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Text:
Matthew 13:24-43
W 9th Sunday after Pentecost The Coming Harvest In the name
of Jesus, dear friends in Christ: One of
the questions that has perplexed Christians for thousands of years is the
problem of evil. Where did it come from? How did it originate? If, as the Lord clearly states in the Old
Testament reading for this morning, “I am the first and the last; apart from me
there is no God”; and if, as the Scriptures elsewhere assert, he is good and gracious
and loving; then how do we explain all the evil in the world? How do explain hate, and crime, and terrorist
bombings … and human suffering in all its forms? If he’s been in charge the whole time, and
he’s all-powerful, and knows everything and all that, how did things get so
messed up? And perhaps more important to
our immediate situation, since we’re already in this awful mess, why does he
let it go on? Why not stop it now? Right now, today, this moment: eliminate sin and all its consequences so
that we can all live happily ever after.
If God is truly all powerful and he loves us so much, why doesn’t he
just do that? There is a
branch of Christian scholarship called Apologetics
that attempts to answer questions like these using philosophical
arguments. I think a better place to go
is straight to the Scriptures because that’s where we get God’s own Word on a
subject. And if we do that, we find that
Jesus answers the second half of the question (why does God allow evil to
continue?) in the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares, which is the Gospel
reading we heard this morning.
Surprisingly enough, what Jesus says there is that it’s precisely
because God loves us that he permits evil to continue to flourish. “Do you want us to pull up the weeds?” the
servants ask. “No”, says the Master,
“because you may root up the wheat with them.”
So, we see that it’s for the sake of the wheat that the weeds are not
destroyed immediately. We’ll come back
to that in a bit because that’s what this morning’s message is about. But I don’t want to leave the first part of
the question just hanging, so we’ll spend just few moments on it, and briefly
attempt to answer: “From where and how
did evil come?” We can take
from the Parable of the Wheat and Tares the truth that God himself did not
cause evil. “An enemy did this”, says
the Master when the servants find the weeds in the wheat. We know that all God created was good.
Now, it might be argued, “Yes, but didn’t God also make the enemy?” And the answer is no, not really: Satan wasn’t created as
an enemy. He defied God and chose that
path for himself. And he enticed our
first parents to follow him on that path.
They could have chosen not to.
But too often, this whole problem is explained merely in terms of free
will, or free agency. It’s explained as
a failure to pass the test of obedience.
Now, it’s true that free will is
a factor, but it’s not the main one. The
main issue here is love. You see,
God loves people. That’s why he made
them. That’s why he created everything
in the whole universe – simply to give it all to the people he made because he
loves them. He loved them so much he
gave them a gift that exceeds all others, and that is the capacity to love as
he loves. And God’s love is different
than anything you or I have ever experienced coming from within our own sinful
hearts. God’s love is totally directed
outward. It focuses completely on the
object of its devotion. It never thinks
of self. It is totally serving,
self-giving, and self-sacrificing. It
asks only, “What can I do that is good for you?” and then does it, without
thinking about the cost or inconvenience.
And an important feature of love is that it is voluntary. It has to
come from within the heart of the one who loves. If it were coerced or forced in any way, it
wouldn’t be love – it would be slavery. Therefore,
because God gave humankind the ability to love as he does, he had to also give
them the option to choose not to love.
That’s what the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was all
about. Adam and Eve were on the
receiving end of everything God had created.
Everything was for them. That’s
how God showed them his love. But
because they needed a way to show their love in return, he had to give them
something that they could give back to him.
The trouble is that God has no needs; there was nothing they could do
for him. So God gave them the tree that
they were not supposed to eat from. By
leaving it alone they could say “As good as that fruit looks, as tempting as it
is, I will leave it alone and deprive myself of it to show my love for
God.” Depriving themselves of the tree’s
fruit gave expression to their love. But
by choosing to eat it, as our first parents did, they chose to not to love like
God does. They chose instead Satan’s
kind of love: and that means choosing to
love me above everyone else –
especially God. Satan used his freedom
to choose to try to put himself above God.
Satan’s love is nothing more than self-love. It’s the absolute opposite of godly love –
and another name for it is “evil”. Really, that’s all evil is: not loving like God does and instead, loving
the self. And once humans started doing
it, there was no going back: after the
seeds of the weeds were sown into the field, there was no way to go back and
pick them all up again. So the wheat and
the weeds have been growing together ever since. And that
brings me back to this morning’s parable and to the question, “Why doesn’t God
put an end to all the evil in the world right now?” That would seem to make sense. The answer is given as Jesus explains in the
parable that there are two kinds of plants growing in the Owner’s field. There are the wheat plants that God
planted. They are the children of God’s
kingdom – the faithful in Christ who have received his Word and believe it; and
there are also the weeds that were planted by Satan. They are the unfaithful whose works are
wicked and harmful. And it’s interesting
that in the parable, Jesus actually names the kind of weed: it’s a kind of darnel, a wild grass. It turns out that in the seed head of the
darnel plant grows a certain kind of fungus that produces a deadly toxin. If you failed to separate out the darnel
heads before going to the gristmill to make your flour, you be in for a deadly
surprise when suppertime came. It seems
that the enemy who sowed the weeds was not just trying to hurt the Owner in the
pocketbook by causing him to have a diminished crop and lots of extra work –
no, the enemy was hoping to hurt or kill somebody: that’s what evil does. Now, we
think, wouldn’t it be better for the faithful (the wheat) if we could do away
with all those other guys? Think about
it: how crime rates would drop, how much
safer our communities would be. We
wouldn’t have to worry about people getting kidnapped or mugged or robbed. You could leave your house and car
unlocked. On the spiritual side, you
wouldn’t have to worry about people getting sucked into pagan religions and
strange cults because all the false teachers would be gone. Christians would not be persecuted. And there wouldn’t be so many temptations
around. Television would have nothing on
it but good, wholesome entertainment (that’s hard to imagine, isn’t it?). Your E-mail in-box wouldn’t have all those
disgusting come-ons from perverts. Don’t
misunderstand me, the faithful aren’t perfect in this life; but wouldn’t things
be so much better if just we could do away with all the toxic weeds of
Satan? Or at least, the very worst of
them? Jesus
answers that question with an emphatic “No”.
And to help us understand his answer, you have to know that this darnel
weed that Jesus mentions is related to wheat and looks just like it when it
sprouts and as it grows. Not until the
heads of both form is anyone able to distinguish a difference. By using this specific illustration, Jesus is
saying that you can’t tell by looking who is a weed and who is wheat. You don’t know who among the unbelievers may
come to faith tomorrow – or which of their descendants might come into the
family of God. Likewise, you don’t know
who currently counted among the faithful is really a hypocrite and has no faith
at all. So, where – or rather, with whom
would you begin to get rid of the weeds?
It’s a sad
part of the history of our faith that from time to time well meaning but
misguided people have set out to do the weeding. Crusades and wars have been fought against
infidels, accused heretics have been tortured and burned, and people have been
shunned, robbed, and ridiculed all (amazingly) in the name of Christ. And how it must grieve our Lord who commanded
us to pray for our enemies and do good to them.
The Lord doesn’t capture hearts and souls with violence and force; he
does it with his Word and with his love expressed through his faithful
people. That’s our job. And in his own good time he will execute
judgment on his enemies. That’s his job. Well, okay
then; but if that’s true, why doesn’t God himself root up the
weeds right now? Sure, we can’t
do it: we can’t tell the
difference – but surely he
knows who is, and who is not, and who will become his children. Why doesn’t he just get rid of the
rest of them? That would still be better
for the rest of us, wouldn’t it? You might
think so, but we should note that in the parable, it’s after the heads of the plants form that the servants ask the
master if he wants them to pull up the weeds.
It’s after the difference appears.
But something else you should know about darnel is that its root system
is deeper and wider than the roots of wheat.
In the soil, the roots of both would be all mixed up and grown
together. If you tried to pull the
weeds, most of the wheat would come up with it – and then you’d be stuck with a
lot of wheat that you couldn’t use because it hadn’t yet ripened. For the wheat to mature properly you have to
wait, and to do that you have to let the weeds grow too. And that’s
the key to understanding the parable.
For God’s people to mature properly in their faith, for them to produce
their full potential of the fruits of faith, the weeds have to grow too. In a sense, we need them. You see, in Christ, God loves people who hate
him. That’s what the Gospel of Jesus
Christ is all about. It’s about God
loving us so much that he gave his Son to die for us, even while we hated
him. It’s about Christ rising to give us
a new life free from the evil of self-love – so that we can love like God loves
once again. For us to learn that kind
of love, we need people who hate us.
Part of our growing in the faith is our interaction with them: how we continue to trust in God despite all
the hazards caused by the evil in the world and all that we suffer, how we show
Christian love and kindness even to the wicked, and how we continue to witness
to the truth of the Gospel even in the face of persecution. And as we do, who knows which of them will
hear the message and see God’s love through us and in the end, turn out to be
one of us? Our living in a sin filled
world full of suffering and sadness provides the resistance we need to struggle
against in order to mature properly, so that when the end of the age comes, God
will find us ready for harvest. The reason
that we who are faithful must struggle to grow is that we are sinners
ourselves. Beneath the surface, our
roots are completely tangled up in sin.
Our thoughts are wicked, our motives are selfish ... we don’t love like
God does. But we are growing and
maturing. Every time we come into God’s
presence, be it through his Word or in the Sacraments, there is a sort of
miniature harvest that takes place. It’s
the end of an age, as it were: maybe of
a day, of a week, or whatever. When God
comes to us, it’s judgment day; not for everyone, but for us as individuals. In each of
us there is both the good seed planted by God and also the weeds of Satan. And when God comes to us in our personal
devotions or in public worship, we are able to see the weeds clearly. We are very much aware of our sin. And he tells us to bind them up and throw
them into the fire – that’s exactly what we do when we confess them. Because of Christ’s suffering for us, he can
take those weeds away leaving nothing but the good that the Spirit worked
through us by the Word. And then,
planted again with the good seed we’ve just heard, we go back into the world to
keep growing; to keep showing God’s love in a hostile world. And so it
goes: seasons of planting, harvest, and
separating out the weeds as we continue to grow and bear the fruit in which God
delights. It is through this process
that God is transforming us to the image of his Son, so that when the end of
the final age comes, we will be counted among the righteous who will shine like
the sun – or rather like the Son of God – in the kingdom of our Father. May he then give us the grace to concentrate
on separating out the weeds within, and to see the weeds without as
opportunities to grow in his love, from now until he comes to bring his harvest
home. In Jesus’ name. Amen. Soli Deo Gloria! |
