We continue in the 13th chapter of Matthew’s gospel this morning, with another parable of Jesus that comes just after the one we considered last week about a sower who “goes out to sow,” casting the seed upon different types of soil. This week, we hear of another sower, this time who seems to be growing different plants.
“The Kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field. But while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, the weeds appeared as well.
And the servants of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ They said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’
But he replied, ‘No, for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.
Let both of them grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.'”
And like last week with the parable of the sower, Matthew provides a helpful interpretation: the sower of the good seed is Christ, the field is the world, and the wheat that grows from this good seed is the “children of the kingdom.” Conversely, the enemy that sows the weeds is the devil, and weeds are those in league with him. In the fullness of time, all the angels of heaven will sort between the two, with the weeds ending up in the furnace: Let anyone with ears listen!
Well, I’ll say!
I.
If nothing else, this parable is certainly an attention grabber—for the church today as much as it seems to have been back then. It’s dramatic, and seen from one way, it speaks to real, even natural, questions we have when we look out over the world, with all its suffering, injustices, and real evils: will God make things right? Will those responsible for this pain and hardship ever be held accountable? Is there justice, in the end? These can be fair and faithful questions.
But the twist in this parable, the surprise, the part that is meant to unsettle us, and what I believe is the parable’s true aim, is how it speaks to one of the church’s great pastimes both then and now: which is speculating about who is wheat and who is a weed.
We love these conversations! And of course this sort of speculation is certainly not reserved for the church—there is an entire information and opinion economy out there whose central project is this exact question: Who’s good and who’s bad?
Who’s on our team and who’s not? Who can we discard and throw away? It can be intoxicating to be told how right we are and how wrong they are. And profitable! How many billions are being made from keeping us trapped in this same doom loop of sorting the wheat from the weeds?
It has been a very powerful politics in recent years—as it circles around with each generation—to separate the wheat from the weeds, the plants that “belong here” and the bad seed sown among it, imagined as whole communities of people.
This conversation is not reserved for the church by any means. But it is also true that when the church sorts who is in and who is out, who is under the love and care of God and who is somehow outside it, it does so with a unique finality and conviction, claiming to have the backing of scripture and the Word of God, often to disastrous and painful ends. It’s this kind of speculation and misplaced certainty that Jesus addresses.
The servants come to the master and ask if he’d like them to comb through the fields and pluck out all the weeds that have grown among the wheat, and he, somewhat surprisingly, says No. No, you’ll end up doing more damage to the whole field. Let all of it grow together, and in time all will be revealed.
The workers are eager to go through the fields to identify and remove anything they deem of no use. But the master—who clearly has been at this a lot longer than they have—knows it’s not that easy. This kind of sorting, sifting, and discarding does harm to the whole field. But even more than that, I believe, and crucially, the master sower in this parable knows that it’s not always easy to tell what’s a weed and what’s not.1
II.
It was some years ago when the boys and I were left unsupervised to weed an area in our backyard where Audrey had been doing some planting around our raised-bed boxes. And, doing my best to be my sons’ fatherly guide in these character-building tasks, I called them over to see the fibrous green shoots popping up among the other weeds, which I identified for them as wild onion. And I showed them how if you pull them at the base, the whole shallow bulb will come with it.
There was a whole patch of it there, so we took care to pull them all up and lay them in a pile before moving on to another spot.
Before long, we went inside to wash our hands and get a glass of cold water, when I heard a shriek from the backyard. I jumped up and ran out to find Audrey standing in horror, as she asked who pulled up all the daffodil bulbs that she’d planted just the season before.
She was finally able to comfort me this past week by admitting daffodils really do look like onions at that stage, which I appreciated.
And then there was the time when we were all working in the yard, clearing brush and putting down some mulch in the natural area by the fence. Billy was maybe six at the time and very much wanting to help, especially in the tasks that involved wielding a sharp tool. So against my better judgment, I gave him a pair of dull garden shears, and sent him over to cut down an old trash tree sapling by the live oak, and went back to my work.
A few minutes later, he reported back to me, with Audrey now standing there beside me, proudly dragging behind him like a hunter with his vanquished prey, not the trash tree I intended him to cut down, but one of Audrey’s azaleas, which she had nurtured as a cutting from her grandmother’s yard in South Georgia since she passed some years before. This episode induced another shriek, as she quickly rushed inside to hide her very real grief, which was as if someone had died, which, in a way, was very true.
The stakes are high when you start sorting the wheat from the weeds.
Some know better these mysteries.
I remember an old saint of the church, who was also a prolific backyard gardener, always bringing in grocery bags of produce to friends, neighbors, and pastors. He was the kind of saint who, when his own children were in the youth group, and they gathered in the parking lot before leaving for church camp or a mission trip, had been known to walk over and quietly, without fanfare or attention, gently place his hand on the rented vans that would carry them all, close his eyes, and whisper a word of blessing upon it.
Later, as I remember it, when his children produced grandchildren, he would walk them through his garden of vegetables and flowers, which was beautiful and abundant, and the children would point down at the various green shoots popping up through the soil and ask him what kind of plants they were. And sometimes he was able to tell them, but other times, maybe because he truly didn’t know, or was unsure, or simply wanted to appear so, he would tell them, looking these children in the eye, Let’s let it grow for a while longer and see what it becomes.
III.
To even a master gardener, it is not easy to tell what’s a weed and what’s not. Sometimes it’s best to let it grow and let it tell you what it is. If we can’t find that wisdom for our children, then perhaps for our grandchildren.
Which also points us to the more philosophical, or perhaps theological, question of what a weed even is? In the end, this is a very subjective category. A weed is nothing but a plant growing where someone does not want it to grow. In other words, this is a human category. It is less a question of a plant’s nature than of our expectations for it. One man’s trash tree is another person’s holly bush, or, to widen our aperture beyond the human world alone, to the birds up above, a terrific source of breakfast—weed or not.
What is the difference between a weed and a wildflower other than the beauty of one’s blooms to human eyes? Is the Queen Anne’s Lace that my grandmother would pick from the roadside and press between the pages of her Bible any less delicate than the blooms of zinnias brought home from the nursery? And did those zinnias not first and still grow freely somewhere?
How much would be lost in this world if we rounded up all the dandelions for the fire? If no child could pick one and learn to blow its tufts and watch them scatter through the air? Or the honeysuckle that grew along the fence in my childhood backyard—considered a weed in most states—whose blossoms my mother taught me to pluck just so to reveal the teardrop of nectar at its tip.
The workers want to go in and rip it all up, but the sower says no. He knows it will only hurt the field, and it’s so hard to tell the difference. Nature’s gift comes in so many different forms. This parable seems to remind the church of our role in cultivating God’s Kingdom in the world. We’re not charged with sorting who is wheat and who is weed. We’re simply asked to help the field grow—all of it together—and marvel at what it becomes.
Which means we can’t write anybody off. We can’t give up on anyone. Who knows what they’ll become in the fullness of time? Who knows what the master sower will be able to nurture to growth—the sower who sees the potential in every seed that’s sown upon the earth, and the beauty in every shoot of green.
IV.
There is a point at which these agrarian images and metaphors break down, for people are not plants. Who we will be is not predetermined at our birth. At least not any part of us that matters in the Kingdom of God: how we will love our neighbor, how we will care for the gift of creation, the love we will spread, the joy we will know.
And so, as with last week, and the different kinds of soil that the gospel seed is sewn upon, is it possible to see the wheat and weeds of which Jesus speaks not as individual people but rather as representing all that is growing in different measures and different seasons in each of us?2
Each of us in our complexity. Each of us growing in so many ways and so many different directions and at so many different speeds. Each of us with our virtues and growing edges, our goals, our hopes, our failures, our works in progress.
And if that’s true, then this time that the parable imagines, when God separates these two and harvests what is good within us and carefully separates all that is not, is not a reckoning to be feared. It is yet another way of saying what Paul imagined in his great treatise on the love of God that reigns over everyone and everything, as a time when we will “know fully as we are fully known.” When we will finally be revealed as the people we long to be,“ but in this life never find our way to being completely.
Let it all grow together, the sower says. Let it grow and show us what it will become. You will know a tree from the fruit it bears, Jesus says elsewhere. So let it all grow, trusting the wisdom of the sower to find the beauty in every blossom, the sweetness in every fruit.
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1 I first encountered this approach as a seminary student reading Fred Craddock’s Cherry Log Sermons, and it has stayed with me. My memory of his work shaped much of this sermon, though I haven’t been able to put my hands on it in years!
2 Anna Case-Winters, Matthew, from the Belief commentary series.