“24 Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. 25 But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. 26 When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared. 27 “The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’ 28 “‘An enemy did this,’ he replied. “The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’ 29“ ‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them. 30 Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.’ ”
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36 Then he left the crowd and went into the house. His disciples came to him and said, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds in the field.” 37 He answered, “The one who sowed the good seed
is the Son of Man. 38 The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one, 39 and the enemy who sows them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels. 40 “As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. 41 The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. 42 They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 43 Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.
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“If there’s a God in heaven, what’s He waiting for? If He can't hear the children, then He must see the war. But it seems to me that He leads His lambs to the slaughter house and not the Promised Land.” That’s a song from the seventies. Here’s an older one: “Yet for Your sake, God, we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered. Awake, Lord! Why do You sleep? Rouse yourself! Why do You hide your face and forget our misery?”
The first lyrics were written by a man who doesn’t claim orthodox Biblical faith. The second is from the Bible itself. The two are nearly identical. Both shudder at the seeming insanity of God’s way of ruling over this world—subjecting Your own people to slavery, babies drowning in the Nile, failed rescue attempts by Your own servant to name simply what we’ve been studying in Exodus. The Lord’s ways are most emphatically not our ways. They seem to us to be needlessly and terrifyingly messy, yet they will, in the end, prove the most needful; that’s the claim of this sermon.
We will study this in two points. First: the wheat and the weeds. Second: lessons to glean. First, we work our way through verses 24-30 and 36-43 looking at the parable itself. Second, we look at lessons to be derived from 24-30 and 36-43.
We begin to see this most needful way in our first point: the wheat and the weeds. This is our third parable and the last one, for a time, dealing with seed. This parable ponders why there are weeds in God’s garden. That’s worth considering. When you watch The Lion King, did you ever wonder why Scar is there? He’s clearly a traitor. Why didn’t Mufasa banish him earlier? If you are King Trident in The Little Mermaid, why do you let Ursula lurk when she has the will and power to destroy your daughter? You can say, “well, those are just stories?” but this points to the bigger question of reality, which is, “if God is so good, why is so much so wrong?” or to use the kingdom language Jesus is teaching us, “if this is really the kingdom, why is there still evil?” And so we read in verse 24, ‘Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away.”’
Jesus explained the existence of evil by way of story. Jesus knew how we humans think. “Most of us tend to think in pictures and most of us have difficulty in grasping abstract ideas,” as Barclay explained. Most of us would struggle to define sacrificial love in two sentences, but we know that the story of the boy willing to give a blood transfusion to his little brother even though he thought he would lose his life in the process describes sacrificial love. We think in stories. Jesus works with this grain of who we are. “Jesus talks of God by talking of things,” as Bruner put it—things like lost coins, parties, and weeds.
The sower in this parable, like the others we’ve studied, sows good seed. That is made clear in verse 27 when the servants see the weeds too and ask, “Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field?” That was a valid question then because they didn’t have the sort of quality control like we have today. This spring I picked up a few pounds of grass seed from Mulder’s without once wondering if there were weed seeds in the bag. The ancients didn’t have such assurances, and so their question about the seed’s purity was quite real.
The import of this parable, unlike the last, though, lies not so much in the good seed as it does in the weeds; “while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.” This sort of sabotaged happened in the first century. Neighbors and enemies really did this to each other. It was prevalent enough that the Romans had laws to deal with such offenses, and Jesus taps into the deep frustration responsible farmers would feel by way of this story.
Jesus’ point is the betrayal. It’s not, as some think, a correction of the inattentiveness of the farmer—be it God or man—in sleeping. Don’t press stories too far. Jesus’ point is the craftiness of the enemy, which is something with which we rarely reckon. Satan is far shrewder than the wisest mere mortal. If you have ever listened to someone who consistently unfolds your mind with insight, that man or woman is as a toddler compared with Satan’s skill. The devil is like a vengeful adult and we are, by comparison, like naïve children. We are, as we will see in coming years, as hopeless in our own power against him as we are against the flesh or the world.
Satan is the cause of the weeds just as he is of the mess in Genesis 3. We aren’t told much about him in either Genesis 3 or this parable and that’s purposeful. ‘The words “an enemy did this” leave much unsaid,’ as Bruner explains. ‘We would like to know much more about this enemy: where he came from, why he is an enemy at all, and so much else. But Jesus is content with defending God’s honor and indicting the true agent of evil.” Here as with all of Scripture, we need to learn to deal with what is said rather than what we would want to have been said.
Not going beyond the bounds of Scripture is the receptively humble way to think and what Scripture wants us to see here is that God’s way of dealing with this mess of the weeds remains messy. That’s verse 28, ‘The servants asked him, “Do you want us to go and pull them up?” “No,” he answered, “because while you are pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest.”
These weeds are what is called darnel. It, especially in its early stages, looks like wheat. In this story the wheat and the weeds are already terribly entangled by the time the difference is noticed, and that is the situation between the kingdom and the world too. Even as God works, evil will metastasize in, around, and through that very work.
No one in Jesus’ day wanted to hear that. The Pharisees didn’t want any containment because they believed it was cleaning themselves and others which would bring the kingdom. The zealots wanted the evil of Rome gone yesterday. I want things right, right now too. Jesus, though, tells me and you and the Pharisees and the zealots and everyone that things will be quite wrong until the end and that this method is the best way forward; “while you are pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them,” he warns in verse 29.
We, even as our best are apparently so intertwined with this fallen world that to destroy it now would be to destroy us now. Solzhenitsyn recognized this regarding the flesh. “If only it were all so simple!” he said. “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
We are so intertwined with this world right now that rooting out all the evil from it in real time now would tear us to shreds in real time. We think we know better than God as to how to deal with matters of good and evil but our way would end in our own destruction. Yet again God saves us from ourselves by not giving us our way. His way is to, “Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn,” as verse 30 puts it. We are still awaiting that separation. There are lessons to be learned in this situation and it is to these lessons that we turn our attention now in our second point: lessons to glean.
This is one of only three parables to which Jesus gives a detailed explanation. You see it here, as we saw it with the parable of the Sower. Jesus tells the parable. The disciples ask for help understanding it and he gives it. That’s helpfully humbling. We children of the kingdom are not born by our insight. Rather, it is our asking that distinguishes us. It’s easy for us Protestants to fall into a sort of realization-based-salvation—as if it’s our getting it that saves us. It's the other way around. It’s the grace of salvation that leads to us getting it and you see this grace in Jesus explaining the way the kingdom works to anyone who would ask—then and now.
That’s the first lesson to learn. The second is that the Lord is, for now, quite fine with the weed situation in this world. The Lord is, at present, quite willing to will what we could never imagine. God was quite willing to will the Canaanites’ existence for centuries while His people remained nomads. God was quite willing to will the Egyptians’ rule for generations while His people remained their slaves. God was quite willing to will the rule of Herod and Pilate and the prestige of the Pharisees knowing full well that they would conspire to kill His Son. I’m not fine with any of that, but that just means what I’m foolish enough to be fine with what apparently won’t lead to God’s purposes.
The seeming insanity of God’s ways, to borrow a phrase from a missionary, will in the end prove wiser than my good sense. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” as the Lord spoke through Isaiah. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” This parable tells you that His ways won’t seem higher. They will seem lower. That, however, is because we know next to nothing compared with God. We will either accept that or we will condemn God’s rule. Each of us must and will make our choice regarding the Lord willing what we would never will.
Lesson three is that we, at present, cannot judge as well as we think we can and therefore must not judge. The wheat and weeds looked similar early on. When the difference becomes apparent, the servants—people like us—ask if they can separate it and the sower lets them know that they don’t have the skill. We think we have the skill to judge. This goes back all the way to the Garden in which we ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thinking we have it in us to determine the difference between good and evil. We still think we do. We are terribly judgmental. We would be disgusted to see how rooted this wickedness is within each of us. This moral insanity within us means we simply aren’t capable of separating the weeds from the wheat. “Men cannot see the heart,” as Jeremias explains this parable; “if they tried to carry out the separation, they would inevitably make wrong judgments and uproot good wheat with the weeds.” I couldn’t begin to accurately judge you and the same with you with me. “God Himself does not propose to judge a man till he is dead,” said Dr. Johnson. “So why should I?”
I don’t know anywhere near the full story on the kindness, bitterness, fear, rage, failed attempts at success, picking yourself back up, creativity, hope, and hopelessness that soak your being and neither do you with anyone else. It’s usually those closest to us that show us how little we know because we are forced to see how badly we misunderstand.
We don’t understand comprehensively today and we sure don’t know where things are heading. We don’t know how the Lord is going to weave us all together and it altogether. We don’t know what purpose He has for the weeds. We don’t, if we are honest, have much idea as to the purpose He has for the wheat. JRR Tolkein reflected on this in the character of Gollum, the corrupted creature stalking the one ring and the fellowship in his Lord of the Rings series. Upon realizing Gollum is stalking him for the ring, Frodo tells Gandalf, “this is terrible! Far worse than the worst that I imagined from your hints and warnings. Gandalf… what am I to do? For now I am really afraid. What am I to do? What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature when he had a chance!” “Pity?” asks Gandalf. “It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and mercy: not to strike without need… “I am sorry,” said Frodo, “I do not feel any pity for Gollum.” “You have not seen him,” Gandalf broke in. “No, and I don’t want to,” said Frodo. “I can’t understand you. Do you mean to say that you, and the elves, have let [Gollum] live on after all [his] horrible deeds? Now at any rate he is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death.” “Deserves it! I daresay he does,” said Gandalf. “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play, for good or ill, before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.” The story reveals Gandalf’s wisdom. History will reveal the Lord’s far greater wisdom with the weeds.
Judgment is coming. Be confident of that, but be humble enough to recognize that we don’t have it in us to do the comprehensive judging. In my judgmentalism, I crave a responsibility that would destroy me. “Do you want us to go and pull them up?” might seem like a question from earnest hearts, but it is question earnest for something that is not theirs. Don’t long to be like God in any way in which you were not meant to be. You won’t become more than you are. You will become less. You won’t become a splendor. You will become a terror.
You see God preserving us from this by way of the angels. “The harvest is the end of the age,” verse 39 says, “and the harvesters are angels. As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil.” We have a lot question about angels, but I don’t think that the answers to those questions are at point here. It think the point is that it’s the angels, not us, that do the separating. We servants ask, “Do you want us to go and pull them up?” but the master will never send us to do it. He sends the angels as another way of saying, “this isn’t your business.” So lesson three is that we can’t judge nearly as well as we think we can so we shouldn’t.
Lesson four is that it will end better than we can imagine. Every wrong will be righted and every right will be rewarded. You see this in two references to the book of Daniel. The first reference is the weeds being thrown as verse 42 puts it, “into the fiery furnace.” That’s the same phrasing as what we see with Daniel’s three friends only then it was sons of the kingdom being thrown in by the sons of the evil one, to use the phrasing of this parable. The point here is that in the end justice and judgment will finally and forever go the way they are supposed to go—the righteous will not wind up in weeping and gnashing of teeth; the wicked will. The wheat will not be burned; the weeds will. You need that assurance if you are going to keep faith with God.
The second reference from Daniel is seen in verse 43, “Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” This is from the last chapter of Daniel—his end times revelation—in which it is said, “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.” That’s what Jesus has in mind talking about the end result for the wheat—“shining like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” That’s the glory that this messy process will result in, and the eternal glory that will never again be marred. That will be far better than anything our plans could produce.
The weeds is not the reality we would choose to currently exist but it is part of God’s process to glory. The cross is not the way we would choose but it leads to resurrection. God’s ways will seem needlessly messy, but know for certain that when all is done, it will become unavoidably obvious that His ways were the most needful. Amen.