Lectionary Reflection for Proper 11A on Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
A MISGUIDED QUEST
In Sheri S. Tepper’s book, The Revenants, which I read decades ago, a group of elders or gods sought to perfect themselves by extracting all the evil from within themselves and storing it away in some forgotten place. To their dismay, it took on a life of its own and became a force of destruction in the world. In the rather rigid, dualistic, and conservative faith of my youth, I struggled with this image and refused to consider that it could hold truth. It took years before I was able to grasp how insightful this story was, and now, whenever I encounter Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds in Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43, I am reminded of Tepper’s wisdom.
Seeking perfection, seeking to rid ourselves and the world of all evil, seems like a noble quest. But in our imperfections, limited knowledge, and hubris, our attempts to purify ourselves usually end in disaster—or, at the very least, a cold and empty life with no joy, pleasure, or true aliveness. As George Target wrote:
They don’t smoke, but neither do they breathe fresh air really deeply.
They don’t drink wine, but neither do they enjoy lemonade.
They don’t swear, but neither do they glory in any magnificent words, neither poetry nor prayer.
They don’t gamble, but neither do they take much chance with God;
They don’t look at women and girls with lust in their hearts, but neither do they roll breathless with love and laughter, naked under the sun of high summer.
It’s all rather pale and round-shouldered, the great Prince lying in prison.1
It’s not that we should be passive in the face of evil. It’s not that we shouldn’t try to evolve into more compassionate, generous, good, and loving people. It’s just that identifying and facing the evil in our world and in ourselves is more complex than we like to admit.2 And in times like these, when both global and local inequalities, injustices, war-mongering, and abuses of power seem unstoppable, we grow impatient for God or Good to intervene and set the world to rights. But the longer it takes for things to change, the more at risk we are of losing hope and taking any desperate action we can to bring about the change we seek.
It was into this age-old human dilemma that Jesus spoke his parable.
WHEAT AND WEEDS
When Jesus sent his apostles out to preach and demonstrate God’s reign in Matthew 10, he made it clear that they would face strong and often painful opposition. In Chapter 12, the writer describes some of the hostility that Jesus himself encountered: accusations of breaking the Law because his disciples picked and ate grain on the sabbath as they traveled between villages, and because Jesus healed a man’s arm on the sabbath; rumours that Jesus was serving “Beelzebul, the ruler of demons” (12:24 NRSV); and demands that Jesus prove himself by giving the religious leaders a sign. In Chapter 13, which contains the third of Jesus’ five discourses, the writer of Matthew shares a collection of Jesus’ parables, which is followed by the people of his hometown rejecting him.
This means that as we read the parables of Jesus, we need to keep this atmosphere of conflict in mind. We also need to remember that Jesus was speaking to people who were oppressed by the Roman Empire and by some of their own religious and political leaders. The message that Jesus spoke into this context, then, was political and eschatological—that the “end of the age“ or the age of the Messiah had come through Jesus and his preaching, and that God’s promised reign was present and active in the world (Matt. 4:17; Mk. 1:15; Lk. 4:16–21).3 The parable of the weeds and the wheat, which references the prophecy of Daniel, brings an apocalyptic character to Jesus’ teaching.4
The story Jesus told would have been familiar to his hearers. They knew about the weeds that, in the early stages of growth, were indistinguishable from wheat. They also knew the frustration of enemies planting such weeds in good wheat fields. This was something that really did happen in their world. But they would have nodded their heads knowingly when Jesus spoke about the dangers of trying to remove the weeds while they were growing with the wheat, both because of the struggles with trying to distinguish the good from the bad, and because of the way the roots were intertwined.
Many scholars believe that the weed Jesus was referring to was darnel. Because it looked so much like real wheat, the Jewish people called it “bastard wheat”.5 But it was poisonous and, if consumed, would cause illness or even death.6 For an enemy to sow such weeds was not a small thing. It was evil.
Jesus’ story, then, described how he was sowing the seeds of God’s reign—his apostles—into the world, “the realm of everyday political, economic, social, and religious life dominated by Roman imperial power”,7 but others were sowing seeds—children of the evil one—who may have seemed like God’s followers but were anything but. In Jesus’ explanation of the parable, these wicked ones cannot be rooted out and judged because they are indistinguishable from the righteous. It is only at the time of the harvest, the time when their fruit is visible, the time when God’s reign is revealed in fulness, that the weeds can be separated from the wheat.
We aren’t told how the people listening to this parable responded. But we can assume, from Jesus’ final call for his disciples to listen, that they would not have received it easily. They were tired of the evil that was rampant among them, which seemed to be continuing without consequence or judgment. As far as they could see, God was doing nothing, and they must have wondered whether judgement would ever come. But wrapped up in their frustration and despair was the assumption that identifying evil and overcoming it was easy.
Jesus’ message was hard for them to hear, but it was exactly what they needed to navigate their suffering with wisdom, grace, and creativity. In the words of Jennifer Kaalund:
The owner of the field understands that once they are together, the weeds and wheat must grow together since the destruction of one can lead to the demise of the other. Likewise, our tendency to split our world into two — “believer or nonbeliever” or “sinners or saints” — is not useful. We are in this world together, whether this world is the planet, our country, our community, or our congregations, we must grow together and allow the Great Judge, God, to do the separating in God’s own time. We should acknowledge that likewise we need each other to survive.8
LISTENING TO JESUS’ PARABLE
It can be just as hard for us to hear Jesus’ message today. We have learned how comforting and strengthening our polarisation can be. Corporations have discovered how lucrative algorithms that feed our dualisms and outrage are. To seek common ground is often viewed as betrayal by “our people” and as manipulation by “those people”. But we cannot eradicate evil by dehumanising one another. We cannot find purity and righteousness for ourselves by projecting our evil onto others. And we cannot build a just and loving world by seeking to destroy our enemies. In the light of this, there are perhaps three truths we need to draw from Jesus’ parable in our quest to create beauty, truth, and goodness in a world that seems to be the opposite.
