Weeds
Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43
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Clearly, different people have a different tolerance for weeds. Of course, it would depend on what someone considers to be a weed. We don’t need to spend too much time in our house deciding what is and what isn’t a weed. If one ever pops up in the cracks of our driveway, the homeowner’s association in our neighborhood is quick to snap a picture of it and send us a letter with photographic evidence letting us know about the offending flora. The letter reminds us that weeds out front of the houses in our subdivision simply will not be tolerated and that failure to eradicate them from our property will result in a fine from the HOA. It helps that most of our property is xeriscaped with rocks, so the weeds are fairly easy to spot. When we lived in Tennessee, we were lucky enough to live in a house provided to us by the church I was serving. It was on a corner lot, and I was responsible for cutting the grass. We once remarked to one of our parishioners that we might want to treat the lawn to kill the clover and other weeds. He observed wryly, “if you killed the clover, I’m not sure you’d have much of a lawn left.” He had a point.
Jesus has his own thoughts on weeds, as evidenced by the parable he tells in this morning’s reading. On the heels of his parable about an extravagantly wasteful sower who throws seed far and wide regardless of the soil conditions comes this parable about a farmer whose well-sown field is corrupted by the work of a nefarious agent who sows counterfeit wheat, or weeds, while everyone is sleeping. Right away, I think that the farmer in this tale would have a ready defense for any homeowner’s association critical of the weeds in his field. It isn’t that he’s a neglectful farmer who has let his field go to seed. It isn’t some random bit of agricultural bad luck caused by a wind that might have blown the offending seed into his field. No, this is a deliberate act of sabotage carried out by an enemy. But when the farmer’s hired help offer to remedy the problem by pulling up the weeds, they are told, “no.” They are instructed to let both the wheat and the weeds grow until the time of the harvest. It’s at this point that a homeowner’s association, or whatever would be the ancient near-eastern equivalent, would need to step in. Because that strategy sounds terrible. I’m no farmer, and apparently neither was Jesus, because to do such a thing would invite all kinds of undesired consequences, like the one detailed in Jesus’ earlier parable where the seed that falls among the weeds is choked out and unable to grow. But then, it has to be said, that this is a parable and not an instructional video on YouTube. Jesus isn’t teaching people how to farm, he’s trying to paint a picture of how things work in the realm of God’s activity in the world, what is often referred to by Jesus as the Kingdom of Heaven.
One of the things this parable does is to give voice to a fairly common question when we begin talking about the prospect of God’s active presence in the world. Namely if God is indeed present and working to bring about all that God desires for us and for all of creation, then where did all the weeds come from? One day the people working for this farmer look to see how the crop is coming along only to realize in horror that in addition to the wheat, the field’s been sown with weeds. They ask what we all want to ask God at some point or another, “didn’t you plant good seed?” Which is a kind of backhanded way of asking if God can be trusted. I mean, I want to believe that you are good and that what you do is good, so where is all this bad stuff coming from? What’s with a virus that’s so unpredictable in the damage that it does, that preys on the most vulnerable? Didn’t you plant good seed? And while we’re at it, what about a whole host of other things that make no sense: like babies that die, children who are orphaned or afflicted by brain tumors; human trafficking; the systemic violence endured by people of color, catastrophic weather brought on by a rapidly warming planet, and on and on. Far from shying away from such questions, Jesus tells us a story that recognizes the legitimacy of such lament in response to all the ways in which we can see that the world is not as it should be, that in the midst of God’s grand design is something else that is counterfeit and not at all what God intends.
A friend once told me the story of a new pastor who was called to a church that was so small she made it her goal to visit every member within the first six months of her arrival. At the end of those six months she’d nearly met her goal. She had visited everybody but one family that hadn’t been to church in a couple of years. Leave them alone, she was told, they aren’t coming back. But she’d set a goal, so one afternoon she went out to see them. Only the wife was home. She invited the pastor in, offered her coffee and they sat in the kitchen and chatted. They chatted about this, they chatted about that and then they chatted about it. Two years ago she had been vacuuming while their infant son played in the back den, she hadn’t checked on him in awhile, so she turned off the vacuum, went into the den- he wasn’t there. She followed a trail out the den, across the patio to the swimming pool where she found him. “Our friends at church were very kind,” she said, “they told us it was God’s will.”
The pastor put down her coffee and wondered, should she touch that, or not. She touched it. “Your friends meant well, but they were wrong. It wasn’t God’s will. God doesn’t will the death of children.” The woman’s jaw clenched, and her face got red with anger, “then who’s to blame, are you blaming me for this, is that what you’re saying?” “No, no. I’m not blaming you. I’m just not blaming God either. God’s heart broke when yours did.” But the conversation was over, and on the way back to the church the young pastor thought, I should have left it alone.
By the time she got back, there was a message waiting for her and when she called, the woman said, “I don’t know where this is going, but my husband and I would like you to come out here and talk to us about this. For two years we thought God was angry at us, and now we wonder if it was not the other way around.”
Did you do this, God? No. Then where did these weeds come from? An enemy has done this, we are told. That is what we are up against, an enemy that is something more than the evil in you and the evil in me.
Here’s where Jesus’ story gets tricky. Because when I see all the evil in the world, all the injustice, all of the grief and heartache, all the unrelenting pain that so many people endure each and every day, I want to do something about it. I want to pluck it up. I want to eradicate it. I want to pull out my industrial size jug of roundup and spray those weeds into oblivion. Only, it turns out that roundup might give you cancer. Which is kind of the point that Jesus is making. We might worry about the unintended consequence of leaving things alone. But as this parable points out, there is also an unintended consequence to going to war with the weeds. You can’t do it, says the landowner (and by extension, Jesus) without tearing up the wheat in the process. Their root systems are too intertwined.
The moment we are living through as a society is not unique. In some ways, the divisive polarization created by partisan politics and culture ebb and flow over history like the tide. We are certainly experiencing a high-water mark right now for animus and anger directed toward our neighbor. It existed well before this viral pandemic reared its ugly head, but the efforts to mitigate its spread have only exacerbated the worst behavior. I read about an encounter someone had at a convenience store last week where another customer tried to rip their face mask off, claiming they were the victim of government mind control. It’s a little crazy y’all. I’m sure we all have our ideas about who is the problem; who are the weeds among us, planted by the enemy to thwart the thriving that God desires for all of creation. But the chances are that the people we might identify as “weeds” would have the same view of us. The simple truth is that what we’re up against is bigger than either of us. Now that isn’t to say that we shouldn’t actively work to name injustice in the world. Jesus’ parable isn’t a call to passively allow evil to persist, “weeds and wheat.” But it is a caution to us about how often we do real damage to God’s creation and God’s children in the name of weed control. As Gandhi observed, “[even] when violence appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.” Putting that person in their place, destroying them in a debate might feel good in the moment, but the damage to the relationship will far outlast any of that good feeling. Lest we forget, the highest example we have of God’s effort to defeat evil comes in Jesus himself, who did so not with a sword and shield, but nakedly hanging from a cross to die, transforming the power of sin and death in the process. Doing battle with one another, seeking to eradicate the people we consider to be weeds only does what the enemy intended all along- it destroys the field and thwarts God’s purpose in cultivating the very thing that can feed those who hunger for something good. Or as my friend from Tennessee put it so long ago, if we do that, we won’t have much of a lawn left.
Father Richard Rohr reminds us that the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. Instead of trying to prove that someone else is wrong, or a product of the enemy, we serve the kingdom far better by living into the practice and values of the one who has the power to transform the worst of this world for the good. We would also be advised to do so with a measure of humility, knowing that we are God’s field and that as such it’s more than a little likely that the enemy has sown some of that counterfeit wheat in us too. Which means that as scary as it’s been made to sound, the fire at the end of this parable is actually very good news. The fire doesn’t belong to the enemy, it belongs to God. It is the means by which God burns the stubble and impurities away from human life to refine it. At some point our prayer must be, “Lord, whatever there is in me that participates in the power of Death- burn, baby, burn. Make me whole by the refining fire of Christ, that I might be consumed by his love.”
As the days of this pandemic turn to weeks and then months, we would do well to heed the vision Jesus places before us with this parable, and instead of participating in the endless blame game, looking for the ways in which we can work alongside God to cultivate what is good, what is just, what is worth growing. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Amen.