“Smoking Weeds”
Sermon on Matthew 13:24-30
Ninth Sunday After Pentecost-Year A
July 17, 2005
Rev. J. Curtis Goforth, O.S.L.
While serving as a Methodist minister in England, I was privileged to know a man named Bernard who was on fire with the gospel, burning with the desire to tell people about Jesus. Everything that the man said was about accepting Jesus into your heart. Bernard didn’t go a day without witnessing to somebody. Every conversation he had with somebody he could turn into a conversation about accepting Jesus. He would always catch me after the service on Sundays and ask me if I had the time to go around and visit some people with him. As the pastor of 5 churches I never had the time, but I made sure to take the time one Wednesday. I called Bernard up and told him that I had Wednesday cleared off for visiting some people with him.
He was ecstatic and told me that he wanted to introduce me to about 20 different people. But, we only got to visit about five or six. We visited some of the faithful members of Dedham Heath who for health reasons were unable to attend anymore. We visited Mrs. Armstrong in her little cottage and drank tea by a coal fire in May, just a few weeks before her passing. All my visits with the people in those small, English towns will forever be etched in my memory. But I remember most vividly a visit that I went on with Bernard to see a man who had never been to the little chapel. He had never even been to the 600 year old Anglican Church around the corner for a worship service.
Bernard told me that he wanted me to meet his friend that he had been visiting every week for the past 2 years who was an atheist. We drove down this narrow country lane surrounded by fields of yellow oil seed rape in bloom and we finally got to the man’s house about lunch time. Bernard knocked on the door and the man invited us in. Bernard mentioned that I was the vicar (the British equivalent of our term preacher). The 94 year old man said, “Oh, you are bringing out the big guns now huh, Bernard.” The man told me that Bernard came by every week to try to get him to accept Jesus and come to church. But he said he didn’t believe in all that stuff. And he asked me how I was enjoying England. I told him that the countryside was just so beautiful right now with the fields all covered in yellow oil seed rape. Then Bernard decided this would be a good moment to tell the aged atheist about the parable of the wheat and the weeds. Bernard told him that Jesus once told a story about the harvest and about how at harvest time the weeds are pulled up and burned and the good crops are taken into the barn and how that was what was going to happen to each and every one of us. Bernard told his friend that Jesus was going to come and judge all those who weren’t his followers and throw them into “the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” The old man looked at Bernard with a smile, and said he still wasn’t scared of that. Bernard asked him how he could hear that parable and not be terrified of a place of so much pain that it was known as a place where people were tormented so that all they could do was gnash their teeth! The old man chuckled and said to Bernard, “I don’t have any teeth left to gnash!” Bernard quickly retorted, “Ah, my friend, teeth will be provided.”
I must confess, my first instinct when I read this parable was to preach on the Romans passage that was appointed for this week instead of this parable of the wheat and the weeds. I don’t like to read about final judgment or hell anymore than you all like to hear about it. It is very unpopular for a minister of a mainline Protestant church to preach about Hell, especially when this is just the third sermon you have ever heard me preach! It is unpopular to preach about Hell or even to say the word. We much prefer to call it “H-E-double hockey sticks,” or the place “down there.” It isn’t popular to tell people that they are going to be punished or to try to scare them into believing the same things you believe. And it is right, and a good and joyful thing always and everywhere to disagree with those who think they are the one who have the authority to tell if someone is bound for flames of H-E-double hockey sticks or the bliss of heaven. Nobody on earth has that authority, only God.
The parable even speaks against such attitudes of anyone other than God having that authority. The slaves of the owner of the field ask if they should go and rid the wheat field of the weeds, but the owner tells them not to. It is a difficult thing to distinguish between the wheat and the weeds sometimes. You never know what might be going on spiritually with most people.
I told Bernard in the car on our way home from visiting the aged atheist that all we can do as those who share the gospel with others is plant a seed. I tried to tell him that scaring someone into believing in God is not genuine belief and that it is certainly not love. And, we discussed this parable in my driveway that he used that day with his atheistic friend. I told him that it wasn’t always so easy to distinguish between the weeds and the wheat. He told me that he always thought it was pretty easy to tell a weed.
Here is where some knowledge of the context of this parable is so important. You see, the Greek word zizania, the word which is translated here as “weeds” is denoting a special kind of weed called bearded darnel. Now bearded darnel looks just like wheat when it is young. Even experts can’t tell darnel from wheat until it bears grain. The passage even tells us this if we read it carefully. Look at verse 26. “So, when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well.” It wasn’t until the two plants had produced grain that they could be told apart.
Darnel is a particularly harmful weed though. Since it looks so much like real wheat, it is allowed to grow with the good wheat. But, when it produces grain, it can be told apart and the yield of the field is greatly reduced since the darnel consumed so many of the resources the field had to offer the two plants. In the ancient Near East, this wasn’t just a reduction of profit margin, this could even mean starvation. If the darnel mistakenly was ground up with the wheat, it could even cause death in large quantities. Darnel is a narcotic, and it caused people to stagger and hallucinate and vomit. It would have been very difficult to live if an enemy had planted darnel in your wheat field. The people Jesus told this parable to would have been well acquainted with the dangers of this false wheat, this weed.
In the end, the darnel produces a very different crop than the wheat. Later on in Matthew, Jesus explains this parable to the disciples (something that rarely gets recorded in the gospels). Jesus says that the field is the world and that the wheat are the children of the kingdom; the weeds, children of the evil one.
I don’t know if you personally even believe in hell. I don’t believe we have all the answers about the afterlife. I don’t know that we can accurately describe heaven or hell. I certainly don’t think “the place down there” comes complete with a guy in red tights with horns and a pitchfork. In fact, if you read the Bible, the otherworldly person who is pictured with a pitchfork is Jesus, not Satan. And, if you read Dante’s Inferno, hell hasn’t always even been pictured as a place of fire—Dante records hell as being a place of ice as well.
I can’t stand up here and tell you what heaven or hell will be like. If we knew all the answers, what need would there be of God. If we knew all the answers, that would make us God. I can say this—the parable of the wheat and the weeds is an earthly story with a heavenly meaning that tells us there will be a time when judgment is pronounced and when justice is served. The wheat and weeds will be separated and dealt with accordingly. How they will be dealt with is not something that is up to us.
It may be unpopular to preach about Hell and judgment, but Jesus preached about it. He wasn’t always popular either. But the good news of this parable comes when you are the wheat that has to eek out an existence amongst the weeds in the field of life. It is only a parable of punishment and fear if you are a weed. If you are wheat, it is a parable of joy. As unpopular as it may be to preach about Hell, it is even more unpopular to live your life as wheat in the midst of a field of weeds.
When Bernard and I were sitting in his car in my driveway that Wednesday talking about this parable, after I had explained to him the context of it and told him about the darnel and about how there was a difference between simply fearing Hell and loving God and being a child of the kingdom, he told me something that I took as a great compliment. He told me that I had given him a lot of food for thought to chew on. He said that he just wasn’t sure that he had teeth enough to chew on it all. I looked over at Bernard and smiled, and said, “Ah, my friend, teeth will be provided.” Amen.
