Stories Jesus Told:
It’s All in the Mix
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
A story-teller usually has one thing to communicate, one point to make, when he/she tells a good story. Thus it was with Jesus as he began to weave a story for his listeners. Now a good story may have twists and sub-plots that bring secondary points into the story, or add shades of meaning to the main point, but there is still only one point the story-teller desires to pass on to hearers of the story. That’s the way it is with this story that Jesus told the crowds this day.
We also have with the story, one of the few explanations Jesus gives for one of his stories. He tells the story and his disciples ask after the crowds have gone away to explain the story so they can understand. Jesus obliges them, and plainly lays out the purpose of the story. Too often, we try to read too much into the stories, and we miss the main point by focusing on the elements that are only meant to enhance the primary meaning. It would be easy to do with this story.
One of the parts of the story that immediately catches our attention is the enemy, or the Devil, as Jesus offers in his explanation. It would be easy to let this revelation take us into a discussion on the personal nature of the enemy of our souls. We could talk about how we have moved the reality of a personal Devil to the side in our theological discussions, and how many people, Christians among them, deny the Devil’s existence. At the very least, we have painted a characatiure of the Devil as this harmless little, red-bedecked creature who sits on our shoulder trying to persuade us to satisfy our fleshly indulgences, but he certainly isn’t the enemy of our souls. That might be an appropriate discussion, but we would miss the point of the story.
Another element that would easily capture our attention is the reality of the judgment at the end of time. With the overwhelming attention given to discussions of end times events, and with the inordinate amount of books being published to help us understand apocalyptic expectations, it would be a timely discussion, but it would cause us to miss the point of the story. So what is the point of the story? Let’s see if we can discover it together.
Jesus began, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like…” Perhaps there is a clue. This is a story about the Kingdom. Jesus wants to communicate to his disciples something of the truth of living in the Kingdom. When Jesus refers to the Kingdom of Heaven he unmistakably is referring to God’s rule of grace in the world that was made a reality with the coming of Christ. Don’t be confused—Kingdom of God and Kingdom of Heaven, whenever you see the phrases in the Bible, refer to the same thing—Christ’s rule in the world, and though it has not achieved perfection, time and eternity is moving in one direction. So, Jesus was giving us a picture of what the Kingdom of Heaven was like, and that picture surprises us as the story unfolds.
The farmer sowing wheat would not have surprised us were we in that first century crowd. No, it was a scene well familiar to the people of Palestine. Any spring day would find a traveler passing many a field where a farmer was out working to plant his seed in preparation of the harvest. Remember Jesus had just finished telling the story of the sower who went out to sow seed, and some seed fell on rocky ground, and some on thorny ground, and some on good ground. Jesus simply continues the illustration he began earlier.
Nor would an enemy of the farmer been a foreign introduction into the story. In the first century, one of the greatest threats one person could offer to another was the threat of sowing bad seen in their field. It was an act of hatred. It was an act of total disregard, and it was sometimes done in retribution for some other event. The prohibition against sowing bad seed in a person’s field was codified into Roman law and carried punishment. The practice is still outlawed in India today. This, too, was a familiar scene to Jesus’ listeners.
Certainly, most of the crowd that day, would have also been familiar with the weeds Jesus was talking about in the story. The seed was darnel. In the King James Version of the Bible, or perhaps in some of your translations, the weeds may be referred to as tares. In the early stages of development, the darnel so closely resembled the wheat that it was impossible to distinguish between the two. Surprisingly, though, that is what Jesus says the Kingdom of Heaven is like. Wheat and tares growing together. Good and evil existing side by side in the Kingdom, and there is something upsetting to us about that picture. But when we reflect for a moment, we begin to realize that it is true.
Who can deny the reality of evil in the world? We see it when we see nations rising against nations. We see it in the eyes of a starving child. We see it in the newspaper when we read of another homicide committed in our community. We come face to face with evil when we are confronted with another loved one who has been diagnosed with cancer and given six months to live. We may doubt its source, but we can never doubt its reality. We see it in spite of the fact that we believe that God is present in this creation of His. He did not create us simply to leave us to our own devices, but is interested and active in the affairs of His creation, most specifically through the work and person of Jesus Christ, who was the epitome of goodness. Good and evil, wheat and tares, it is all in the mix.
Yes, evil is real in the struggles of humanity, and it is real in the struggles in the church. It started that way. Jesus chose twelve disciples. One denied him, one betrayed him, they all forsook him. After the Holy Spirit had fallen on the early church, even the Spirit-filled Christians couldn’t get it right. Luke tells us in Acts 6:31 that “there arose a murmuring.” And you know from your own experience there is no such thing as a perfect church. Some would say you’ve seen the best and the worst. We look around and we see so much wheat, but in the mix we know there are so many tares.
Who among us can deny that the wheat and tares grow in the mix of our own lives? We must admit, if we are honest with ourselves, that even the best of us can be prone to evil from time to time, and even the worst sinner can be moved to some act of goodness on occasion. Wheat and tares—it’s all in the mix.
Then we come to the compelling response of the servants. How like us are they? They become indignant at the discovery that darnel has been sown among the good wheat, and their response is to go and uproot it—get rid of it, destroy it. Isn’t that our response when we encounter evil in our midst? Don’t we seek to root it out? Isn’t that what Christ is after, too? Didn’t he come into the world to overcome evil, and so that it might be destroyed? Yes, is the answer to all those questions. The servants and the master were seeking the same end, but they came at the problem from different perspectives. “Let the wheat and tares grow together,” the master says. It’s all in the mix.
So why not just up root the weeds? There are two reasons I can identify why Christ would not allow his servants to up root evil in the world. First, to begin to root out all the evil in the world would require a wisdom and discernment that, quite frankly, we don’t possess. These servants in the story who stood looking out over a troubled field could not tell the difference between the wheat and the darnel, at least not until after the heads appeared on the grain, and by that time the roots were so intertwined with each other that to pull one would destroy the other. Like weeds growing in the fields, sometimes its impossible for us to distinguish between what is good and what is evil. There are many things in life that appear at one and the same time both good and evil. What do I mean?
I think first of all of alcohol. Jesus and his disciples shared the fruits of the vine as they supped and enjoyed fellowship, and life is truly enjoyable when we can relax with friends or our spouses and sip a nice glass of wine, building relationships with one another and enjoying the fruits of God’s bountiful creation. That is wheat indeed. But what of the destruction done through the same good thing when it leaves a person broken and lonely, out of work and without a family. That, my friends, is evil. And it grows right alongside the wheat, and it is difficult for us to distinguish when that line has been crossed.
We could use a similar analogy with gambling, or as some like to say, gaming. Wonderful form of entertainment, provider of jobs and economic development. All good things. Wheat we might say. But again, when a person sits in front of a device and feeds the weeks paycheck into the machine, thus robbing the home and family, it has become an evil.
Ah, and money. How can we forget money? Money can be used as a great tool for good. The abundance of generosity can provide for hospitals and schools, and homes and food, and clothing and so many other necessities that people need. Philanthropy has been a great source of blessing for thousands of years. But that same thing that can be used for good, can also be used for selfish purposes, hoarded by people who only serve themselves. Remember a passage in the Bible that says, “The love of money is the root of evil.” Wheat and tares, growing together. And we can’t often tell the difference.
The second reason Christ has not called us to up root the tares is given to us in the story itself—it will damage the wheat. By the time the wheat is distinguishable from the tares the roots are already enmeshed. Pulling the tares will also pull the wheat, damaging the roots, and causing its death. When we go to root out evil we might in fact damage the very one God was hoping to save. What do I mean? In our zeal to rid the world of evil, we can become harsh and hard, or we can appear so to others, assuming that we are, in fact, wheat ourselves. Our harshness or hardness becomes a barrier in two respects. First, we become hard the hurts and needs of others, and we fail to reach out to them in grace, and secondly, we become hardened in our hearts to the grace of God seeking to reach us.
The Amish still practice “shunning.” When one among them is found in sin, or chooses a path outside the norm for their culture, that person is shunned. There are other Christian groups who practice “dis-fellowshipping,” where a sinner is kicked out until they confess and repent. More than once, this practice has driven, not only the offender out, but those in his/her extended family. We cut them off from the grace of God by our actions. Rarely has ostracism won a person to a good life. No, tare-pulling is a focus on the negative of the Kingdom at the expense of that which is positive, and there is where we find the remedy of the farmer in the story.
“Let them grow together,” the farmer says, “and then we will separate them when the harvest comes.” Laborers were hired when harvest time came, and if there were tares in the wheat, it was their job to separate them, because then they could be distinguished, and the good wheat was saved. But until that time, it was all still in the mix. Jesus was telling the servants, “It’s time now to focus on the wheat.” The only way to destroy evil is to focus on the good. It was the Apostle Paul who suggested this remedy to the Roman Christians. He said to them: “Don’t let evil get the best of you, but conquer evil by doing good (Romans 12:21). That is the way of the master, too.
Jesus said things like “Do unto others as you want them to do to you.” He said, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another.” Jesus showed us the goodness of God, and it was his goodness that overcame the depth of evil in the world on the cross of Calvary, and it was his resurrection that overcame the evil of death, hell and the grave on that first Easter.
Perhaps Jesus knew we would have such a hard time rooting out the evil in the Kingdom because we have such a hard time rooting the evil out of our own lives. Only when we come to Jesus, embrace his method for overcoming the evil in ourselves that we can begin to show the world the face of Jesus, and when we show the world the face of Jesus, they will begin to fling away the evil within themselves.
