The Problem of Weeds, Or Why Jesus Would Have Made a Bad Farmer

Proper 11A: Matthew 13:24-30,36-43

Robert Frost wrote in one of his poems "Something there is that does not love a wall, and wants it down." Well, there is something in me that does not love a weed and wants it out! It’s a compulsion. I admit it. I’ll be over at a friend’s house and we’ll be talking outside and, if I see a weed in their yard, I’ll pull it. It’s a little rude, I suppose, but I can’t help it. Whenever I see a weed, it just seems to scream, “Pull me!” I’ve talked with other gardeners, and it’s clear I’m not the only one who feels compelled to rid the world of weeds.

Noting this shared anti-weed compulsion, I can’t help but think that Jesus evidently doesn’t know very much about growing crops. Sure, you’d think someone like Jesus would know something about farming, especially given that most people in his day were farmers. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. For, when Jesus tells stories about farming, his stories simply don’t make any agricultural sense.

Remember, last week, how he told the story of a farmer whose ‘brilliant’ planting strategy was to just throw seed all over the place and wait to see what comes up. And now Jesus tells a story about a farmer who lets weeds grow in his field right alongside the wheat. Jesus may the “Lord of Creation,” but he’s clearly clueless about cultivating crops!

Listen to the story again—it’s shocking. A farmer plows his field, sows it with wheat of the highest quality, and goes to bed that night, content that he had done everything he could to ensure a bumper crop some months down the road. But while he was sleeping, though, an enemy comes in and, with equal care, lays some weed seed in the same furrows. Only this weed isn’t just any weed; it’s something called "darnel," a weed that is indistinguishable from wheat right up until the plants mature and the ears appear. Problem is, if you don't separate the darnel from the wheat before grinding, the resulting flour will be inedible and can make you sick.

So as the wheat starts to grow, the farmer's hired hands notice the weed growing with the wheat and they figure that this was no accident. Stray seeds didn’t just drift in on the breeze one day. This was an act of agricultural terrorism! The servants ask the farmer if he wants them to go and start plucking out the dastardly darnels. It was the logical thing to do. What any farmer with any sense would do. The last thing you wanted was for the darnel to go to seed because then next season you'd still have a field full of weed seeds.

But contrary to all agrarian good sense, the farmer tells the hired hands to leave it be. They'd sort it all out later, at the harvest. If Jesus' listeners knew anything about farming (and, as I said, likely they did), then they’d be aghast at the farmer’s lax response.

But that's probably a clue to us that this story is not really about farming but about theology. This shouldn’t surprise us. We know by now that, if Jesus is telling a story, it’s probably about God. Nevertheless, the disciples come to Jesus later and ask, "Could you spell things out for us a wee bit more?" Jesus concedes, but you can almost detect a little weariness in the rather dry way that Jesus connects all the dots for them. <Sigh> “The one who sows the good seed is the Messiah; the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels.

Seems simple enough, except that it doesn’t make us feel much better about things. I mean, Jesus seems to be telling us that in the imperfect world we live in, evil is an unavoidable part of life, and sometimes, most times, there is not much, if anything, that we can do about it. We have to live with it. Because the weeds are too entangled with the wheat that pulling out the one would damage the other.

I don’t know if this is true horticulturally—I suppose it would depend on how close the weeds are to the wheat—nevertheless we can accept that it is true in our lives. It’s not always easy separating the good from the bad, and trying to do that creates its own problems. We can see this in international politics. Powerful countries like ours often feel pressured to intervene when there are human rights abuses or when a country is undergoing great turmoil, such as in Ukraine and in Venezuela or Syria. We need to do something, anything, people say. Only it’s not always clear what that “something” should be, whether it’s employing sanctions or deploying troops, or even if “doing something” is really what is called for—if the best thing we can do isn’t in fact to do nothing.

Similarly, in the medical field, doctors have all these marvelous technologies and therapies and are expected use them when they treat patients. But sometimes it’s best not to use them, to not “do something.” I mean, should a doctor prescribe an 80-something-year-old woman with low blood pressure a medicine that he or she knows may make her light-headed and liable to fall and thereby break a hip, and perhaps even die? Or is it better for the woman to live with low-blood pressure for the rest of her life? Often restraint is what is called for, not action.

We’re not used to thinking that way. We assume that if we can, we must. Indeed, we Americans are a people who believe all problems can be solved, that everything that goes wrong is amenable to a quick fix. We see evil in the world—suffering, poverty, injustice, homelessness, terrorism—and we figure we can just put our heads together and put an end to the problems, once and for all. Only these problems are not so easily solved.

And, as Jesus suggests, attempting to rid the world of evil can do more harm than good. Attempting to root out evil, we can become a cause of evil. Think of the Spanish Inquisition, the witch trials in New England, and political purges in Communist countries. And probably most of us could cite examples of congregations or denominations being torn apart by a small group of members crusading to make the church conform to their ideal. Usually such people have the best intentions. They are “servants of God,” they thnk. They are “doing what they believe God wishes.” They are going to help God eliminate sin in the church or in the world. The Pharisees in Jesus' day were like this. They set out to be best "weeders” in Jewish society and considered Jesus and his group as some of the worst weeds. In fact, St Paul was one of the most zealous among them, going after Jesus’ followers, overseeing the stoning of Stephen, before he saw the error of his ways.

This just shows how hard it can be to sort the wheat from the weeds. Often God's worst enemies assume that they are God's friends -- doing God's work. Even if we are certain we are on the wheat-y side, we can nevertheless act like weeds in setting ourselves against others. The late night host Johnny Carson once cautioned many years ago: “Choose your enemies carefully, because you become like them.” It can be very easy to become intolerant of intolerant people, or angry at the people who are angry at us, or bigoted toward bigoted people. By seeking to destroy our enemies, we condemn ourselves because we have become just like them.

That may well be true, and we need to exercise humility in our judgments, but what, we may ask, does Jesus want us to do then? Nothing?!? Just stand by and let evil win the day? Aren’t we supposed to stand up to injustice, to fight the good fight, to defend the weak, to speak out for those who have no voice? Aren’t we called to be a holy people, and doesn’t that mean when we see something we think is less-than-holy, we should attack it, pour some theological Roundup on it?

It’s not that simple, Jesus cautions. What’s more, this parable tells us, it’s not our place, not our responsibility. We are tempted, when we see evil in the world to be like the servants, to question our Lord’s competency—“What kind of God would make such a messed-up, weed-filled world?” And then, since God is apparently not going to do anything about it, we take it upon ourselves, like I did in my friend’s yard—we get to work pulling weeds.

But, what this parable seems to be saying is that what God wants from us in this weedy world is not initiative, but restraint, not an assault on sin, but patience. Patience, we often think, is a passive thing—it’s what you do when you cannot do anything else, like sitting for an hour in the doctor's waiting room or being stuck in a traffic jam. Patience as a virtue, though, is not passive at all. Nor is it something we practice when we cannot do anything else. It is rather a fruit of the Spirit, the work of God working in us, through us, helping us to not take matters into our own hands but to stick with God's program and with God's way of doing things.

Being patient with evil—not condoning it, but being patient with it—is not easy. It entails a certain degree of humility, resisting the urge to try to control the world, to think we’re responsible for making things turn out right. Patience requires faith, trust that God will sort it out in the end,  evil will be vanquished, the world will be put to rights, and there will indeed be a harvest, with the ripe grain of the harvest, God’s chosen people, “shining like the sun in the Kingdom of the Father.”

It is clear then that not doing something isn’t the same thing as doing nothing. Not trying to root out all evil is not the same as sitting on our hands in inaction or wringing our hands in despair. Neither of which are appropriate for Christians. Rather than worrying ourselves over the presence of weeds in the world, we are to concern ourselves with being wheat. Wheat is not responsible for getting rid of the weeds; wheat is responsible for growing, maturing and producing fruit, which for Jesus means good deeds—healing the sick, feeding the poor, teaching the ignorant, leading the lost to Christ.

So rather than counseling passivity, this parable reminds us of our calling to be wheat among the weeds, to produce a good harvest in the world. Indeed, if we wheat-y people are to have any effect on the weeds, it is by out-doing them, out-serving them, out-loving them. Which is kind of a funny image, as one of things that makes weeds so obnoxious is their amazing ability to spread. Yet, by sharing the Good News by word and deed, the wheat can out-do the weeds.

That was in fact what happened in the early church. In 251 AD a horrific plague swept across the Roman Empire, killing nearly a quarter of the population. Cyprian, the Bishop of Carthage at the time, describes seeing human carcasses lying in the streets, untouched and rotting. His pagan neighbors, he observed, ran away. But the Christians stayed to care for plague victims. And when the Romans returned and saw what the Christians had done, how they had showed compassion on the sick and dying often at the risk of their own lives, they recognized that theirs was a truly remarkable faith, that their God must be a remarkable God. The courage and compassion those Christians showed during the plague was the cause of many conversions. Indeed, it was the turning point in the Christianization of the Empire.

Being wheat in the world, for the world, can be just as powerful today as it was in ancient Rome. Too often we Christians are known for what we are against, our opposition to the weeds. By showing the world what we are for, bearing the fruit of good deeds, we witness to a richer, wiser, more grace-filled way to live.

As my college religion prof Jerry Smith said in his farewell address: "The answer is not to fix the world. The answer...is to embrace a broken world with all of its rocks and potholes and to begin the work—every day—of building the community of redemption—the love of neighbor—that is the only city that can rise above the ruins of the world." Not to “fix” the world, but to witness among ourselves, in the church and as the church, to a life of goodness and fruitfulness—that is our task, our calling.

I hope Jesus will forgive me, though, if I don’t stop pulling weeds in my yard. Jesus may be right about letting “weeds” be in the world. But allowing crabgrass and dandelions and plantains to grow unchecked in my garden? That’s just asking too much! Thanks be to God!