Matthew 13:24-30,36-43
As far as the parables of our Lord are concerned, the one before us in today’s gospel is certainly clear. Some of them are not so clear, even when our Lord interprets them for his disciples; and others are left in the gospel record uninterpreted. This one, however, is quite straightforward. If it poses a difficulty for us, it is in the area of application. Our Lord says, “He who has ears, let him hear.” Of course, mere hearing is not quite the point – it’s what we are going to do with what we hear him say that will prove us.
So, let us turn our attention to the parable with this in mind – what are we to hear? what are we to think? what are we to do? Actually, the point of the parable seems to be not something to do, but something NOT to do. But first, let’s review the salient points of this parable.
First, what are tares? The tares mentioned in this parable are the plant which goes by the name darnel . It is a form of rye grass. And, when it first sprouts and for some time as it is growing, it is virtually indistinguishable from wheat. Only as it matures do the differences between wheat and darnel become evident. But, by the time you can recognize darnel and distinguish it from wheat, it is already well established in the field, and its root system is well mingled with the wheat. As Jesus explained in the parable, if you go in and start pulling up the darnel at this point, you are going to destroy part of your crop at the same time.
Jesus’ advice to his servants a feature of this parable that isn’t exactly at home in the kinds of Christianity in which my initial spiritual formation occurred. I was reared in a version of the Christian faith that put a great store in drawing very sharp lines between “them” and “us.” Of course, the premise to this view about Christian fellowship and ministry is that we are ABLE to draw these kinds of lines in the first place. And, that is the first notion that this parable challenges.
As I said, when wheat and darnel first sprout, they are indistinguishable. You could not possibly uproot the darnel at this stage, for fear of pulling up wheat instead and leaving the tares to flourish. In order to see which is wheat and which is tares, you must leave them all alone and let them come to maturity. Only as they near the time of harvest is it possible to see the difference between them.
There are communities of Christians – you can find them in all denominations, I think – which haven’t gotten the point of this parable. They think you can have a pure church – a field that contains ONLY wheat, as it were – in this life, before the end of the age. But, they are wrong. For one thing, they cannot stop the enemy from sowing tares among them. For another thing, they do not have the discernment to distinguish between wheat and tares. And, finally, by setting themselves the goal of producing a field with absolutely no weeds in it, they usually achieve a field that has very little wheat in it.
Why does Satan do this? Why does he sow tares among the wheat? Make no mistake here – the field is the world, but the tares are sown among the wheat by the enemy. He doesn’t just willy nilly sow tares just any old place. It is among the wheat that the tares are sown by Satan. What is he up to?
First of all, weeds take up room that would otherwise be useful for the production of wheat. Every Christian ministry of any size has these kinds of “plants” in it, as it were – those who consume resources, the food, water, and sunshine they take to themselves are not available for the wheat plants in these groups. I actually think that this problem is not only easier to see, but also far more common the larger a group of Christians grows. Church programming designed to meet the needs of the tares will inevitably rob resources from ministries that would cause wheat to grow and multiply.
Secondly, as innumerable commentators have observed, the root systems of the tares become entangled with the root systems of the wheat. This is why one cannot just yank the tares out of the ground once you recognize them. If you do that, you will certainly uproot some wheat as well.
Thirdly, tares produce nothing useful; instead they produce a great many more useless plants like themselves.
I wonder, sometimes, if this is why Christian organizations – seminaries, are good examples – tend to decay over time. They do not go away, but they eventually become fields of nothing but weeds. In general, communions of Christians follow a similar path – a beginning that flourishes with new growth, a maturity in which there is an abundance of both good wheat and useless weeds side by side, and finally, a decline into sheer weediness.
If we take the parable at face value here – that the wheat is sown by the Son of Man himself and that the utter removal and destruction of tares is NOT on his agenda at the PRESENT time, then this is what we would expect – when a field becomes so overgrown with weeds that it can no longer yield a crop for the farmer, then he simply goes and sows in another part of the field.
And, so – in the case of seminaries, for example – they begin with high and holy purposes, and over a few generations they become choked with weeds. They are, initially, highly productive for the gospel, generating additional good seed which is sown into the world. But as the tares among them also grow and multiply, they eventually choke out the wheat plants, until you end up with institutions such as Southern Methodist University, or Yale, or Harvard, or Princeton – schools originally founded to further the spread of the gospel, but today are headquarters of many things which are directly hostile to the gospel.
What are we to think of all this? I confess that the advice Jesus gives here appears to conflict with the teaching of the Apostles at some points. I think particularly of the Apostle Paul who admonishes the Corinthian Christians to expel a notorious sinner from their midst. " … put away from yourselves the evil person,” Paul writes [1 Cor. 5:13] Or what about his admonition to the Christians at Rome: 17Now I urge you, brethren, note those who cause divisions and offenses, contrary to the doctrine which you learned, and avoid them. 18For those who are such do not serve our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly, and by smooth words and flattering speech deceive the hearts of the simple. (Rom. 16;17-18).
Or what about Paul’s words to the Christians at Thessalonica:
6But we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you withdraw from every brother who walks disorderly and not according to the tradition which he received from us. … 14And if anyone does not obey our word in this epistle, note that person and do not keep company with him, that he may be ashamed. 15Yet do not count him as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother. [2 Thess.3]
How do we square the Apostolic teaching of these passages with what Jesus is telling us in the parable? It seems to me there are only three ways to reconcile these seemingly conflicting ideas.
First, we may simply say that Paul and Jesus flatly contradict one another in this matter. I reject that out of hand, but I mention it since one might try to solve the problem this way. Except this doesn’t solve anything – it just trades one problem for an even more difficult one.
Another way to reconcile these two strains of thought is to find Jesus speaking about a general policy, while Paul is addressing extraordinary crises of morals or religious authority. It is a crisis of morals when a man is sleeping with his mother or step-mother and the Church seems to find this a cause of boasting. One cannot look at something like this and blithely dismiss it as a case where one can’t be sure whether the fellow is among the wheat or the tares. In the case of the Judaizers in the Galatian church, Paul saw the very essence of the gospel itself at stake.
So, the idea is that one does not go around trying to keep the church pure – in other words, it is folly to suppose you can have a weed free field, and so we follow Jesus’ teaching and let weeds and wheat grow alongside one another. On the other hand, if something that doesn’t even look like wheat is growing – say a large banana tree – if something monstrous like that pops up in the field, why then of course you find an axe and remove it.
This is how most people reconcile these two lines of instruction – one from Jesus, another from Paul, and James, and John in their epistles.
There is a third way to understand Jesus and Paul, however, that does not make them to conflict at all. And this involves taking Jesus’ words in the parable at face value – namely his references to the end of this age. The perspective of Jesus parable is not narrow; it is not focused on the lifetime of any of his disciples to whom he gave this teaching. Rather the perspective encompasses the entire age of the Church, and his disciples are at the very beginning of it. The world is not just the world as it was in the days of the original Apostles – it is the world as it stretches down through time, down to this present day, and onward into the future until that time when the Son of Man charges his angels to go out into the world and to remove everything that gives offense. Said another way, Jesus’ parable has more meaning, more obvious meaning for us today than it likely did for the Apostles to whom he spoke it – at least at the time he spoke the parable to them. They could not see 2,000 years into the future; but we can see 2,000 years into the past.
When we do this, we find that Jesus’ parable explains a fascinating phenomenon we might call the Christian center of gravity. The Christian center of gravity would be a point on the earth around which the distribution of Christians in the world would be equal in all directions. Obviously, the original Christian center of gravity was in Palestine. From there it moved steadily westward and northward until it was fixed in south-central Europe. And there it remained for centuries.
But, in the last century, that center of gravity has begun to move again, and it is now moving – with greater speed than ever before – to the south and back toward the east. That center of gravity is near to entering North Africa for the first time in Christian history. And missiologists fully expect it to continue moving South and East as the Christian faith explodes on the African Continent and in the far east, in China and Korea.
Meanwhile, back in the old center of the Christian faith – in Western Europe, in Constantinople, in the original Churches of Asia Minor – addressed by name by Jesus Christ in the Apocalypse – those churches are still there, but the patches of wheat are tiny and they are very thickly choked with weeds. The fields which are very thickly choked with WHEAT now lie mostly in the southern hemisphere. The Son of Man is still sowing good seed in the world; and the enemy is still following behind sowing the tares among them.
If there is anything in Jesus’ parable that gives us advice on what to do today about the weeds, it is in this cryptic phrase: “25but while men slept, [the] enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat and went his way.” If this is any kind of hint, that hint is a warning about what happens when men sleep, and the sleeping men must surely be those whose job it is to tend to the fields. Had they been awake, we suppose, the enemy might not have gotten a chance to sow the tares in the first place.
Understanding Jesus’ parable in this way, we do not find in it any further advice on how to manage weeds in our own midst. For that, we look to Jesus disciples’ who were planting churches in the First Century – to Paul, to James, to John, and to Peter.
As to what we are to think – and, by “we” I am referring to us here at St. Athanasius – let me suggest two things.
In the larger scheme of things, let us take heart in Jesus teaching here; or, rather, let us not lose heart when we look at Christendom all around us and find it looking more and more like a field of darnel. This is exactly what Jesus tells us to expect. Our attitude is not to be complacence, but rather diligence to tend to the wheat – ourselves and others who are sown by the Son of Man – to ensure so far as we are able that the wheat comes to maturity, waiting to be gathered into the harvest.
In the smaller scheme of things, may I suggest that we take special encouragement whenever we see – or, I think, in our case – when we find ourselves part of sown by the Son of Man in fresh soil. I think I can speak for all of us here, when I say that we have come together from Christian communions which had become choked, that to have remained where we were was to subsist on smaller and smaller portions of earth, rain, and sunshine, because so much of our environment was in those places was filled with weeds.
I trust we are not weeds ourselves, and I do not say this to puff us all up. Rather, I say this so we may take heed to what Jesus said in that parable – that the tares were sown when men were asleep.
As we continue to grow here in this parish – as our work together amounts to the sprouting and new growth in less weedy surroundings, let us keep on our guard. God grant that we not sleep, that we may be ever mindful of the Evil One who would happily sow tares among us. May we be diligent in our prayers for one another, and our diligence in the growth of this parish, so that we may produce a good and hearty crop of righteousness which the Son of Man so earnestly desires to see come forth from us.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
