Matt 13:24-43 – “Seeds, Weeds, and Growth”
It is a pleasure to be here with you in person this morning. I hear you had to sit through a rather long audio sermon of mine a couple of weeks ago. Don’t worry though lunch is very important to me as well so I promise not to keep you here too long.
Let me start with a short story before we get into scripture.
A young woman about 20 years old had been living on the streets of a suburban neighborhood for about five years because of her severely abusive alcoholic parents. She was a pleasant looking young woman behind the tattered and dirty clothes, oily hair, and dirty makeup free face. Somehow she had managed to avoid the alcohol her parents lived for, and the drugs that soothed most of the other homeless people in her area. She had a little old Bible that an aunt had given her when she was 11 years old, that she kept in her one canvas bag that held all of her belongings.
She got by like most homeless folks with rummaging for bottles and cans, and asking the odd person for spare change, but she never gave herself up to prostitution or stealing. Through all the years of torment her only refuge was this Bible that she had learned inside and out, which of course led her to depend on the Lord and love him, she had too much pain though, and not enough skills to get out of the situation she was in, but tried to live as close as she could to how the Bible instructed.
For years she had watched people go to the church a couple blocks away from the place she slept alone at night in the bushes. She would look at all the well dressed people get out of their cars and walk into church as families. She would sit in the parking lot and listen to the muffled music of the worship service, she would pray and read her Bible until the end of the service, and then watch as the people mingled and laughed and hugged before they got back in their cars and drove off. This was her church service. She dreamed of being like “those people” but believed that she could never fit in there.
Finally one day she decided that she would take the money she had made from her collections and instead of food, she would go to value village and buy the prettiest dress she could find. She didn’t know how a dress should fit and felt very uncomfortable wearing it, but she bought what she thought was a very pretty dress. The following Sunday she got up, gathered all the courage she could muster, and put on her dress. She had no place to take a shower and no makeup, but she tried her best to clean her face and do something with her hair. She trembled with nervousness as she made her way to the church and tried to sneak in so that she wouldn’t have to shake hands with greeters. Of course there was no place to hide so she walked through the foyer attracting a few looks of disgust but mostly people just looked away and ignored her. It took everything she had not to run out of the building, but she stayed and found a seat in the back corner of the sanctuary where she closed her eyes and prayed until the service started moments later. She sobbed not so silently through the entire service knowing that she would probably not put herself through this again, but feeling so ecstatic about having had the chance to at least be a part of one church service in her life. To experience some of what these people did.
She found herself hesitating to leave at the end of the service because she wanted to get all she could out of being there before being asked to leave, or just bolting out of there back to her life. When she decided to get up and leave, the foyer was very busy and it took some effort and much discomfort walking alone through the crowd of cheerful people. She finally did escape and as she walked toward her “home” a young teenage girl noticed the color of her dress, and interrupted her father asking him who that was walking away, as she had never seen her before. He glanced quickly, finished up his conversation, then looked more intently as she exited the parking lot. As this family was driving home in the same direction as the girl they noticed her going into the bushes a couple blocks away in her dress.
This family just happened to be a quite wealthy family who regularly took in foster kids who were preparing for independent living when they turned 18. The father had also helped finance a low cost building project for the homeless in a nearby city. The following Saturday morning this family went in search of this girl as their curiosity had increased over the week. The dad went into the bushes where he saw her enter the previous Sunday and saw her sleeping there with an old blanket over her, and her Bible sitting open beside her. He didn’t want to startle her so he gently kept saying hello from a distance until she finally woke. Before anything else was said, he quickly asked her if she had come to their church the previous week. This sort of lowered her anxiety, and she hesitantly said yes.
We will return to this story a little later.
Now you people probably know a lot more about wheat and weeds than I do, and I am sure the parables we will talk about today are not new to you. If you want to know about mildew and sushi then I’m your guy, but I do have prairie blood in me so I hope you will allow me to talk about the parable of the weeds and the twin parables of the mustard seed and the leaven from Matthew 13 today.
Matthew 13 begins with the parable of the sower in which Jesus describes his true followers as good seeds that bear crops of 100, 60, or 30 times what was sown. But before this encouraging harvest, 3 unfruitful soils are described, suggesting that a significant number of those to whom the Gospel is preached will ultimately respond with something less than full-fledged discipleship.
Three discrete sections mark off the central part of Matthew 13: the parable of the wheat and weeds in verses 24-30; the twin parables of the mustard seed and the leaven in verses 31-35; and Jesus’ explanation of the parable of the weeds to the disciples in verses 36-43. The unifying theme of these three passages is the very encouraging promise of first the survival, and then the growth of seeds that are planted with very unpromising beginnings. Despite obstacles that might appear to threaten the entire destruction of the crop, these plants eventually produce a bountiful harvest.
Let’s read the first of these stories from verses 24-30, the parable of the wheat and the weeds.
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We will read Jesus’ very detailed interpretation of this parable in a few minutes. But even before that, we see that the parable seems fairly obvious in its context. In the previous parable of the sower, the seed clearly stood for God’s word, which was sown in various kinds of soils. The different plants that grew in these soils stood for the different kinds of people and the various ways they respond to God’s word. Coming fresh off that parable, we naturally assume that Jesus means something similar in this passage. If Jesus or the Father could be depicted as a sower earlier in the chapter, then it’s natural to think of Him as the farmer in this one as well. We know that God’s enemy is Satan, so he is likely the enemy that sows the weeds. So wheat is God’s people, and the weeds are His opponents. Jesus often uses the image of a harvest to represent judgment day, and many of the parables that Rabbis told back then did as well.
But why didn’t he want the field weeded? Every good farmer weeded his fields to protect his crops. But in this case, premature weeding would destroy too much of the wheat as well, presumably because the roots would be intertwined. The Greek word for weeds here is “darnel” a plant that I have been told, on the surface looked a lot like wheat. Jesus says let them grow together and it will be taken care of at the harvest. The unspoken assumption is that the wheat will indeed survive despite appearances to the contrary.
I found it interesting to reflect on ways in which Christians and non-Christians likewise appear superficially similar for the most part. Our physical appearance doesn’t really change when we decide to follow Jesus. And both because Christians remain sinners throughout their lives, and because many non-Christians live good lives, it is usually very difficult to pick out Christians in a crowd. It is also interesting how many Christians throughout the centuries have longed for judgment day and the destruction of evil people from the world. Jesus idea of letting good and evil coexist side by side, is uncomfortable for some.
In less than half a century in North America, Christians have started to feel like a beleaguered minority with very little impact on the larger society. Maybe that is why Jesus goes on to tell the parables of the mustard seed and the leaven in verses 31-35. We read.
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The mustard seed and the yeast together illustrate the potential of enormous growth resulting even from tiny, inauspicious beginnings. In our day we know that the mustard seed is not the smallest of seeds. But certainly it was the smallest that the first century Jews knew about and planted. Seldom does a mustard plant grow to a height of over four or five feet. But every once in a while, one will grow as big as a small tree or large bush, and that is apparently what happens in Jesus story. In Ezekiel 7:23 a tree is also mentioned to shelter birds who come to perch on its branches. There the birds symbolize the Gentiles who come to know the God of Israel.
The parable of the yeast, or leaven moves from farming to baking, or from what in Jesus’ day would be a typical man’s occupation, to a typical female occupation. Perhaps he is trying to consciously reach both male and female listeners. Adding a small amount of yeast to a large batch of flour makes a small lump of dough become enormous, which reminds me of an “I Love Lucy” episode where she thought the more yeast the better, only to be attacked by this giant ball of dough that ended up filling the whole kitchen. The amount in this parable is computed to have been enough to feed over 100 people.
Paul used the leaven imagery in a negative context referring to the spread and effect of evil in 1 Corinthians 5:6. Some have said that Jesus here is referring to the same thing, but with it immediately following the mustard seed parable in this context it almost certainly means the positive growth of the kingdom. So we should probably let the mustard seed parable govern our interpretation of the parable of the yeast. Both stories depict the positive growth of the kingdom all out of proportion to its size at the beginning of Jesus ministry.
We can see this enormous growth from tiny beginnings if we look at the proliferation of Christianity in China; the explosive growth of the church in sub-Saharan Africa; and the rapid growth of evangelicals in an almost exclusively Catholic Latin America despite much persecution. Our money, resources and technology in North America and Europe give us the potential to do even so much more for Christ, but sadly we tend to be a little more “spiritually flabby” and less committed than folks in the poorer parts of the world, so we don’t see as much of the results that we are capable of achieving.
But there is another reason that we don’t see the mustard seed and leaven factor reproduced in our little corner of the world as often as we might. And it’s related to a faulty interpretation of the first of these three parables. So let’s now read what we bypassed earlier – the explanation of the parable of the weeds in verses 36-43.
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Did you notice the equation of the field, with both the world and with the kingdom? Verse 38 states, “The field is the world”, but then verse 41 says, “they will weed out His kingdom”. That equation is often overlooked. A popular misinterpretation through church history has understood Jesus to be talking about a mixed church of believers and unbelievers allowed to grow together within the professing community of Christ’s followers, as if Jesus had said that the field equaled the church and that people were not to pull the weeds out of the church. That mistake comes from another historical mistake equating God’s kingdom with the visible church. It’s an error that made it into popular music fairly recently by the Christian artist Sandi Patty in a line that claimed, “ Upon this rock, I’ll build my kingdom”. The song was alluding to Matthew 16:18 which actually has Jesus saying, “on this rock I will build my church”. In the Bible God’s kingdom always refers to his dynamic reign or rule, not to a literal realm. It is His divine power, not a place. The kingdom in other words, is always bigger than the church, but it includes true Christians as its subjects. God’s vision of building his church is always but one part of the larger cosmic task of advancing his kingdom – His righteous reign in the entire universe.
Advancing the kingdom creates a Christian unity from recognizing that God’s purposes are much, much greater than what happens in my little corner of the world, local congregation, or ministry. This in turn generates the world-transforming power so that when unbelievers see us throughout the world united, supporting a cause much bigger than ourselves, then Jesus says, the world may believe that God has sent Him. As long as we focus on our little circle of Christian activity or relationships, our in-house issues, our cozy fellowship, our preferred style of worship, and only people who are like us, we risk making our own interests the priority over Gods kingdom interests, quenching the power that He wants release through us. In essence we come full circle, and we not only violate the warnings against prematurely separating the weeds from the wheat in our world but also separating the wheat from the wheat so that no one knows what an abundant crop might be harvested. Then people on the outside say what is the big deal about being a Christian?
But we can take heart. God promises that he will right all wrongs at the end of the age. He has not left himself without a witness even now. No era of church history has ever lacked true Christianity. Today more parts of the world have it than ever before, and the numbers and percentages of unreached people are smaller than ever in the history of the church, though there is still plenty work to be done. With modern technology we stand at a threshold of an era in which we could do more good for God and more clearly communicate his gospel than ever in the history of the world.
But it will only happen if we trust God to do it through us, without attempting to manufacture it on our own strength – when we get ourselves and our pet agendas out of the way, when we realize God’s kingdom interests are far broader than our personal interests, when we initiate cooperation with people very different from ourselves, and perhaps above all, when we see Christian activity as the single most important thing we do in our lives, more than our secular jobs, more than recreation with our families, more than any other things that gobble up so much time and energy even as we claim that Christ in number 1 in our lives! We don’t have to remain feeling like, or at times being, a beleaguered minority. God will preserve his church, but He wants to do far more than preserve it. He wants to grow it wherever it appears as a tiny influence into a powerful force for good in our world.
Back to story of the girl from earlier.
The dad ended up putting her in a motel for the night, and the mom gave her some nice clothes and some makeup from home. Sunday morning they picked her up, of course she had been ready for hours. When they saw her, they could barely recognize her because of the difference. Now she got to go to church like everyone else. After church that Sunday the family took her out for lunch and by the end of it, they had invited the girl to come live with them, kind of like an adult foster kid I guess. Within a year she enrolled and was very successful in Bible college, knowing the Bible as well or better than any teacher or pastor. Today she is living on her own and is the children’s ministry director of an even larger church in that community, which has a huge outreach program for homeless people that she helped initiate.
This woman looked like a weed, but she turned out to be one of the finest strains of wheat in God’s Kingdom.
We must leave the judgment up to the Lord and welcome the weeds, because we have the assurance of survival and being harvested at the right time, but we are called to do our best to ensure that there are no weeds around us when Jesus swings his sickle.
Will you pray with me for God to show us what that might look like in our little lives, in the small mission field surrounding us in His grand scheme of things? Let’s pray.
Dear Lord, we are the wheat, but there are weeds among us. Help us Father to live with the weeds and by showing unity in pursuing your purposes, show the weeds that there is something great about being your follower that is irresistible. Give us a heart to welcome the weeds with love and not judgment as we sit in the confidence of your promises. May the harvest be bountiful and may we share your desire that none shall perish. Now Lord bless us as we go into our mission field for we pray in the holy name of Jesus. Amen.
