Our gospel reading this morning, like last week’s reading, presents us with a parable that is probably pretty familiar to those of us who have spent much time in church over the years. Like the parable of the sower we heard last week, it is a story of a man who plants seed in his fields, with mixed results. In this parable, however, rather than the seeds landing on different types of soil, the narrator tells us that someone else comes along, an ‘enemy’ of the farmer, who mixes in ‘weeds’ with the good seeds of wheat. When the seeds grow up enough for the servants to spot the problem, the farmer tells them to hold off. Let the weeds and wheat grow together, and separate them at harvest time – it will take a lot of manual labor to do things this way, but it will keep the wheat from being damaged in the process of uprooting the weeds.
The meaning of the parable can seem straightforward. The good wheat are the ‘children of God’s kingdom’, the weeds are the ‘children of the evil one’ who co-exist side by side in this world but who, at ‘the end of the age’, will be separated by the judgement of the Son of Man, when the weeds will be thrown into the furnace and destroyed while the righteous will ‘shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father’. As I grew up, the interpretation of my teachers and preachers was clear: the good seeds are Christians, those who ‘really believe’ in Jesus, who think the ‘right things’ about him, and who will go to heaven as a result. The ‘weeds’ on the other hand, are everyone else, the people of ‘the world’ who don’t believe in Jesus, whose lives aren’t ‘biblical’ enough, who will be gathered up and thrown into hell for their unbelief.
Read this way, the parable is an invitation to reinforce anxious divisions between who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ of God’s good graces. It invites us to see ourselves as the ‘good ones’, as God’s people who are in the right with God – and to see those outside our walls, who don’t look like us as the ‘bad ones’ who God will punish. Of course, this interpretation also serves to motivate us to get in line and make sure that we stay on the inside.
But there are some things about the passage that invite us to reconsider this interpretation – let anyone who has ears to hear listen! For one, that word we translate as ‘weeds’ in English refers to a specific plant called ‘darnel’. Darnel is a kind of rye grass that is toxic to humans, which is important to know because it looks very similar to wheat, so much so that it can be difficult to tell them apart until harvest time. Perhaps the parable is inviting us to consider that the divisions between who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ of God’s kingdom are not as easy for us to spot as we might think.
This whole chapter of parables begins with the phrase “that same day”, which is the narrator’s way of cluing us in that these stories of seeds and soil are connected to what has been happening in the gospel story before this moment. So what has been going on for Jesus ‘that day’? Well, as usual, he has been healing people, but on this particular day, his conflict with the religious leaders, the Pharisees, has been heating up. They have been calling Jesus, and by extension the Holy Spirit who empowers his healings, a demon, and have begun plotting to destroy him. They have asked Jesus to prove his authority with ‘a sign’, while ignoring the many displays of God’s loving power that he has been accomplishing for the needy all around them. Jesus, in turn, calls them ‘evil’ – trees that look nice on the outside but are rotten at the root. He implies that they, the public teachers of God’s people, are filled, not with God’s words, but with demons. And, immediately before our passage, he tells the crowds who have come to listen to him that his true family, and by extension the true people of God, are those who ‘do the will of his Father in heaven.’
Who are the ‘good seeds’ of our parable in light of this context? Not the people who Jesus’ listeners would have expected. The Pharisees and religious leaders, the most visibly devout and ‘religious’ and ‘good’ among them are revealed to be men who care more about preserving their systems of belief and security than about obeying God’s command to care for those who God has put right in front of them. The ‘good seeds’ are not those who look good and seem to be full of faith on the outside, but whose words and actions reveal that they are fruitless. Not those who see the Holy Spirit and call her a demon because she is at work in ways that disrupt their assumptions. The ‘good seeds’, in this context, are those who ‘do the will of my Father in heaven’, who hear and do their best to practice the teachings of Jesus to love neighbor and enemy and those in need around them. And let us not forget that there were many among Jesus’ own followers who, in the end, were not willing to follow Jesus down this path.
Rather than inviting us to make judgments about who else is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ of God’s people, perhaps this parable is inviting us to turn inwards, to ask ourselves honestly whether or not some weeds have been mixed in with our own wheat. If a moment of crisis comes, separating the weeds from the wheat, what would be revealed about us? Where do we resist the teachings of Jesus in our own lives? Where have we surrendered to the temptation to judge and condemn those who are different from us, to stop seeing them as one of God’s beloved children? When have we ignored the gentle tug of the Spirit to care for someone in need because it would require us to do something uncomfortable? What do we actually hold most dear? All of us good church folk run this risk, right? When we are here, Sunday after Sunday, hearing the Scriptures, singing hymns, receiving the Eucharist, it can be easy to start feeling like we have ‘checked the box’, to slowly stop listening for that still, small voice that whispers to us and sometimes disrupts our day-to-day lives, ever calling us into new depths of love for God and for our neighbors.
As we go back to our day-to-day lives this week, may Jesus’ words help us to see ourselves more clearly. May we turn inwards with honesty and with courage, and, when we do, may God’s Spirit meet us there with patience and love, showing us the way further into new life.
Amen.