An Enemy Has Done This
Matthew 13:24-30
The world has been staggering from the overwhelming catastrophes that have taken place since the beginning of this year. The devastating earthquake and resulting tsunamis in Japan left over 28,000 people dead or missing. There are mudslides in South Korea that have taken lives and homes. Volcanoes are erupting in Indonesia, Ethiopia and elsewhere. Droughts in Somalia and other places have large numbers of people starving. Drought in our own country has led to wildfires that have consumed more land than ever recorded in our history. Meanwhile, the places which did not need rain got far more than they needed, and it did not stop. Flooding has engulfed large expanses of land and swept away people and homes. On top of that we have had torrential storms that have devastated whole communities. And if you really want to get overwhelmed you can go to the Global Disaster Watch website for a complete listing of all that is going on around the globe. For the people caught in these disasters it must have seemed like the end of the world, and for many of them it was.
When it comes to things like this, it rocks us and we are often led to ask “Why? — Why would God let something like this happen.” It is very much to the point of Jesus parable today. A man sows his field with wheat – good seed. But as the crop grows, it becomes obvious that bad seed has been sown in the field. The laborers come to the owner of the field and say, “Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?” (Matthew 13:27). So it is with us. The world is the field and the owner is God. He is supposed to have sown good seed in his field, so how then does evil sprout up in a world which is supposed to be good? For many people, their first impulse is to blame God. God was supposed to make a good world, but there is evil and suffering in the world, therefore, he must be responsible. Either he has deceived us and made evil as a part of our world, or he himself is evil. He is not a good God after all. That is the conclusion that many draw.
One way to look at it is that it is neither good nor evil, it is just the natural forces of world at work. Tectonic plates are just doing what they have to do. They shift and adjust, and if they did not it would be calamitous for the globe. There has to be give and take within the earth. That earthquakes, and the Tsunamis which follow them, come is just a natural part of the shifting of these plates. Likewise, rain just does what rain is supposed to do — and sometimes floods happen. Fire is just doing what fire does, and sometimes forests and houses get in the way. Wind is just doing what wind must do, and sometimes the force of them is deadly. But it is not evil, and God is not behind it intending to punish the world or the people in it. It just is what it is.
But there is more to it than that. The landowner explains to his servants: “An enemy has done this.” An enemy. The owner has an enemy. He is not as powerful as the landowner, and certainly not good. He is a schemer. He comes only to ruin, or as Jesus said, he is a thief who “comes only to steal and kill and destroy” (John 10:10). We live in a fallen world. The world fell away from God in the Garden of Eden and has continued to fall away from God away ever since. The apostle Paul explains it like this: “The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved” (Romans 8:19-24). Sin has not only affected us, it has affected the world around us as well. The world is distorted and far from what God originally planned and wanted. As a result, nature is fraught with natural disasters. Sin has corrupted us and the world we live in. So rather than blaming God, the blame rests on the human family which has rebelled against God. Our world, and the people in it, can be dangerous. Sin and the devil are those who have sown the bad seed that affects the kind of world in which we live.
But we as well as all creation live in the hope that our world will be liberated from this bondage. It is, as Paul writes, our “eager anticipation.” The Greek gives the idea of someone standing on tiptoe and stretching their neck eagerly looking for something that is to come. There will be glorious freedom for the children of God. Meanwhile we groan, but we are saved by the hope of what is to come — what God will someday do. And what God will do is restore our broken world to his original plan — in a way that is bigger and better than our best dream.
The parable says, “But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away” (Matthew 13:25). Sin has caused a spiritual stupor to come across the world and the church. The church often sleeps as the enemy is at work in our world. We allow it to go unchecked and unresisted in our apathy. We are held responsible for being passive and allowing evil to prosper while good people do nothing. James says, “Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded” (James 4:7-8). And Peter says, “Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith” (1 Peter 5:8-9). But we are not only called to resist evil, but to work positively for God and good as well. The Bible says, “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10). And Paul gives us this promise: “And do this, understanding the present time. The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed” (Romans 13:11).
But in the parable the servants of the owner of the field have an idea. They see the weeds and say, “Do you want us to go and pull them up?” They want, as we often do, to rid the world of all those who are evil. But the owner says, “No, because while you are pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them.” It was a familiar practice in Jesus’ day for an enemy to plant weeds in someone’s field. The weed they sowed was called Darnel. It was a weed, that in its early stages looked identical to wheat. It was extremely difficult to tell the difference. So in an attempt to pull up the weeds there was the danger of pulling up the good wheat as well. And as the weeds and wheat grew, their roots would become entwined, and by pulling up the weeds the wheat would be pulled up as well. More damage would be done than good.
But the history of the church, to our shame, is littered with the burning of heretics, religious wars, the Inquisition, witch trials and many more. It goes against all that Jesus taught us.
Jesus was telling us that it is not always possible to tell the difference between the evil and the good. Some who seem to be good turn out to be evil, and some who seem to be evil turn out to be good. We really don’t know who is a Christian and who is not. We can’t possibly tell who is going to hell and who is going to heaven. But one thing we can do — guard our own hearts so that we know that we are true wheat. The Bible says, “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand” ( Ephesians 6:10-13). Don’t worry so much about where others are in their spiritual lives — you should have your hands full just taking care of yourself.
But in spite of what Jesus said, Christians often see the world as being in two camps: the evil and the good, and we really believe we can tell the difference. Jesus is telling us that we can’t. What seems obvious to us is not always the way things are. In our own time we have seen men who have become well known preachers who preached against sin and evil in the strongest terms, only to discover that they were themselves practicing the very things they so ardently preached against. Their lives were a complicated mess of spirituality, hypocrisy, moral failure, lies and debauchery. It has led to the disillusionment of countless people who have dropped out of the church and abandoned Christianity itself.
On the other hand, we have seen many people whose lives were lived in sin and unbelief come to faith. The changes in their lives have been as shocking as the preachers who fell. They turned from being enemies of the faith to being some of its strongest proponents. Through the working of the Holy Spirit, they saw their error. A new truth dawned on them and they bowed their knees to God. Many of them had been on an honest search for truth, and at one time they thought the truth was that there was no God, no morality and no meaning in life. But something happened that began to turn them — slowly at first, but then their lives came full circle back to God and life itself.
I recently read a book by Krista Tippett entitled Einstein’s God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit. In the book she writes of some of the scientists who turned from atheism to faith. One of the men she writes about is John Polkinghorne. She writes, “In John Polkinghorne’s book Quarks, Chaos & Christianity, he writes, ‘We can take with absolute seriousness all that science can tell us and still believe that there is room left over for our action in the world and for God’s action, too.’ He continues, ‘Of course, this does not mean that prayer is just filling in a series of blank cheques given us by Heavenly Father Christmas. Prayer is not magic. It is something much more personal, for it is an interaction between humanity and God.’” Here is a man of supreme intellect and knowledge who at one time could not believe in the existence of God, but now he wonders how he could have missed it all this time. And there are similar stories in her book.
Another amazing story is that of Anne Rice. Rice tells the story of her conversion in her book, Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession. Some of you will recognize her name as the author of Interview with the Vampire and other books with similar theme. The cover synopsis says that this is, “Rice’s astonishing spiritual autobiography! She was born in New Orleans in the 1940s, then slowly lost her faith. She bemoaned that fact during her radical Berkeley years in Interview with the Vampire. Upon returning to her childhood church decades later, she was amazed to discover she could once again believe in Christ.”
In the introduction she says, “This book is about faith in God. For more than twenty centuries, Christianity has given us dazzling works of theology, yet it remains a religion in which the heart is absolutely essential to faith. The appeal of Jesus Christ was first and foremost to the heart... I want to tell, as simply as I can — and nothing with me as a writer has ever really been simple — the story of how I made my decision of the heart. So here is the story of one path to God. The story has a happy ending because I have found the complete belief in Him and devotion to Him, no matter how interwoven with occasional fear and constant personal failure and imperfection, has become the true story of my life. If the path is real, then we have something here that may matter to you as well as to me.”
It is a strange story of how one woman went from a fascination with vampires to a devotion to Christ, but her story is just one of millions who experienced the thrill of a transformation of the heart wrought by Christ. Who could have guessed? And that is Jesus’ point.
But the greater reason for us not to try to pick out who the evil people are is that God will bring final justice in the end. I saw a picture of a signboard along a highway that said, “You know that Caylee Anthony thing? I’ve got it covered. – God”. Whatever justice is in that case, and I’m not even trying to guess, God has it covered — as well as all other cases of evil and injustice. Jesus said in the parable: “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.” That is the promise we have. But it is not the only promise. Jesus then says, “Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.”
God has not left the world alone. And God has not left us alone. God is good, and this good God will bring the world to a good end — along with all those who are the children of the kingdom.
Father Henry Fehren was quoted in Christianity Today saying, “The fact that evil people prosper is a problem that goes back into the Old Testament. But Jesus said that our Father causes the sun to shine on the bad as well as the good, and his rain to fall on the honest and dishonest alike (Matthew 5:45). The passing ‘rewards’ of evil should not tempt us to abandon good. The evil person is like the man who jumped from the 50th floor of a building without a parachute. When he passed the 30th floor, someone shouted, ‘How’s it going?’ And the jumper answered, ‘So far so good.’” When evil happens and evil people prosper it is like the jumper who is only at the 30th floor. There is something yet to come. The end for the evil and the good is inevitable. . . even if it is delayed.
Rodney J. Buchanan
July 17,. 2011
Amity United Methodist Church
rodbuchanan2000@yahoo.com
