The Parable of the Weeds

 A sermon on Matthew 13: 24-43

When I was in graduate school, I started writing a novel. Set in a universe where multiple worlds were connected by a magical network of roads, and those with the know-how and the power could traverse it, my characters jaunted through many universes, some beautiful, some terrifying, some profoundly ravaged by illness or war, some utopia. As they traveled, they became aware of a deep corruption in the web of worlds, and they began to search for a cure for the brokenness that threatened not only their worlds but all worlds. I began writing this story in graduate school for psychology, at first in my off hours, and then soon I found it to be a consuming project. I scribbled notes for my book in the margins of cognitive psychology and quantitative methods. I typed away over lunch, between classes, pausing in my grading to write down more ideas. Soon it was not one book, but a trilogy, and I was spending hours every day working on it.

During this time, I was also miserable with what I was doing. I was running experiments, doing literature reviews, grading papers, tutoring students, taking classes, the things I had worked so hard to do. And yet I was deeply unhappy and unsure where to go. It took a very insightful friend, who pointed out that all the joy I was experiencing in my life seemed to come from thinking about, writing about, and talking about theology for me to realize I was unhappy because I wasn't doing what I was meant to do. When I go back and look at the stories I wrote at that time, I am struck by the obvious theological themes permeating every scene, every character. Each character represented both virtue and shortcoming, now and not yet; each plot and sub plot wrestled with the reality of sin and the need for redemption.

Our stories reflect things about the story tellers in ways that are probably more honest and clear than the plain histories and texts of the time. Storytellers share, in the telling, their biggest fears, their most authentic needs, their most secret hopes. In writing my story, I was longing to explore the eschatology and sotieriology of my own faith life. Although the stories told a tale, they also told something about who I was at the time, and who I longed to be.

The parables of Jesus are in many ways no different from the stories we tell one another. Fairytales about princesses and kingdoms, heroes and magic, they paint a picture of a world that makes clear what we value and believe to be true. In this chapter of Matthew, Jesus tells not only this one parable but seven parables. In each of these stories, Jesus is trying to put words around a deeper reality, from seeds to trees to treasure and yeast, the theme is Jesus attempting to explain some deeply intangible subject to his disciples. The parable of the weeds is a little bit of a tricky story, even though Jesus clearly explains what each part of the story represents. A sower goes out and plants good seed, and in the night an enemy comes and plants weeds that look very similar to the good seed. In the morning, the servants see what has happened and the sower says to leave the good crops and the weeds to grow together, because uprooting the weeds would destroy the good seeds. Later, when the crop is harvested, the bad stuff can be separated out from the good.

This story raises a lot of questions that I want to draw your attention to. Some of my questions are:

Why didn't the sower do something to protect his field from enemies?

Do the weeds have any negative impact on the good seeds?

Do the good seeds have any impact on the weeds?

What does it mean to be thrown into the fire?

Does this mean that some people are just bad weeds and some are good seed?

The text gives us a little bit more by way of explanation than some of the other parables in this text. Jesus says that the sower is God the Father, the good seeds are the children of the kingdom, the weeds are the “children of the evil one,” and the enemy that sowed them is the devil. Historically, this text and the previous parable of the sower have been used to justify a lot of exclusivity within the church. I won't lie, this text and similar ones make me a little uncomfortable at times. I hate the idea that there are some people that are “in” and some that are “out.” I hate the idea of predestination, and worse, double predestination. I very much dislike the implications when this parable is taken too literally and drawn to the seemingly logical conclusions. It's so easy for us as humans to put our own interpretations, usually laced with a heavy dose of self-interest, into parables. We can cast ourselves as the heroes; the sowers or the servants, or more typically the good seed. But one of the beautiful things about the art of parable is that the meaning is ever shifting, as we cast ourselves in the different roles, as we work through one perspective, and then the next.

I will say a couple of things about some of the facts and perspectives in this story. Jesus doesn't actually say that the “children of the evil one” are other humans. The text says that at the end the reaper will come and collect up all causes of sin and evil-doers. I think the way this passage has been used to divide is, perhaps, a bit of wishful thinking on the part of people who want to keep their churches and societies looking in a certain way that benefits them. I also think it might be a mistake to assume that the children of God and the “children of the evil one” are always binary things. Other passages, such as the wheat and the chaff, suggest that we are multi-faceted humans, each with life giving parts and each also with sinful parts that God can and will separate out. I do think there are some interesting conclusions about our faith that we can draw from this text. We do sometimes shy away from thinking about what happens at the end of our lives and the end of the universe. We mainline Christians hate that, but it is a question we can and should ask about our own role and destination in this walk of life. But ultimately, whatever conclusions we draw from stories like this, we must always explore the meaning first, with great humility and an understanding that had Jesus wanted us to take away concrete conclusions, he would have given us unambiguous answers, and secondly, we must do so with the context and heart of the story teller in mind.

We can do that by looking at the character of the sower, and more importantly, Jesus himself. In the story, the sower seems mostly unsurprised by the attack upon the field that resulted in the weeds. Although he planted good seed, he seemed to have a sense that the weeds were just part of the agricultural process and could be dealt with by the professionals. The sower also stops the servants from making premature judgments. In that part of the world, there was indeed a particular type of weed that closely resembled the wheat. Although pulling the weeds out with the young wheat would result in destroying the healthy plants, leaving them together to be harvested was safest. This is such a beautiful truth and one that we as a church would do well to remember: we don't know the hearts of those around us. The harvest is in God's hands alone, and any attempt to “weed out” people based on our own assessments will be clouded by our own misconceptions, assumptions, and inability to see the future. The sower is saying that the right thing to do is to protect everyone because things may not be as clear as you think. This is a bit of a radical idea at the time, and an even more radical idea now given our massively divided culture. The other interesting thing I noted is that the sower is actually not the one doing the reaping and neither are the slaves of the house. The “Son of Man will send his angels” to the harvest, and therefore not only is it not safe for the slaves or even the master to do the reaping, it's downright not their job. The job of the sower was to plant the seed, the job of the seeds was to grow, the job of the servants was to watch over the field. I don't want to presume to understand all of what this means, but overall from the story, my sense is that the sower, who here represents the divine, is most concerned with engendering and preserving life, not with the harvest or subsequent destruction of the weeds.

Lastly, I think we are meant to connect Jesus' own story and character to the sower and to the tale. Jesus, although he definitely shared his understanding of how to be a servant of God, also very much lived this idea of seeing people as multi-faceted and capable of being nurtured into something other than what they were before. Jesus recruited the least likely people to be his followers. A woman of ill repute, some stinky fisherman, a tax collector. Jesus himself transformed people from sickness to health, from sin to service, from death to life. I think if we get caught up in, excuse the pun, the weeds of the passage and draw too many strict conclusions, we miss who the story teller is. The story teller is one who is preaching humility in not judging those around us; the story teller is encouraging prudence and thoughtfulness in our cultivation of the world around us; the story teller is trying to reveal the importance of certain ways of being and living, not for his own sake but for ours, to help us live better. And so when we read this parable and others, it's important to remember that the story teller is one who loves us. Who plants good seed to feed the world. Who encourages valuing that which is eternal over that which is fleeting. Who came down from on high to be among us and with us.

When we look to the character of the sower, we understand just how valuable and loved we are. And that is what I hear when I listen to these parables. Here is one who seeks to grow us, who wants to guide us from darkness into light, from slavery into freedom. Here is one who wants to reveal to us the power and glory of God so that we don't stumble around blindly harming when God's intent was for life. What I see in the parable is a world of imperfect people who can only be known ultimately by the one who sees beyond surfaces, who calls us into a different reality, and who cares very much for the whole field. And so, I refuse to draw simple, moral conclusions about this parable and others, because that's not what parables are for. Parables are there to make you question, to think, to wonder, to cast yourself in one role one day and another role the next. And ultimately, what matters most in these stories is that the one who told the story told did it for our benefit, because we are so loved. Amen.