the name Israel he will be given means ‘the one who wrestles with God.’ He’s not a shining paragon of virtue and obedience. And God chooses him and works through him for the salvation of the world.

So in the words of today’s parable, what kind of plant is Jacob? A wheat? Or a tare?

He’s not the only one. We could catalog so many other scoundrels and scallywags in the scriptural account, compromised and compromising people who are nevertheless instrumental in God’s kingdom. If Jews and Christians wanted to come up with a set of scriptures that make themselves look good, they didn’t do it with the Bible. And it seems God wants it just that way.

And it shouldn’t take many times through our weekly confession of sin for us to remember that we ourselves are compromised and compromising people. We are all mixed seeds. As Paul says to the Romans, we are groaning with all of creation, still awaiting redemption. We’re not there yet. But God has compassion on our weakness – God seems not only to be patient with us but even to choose us, with all of our warts and weaknesses thoroughly intact.

Which doesn’t free us to just sit back and stop trying to do better, of course. We do have a charge laid before us: we’re supposed to live out what it means to be children of the kingdom, and we’re supposed to be making disciples of other people to be children of the kingdom as well. Which means we need to love other people as God does, always looking in them for what is good – not calculating on and expecting the bad. It’s not a naïve love: it understands that the enemy is also at work, everything that is set against God. But it also allows for people to change, redemption to happen, God’s work to be carried out even when we don’t expect it to. 

Ultimately, God is the only one to judge the wheat and the tares. We may not be in control of what is happening; we may not understand it; but God does. The deeper truth of the parable today is that God has us in hand. We can trust God. If we ground ourselves in daily prayer and time with God, if we put ourselves in mind regularly of God’s love and intentions for us, then we will begin to recognize God’s hand at work in our lives. We won’t need to be so fearful. We won’t need to set up our own barriers and judgments and categories to keep the evil at bay; we won’t need to point fingers at others as the problem, the enemy. Because God is faithful. Ultimately, no evil can harm us; so judgment is not our work. We can be at peace and continue to grow up together, loving one another and letting God be God.