When I was a girl, I would visit Woodward Park in Tulsa, the crown jewel of all the parks in town. In the springtime especially, this large urban park would be ablaze with large azalea bushes covered in blossoms of pink, orange, and white exploding in bloom lining its streams and pathways. The park was kept pristine and beautiful, the grass neatly mown, brooks burbling like laughing babies. Next door to this park was the Tulsa Garden Center, which displayed an astonishing array of dozens of varieties of roses in its own gardens, and inside the greenhouses there were collections of orchids and other fragile, temperamental, hothouse flowers. As you walked through these two adjacent nature centers, no sign of a native plant would you find back then. Wildflowers were considered to be weeds, things to be plowed under or plucked up to make way for exotic, domesticated flowers or crops that were profitable.
Now, however, there is a movement among gardeners to use native plants. We realize the benefits to ourselves as well as to our precious pollinators, their ability to thrive in their native environment with very little care or extra watering or soil adjustment through chemicals. And finally, we are coming to see the beauty of wildflowers in and of themselves. Some of us have come to realize the benefits of clover in our yards for the bees. Some of us have even embraced the lowly dandelion for its benefits to native insects, although that’s often a harder sell. Here in St. Louis, the Butterfly House offers for sale milkweed, bee balm, cardinal flower, and a host of other plants that support bees and butterflies—coincidentally, plants that in my childhood would have been sneered at as weeds and mowed down.
As a lover of what formerly were called “weeds,” when I hear this parable, with its condemnation and threat of destruction for weeds, I get uncomfortable. I am very reluctant to divide people into “wheat” and “weeds.” In fact I am convinced that a lot of what plagues our world today is that tendency toward division and condemnation. Especially as we confront the reality of systemic racism throughout human societies everywhere, we see the urge to divide people up into “us” and “them,” in to neighbor and stranger, as leading to terrible tragic consequences—consequences that hurt everyone, even those who believe they benefit from inequality. We all want to believe that we are the wheat, and that those who are different from us or those that disagree with us are the weeds, and we eagerly await for them to “get what’s coming to them.”
We see this tendency to throw people away operating in our criminal justice system all the time. Once someone gets branded as a “criminal” there is no limit to the punishment that can be rained down upon them. People with felony convictions, even if those convictions are decades old, can be excluded from housing, employment, the right to vote. And yet we also know people who have changed their lives for the better, who have seen and acknowledged the weeds that they have allowed to flourish in themselves and chosen to remove them and grow—a possibility that lies at heart of the gospel for everyone. Who are we to decide who is worth saving, and who can be thrown away?
Jesus tells us that’s not our job. The field doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to God.
Since St. Augustine, a common interpretation of the field in this parable is that it stands for the Church, and that the Church has a mixed nature—encompassing both the good and the bad. The Church is filled with real people, people who are struggling with sin and anger and fear and resentment just like the world around them. This parable has been misused against individuals repeatedly throughout the Church’s history—and used to cut them off from the community as hopelessly lost due to their supposed “sinfulness,” contrary to the gospel of grace that sustains each and every one of us. This parable then, could be a reminder to us that it is not up to us to judge whether people are weeds or not and whether people should be expelled from fellowship for wrongdoing—instead, such judgment is solely up to God. And God never gives up on us.
However, this does not lead us to deny that evil exists. This parable calls us to acknowledge the existence of evil in this world—to take that concept seriously. Yet evil almost always is dependent upon systems to exist—it’s hardly ever the work of one person alone. You’d think, after the genocides of the 20th century alone, we wouldn’t have to be persuaded of this, but we often seem to be squeamish about naming evil as evil, and especially systems that perpetuate evil, even when it is right in front of us. Maybe that’s because evil often sneaks up on us—what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil,” where she talked about how ordinary people can be persuaded to do terrible things under the guise of “just following orders” or “just going along with what others were doing.” We must ever be willing to examine ourselves to determine whether we are being inured to or made numb to cruelty, injustice, or prejudice.
But evil exists collectively, systemically, and often through our unquestioning acceptance of it. Evil exists because of our failure to question the costs that systems impose. Evil succeeds because it keeps pushing the boundaries ever so gradually from decency and compassion toward dehumanizing or “othering” people around us, or scapegoating them to distract from our own responsibilities toward each other. Those are poisons we must never take into ourselves.
And poison is at the heart of what Jesus is talking about. The weeds Jesus speaks about here are not just some benign sunflower. The tares he speaks of, also known as bearded darnel or Lolium temulentum, is defined in the Bible Dictionary as “a species of rye-grass, the seeds of which are a strong soporific poison. It bears the closest resemblance to wheat till the ear appears, and only then the difference is discovered. It grows plentifully in Syria and Palestine.” In small quantities, this plant when ingested could cause hallucinations and a kind of drunkenness, but as a toxin it could also cause blindness in higher concentrations.
And the worst part is, this plant didn’t look that different from wheat as it grows, even to the trained eye. As the tares and the wheat grow up together, they were virtually indistinguishable. It was only when the heads of the grains developed that a slight difference could be seen—and at that point it was important to root out the weeds so that the flour would not be contaminated with a toxin that could cause blindness and even death. But it was only at the harvest and at the processing of the grain into flour that the danger becomes crucial.
As much as we may think we know sin and evil when we see it, this parable also reminds us that we humans are fallible. That means the Church can be fallible because it is made up of fallible people and who are fallible in our understanding of the revelation of God in the world, who exists not just in the words in the Bible but in the Spirit of God revealing Christ to us right now, today.
More often than not, we confuse sinfulness with evil, or sometimes we conflate the two together. But proportion, perspective, and evaluation are also important parts of discernment—as much as remembering that we all have areas in our lives where we are sinful, and where we fall short of the behavior we are called to models as disciples of Jesus.
This is where our epistle comes in—to remind us to take a great big dose of humility with each other. We are all adopted children of God, as Paul points out. Many people, unfortunately, see adoption as a kind of lesser relationship than those of blood. Not so, says Paul in this passage. “Those who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” Not ersatz children. Not second-class children. We are “heirs with Christ,” as we are reminded, and so members of the family of God—all of us. Family members share both privileges and responsibilities. Family is not a matter of blood, but of shared values, shared sacrifice, shared goals.
And as many of us know from experience, being a member of a family can itself bring pain and heartbreak if members of that family treat each other with contempt or disregard, taking each other for granted. Because it is such a close relationship, the possibility to be hurt by those we acknowledge as family is magnified that much more, and the hurt can go much deeper.
Although it is not meant to be, the Church, is no exception, and the pain that can be inflicted by the Church almost inevitably comes from losing sight of an important point about human nature: that rather than being either wheat or weed, we all have parts of both, and that we can delude ourselves into acting from selfish motives by believing that all we are doing is pulling weeds, when instead, we are harming the good plants too.
But what if we were, each of us, to see ourselves as the field, rather than the plants? God is the sower, and sows the good seed in each and every one of us. However, sometimes, weeds sprout up in each of us as well. Things like envy, and tribalism, and greed, and racism, and selfishness— even violence. Those are all there inside of us, sown by the enemy of fear and suspicion and the myth of competition that tries to fool us into seeing everyone else as competitors rather than companions, colleagues and collaborators.
As we see in the parable of the field, the good and the bad go through life alongside each other. But you know, the truth is actually a lot more messy even than that. But if you are only looking for weeds in others, it also makes it much easier to ignore the poison ivy growing in your own back yard.
As Jesus points out elsewhere in scripture, it’s really easy to point out the speck in someone else’s eye even when you’ve got a log sticking out of yours. As much as we wish it otherwise, judgment about each other quickly descends to hypocrisy and hubris if we forget that we all sin, that we all are upheld in our spiritual life by a heaping helping of the grace that God’s gives us to decide to uproot the tares that grow within our own lives. When it comes to people, we should be very careful about pronouncing final judgment on anyone and considered them a “throwaway” person simply because they have made mistakes.
It is our job to acknowledge that evil exists, and it is our job not to align ourselves with those who take pleasure in hurting others but to resist them with all we are, no matter how profitable going along with their cruelty might be. But when it comes to our actions as people of faith living in a world awash with ambiguity, that means we all acknowledge that each of us as individuals will have times when we are struggling, and our job is to work to support each other in all our trials rather than judge each other.
Ultimately, it’s important to place this parable alongside last week’s parable, and to remember that the lesson Jesus is teaching us here is one of empowerment, self-examination, and self-discipline rather than casting out others for their lack of perfection. Jesus calls us to be the good soil, to receive the seeds of the gospel and to nurture them in our hearts so that they bear fruit—especially for the good of others.
May all who have ears to hear, listen.
Amen.
Preached at the 10:30 am online worship service at St/Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO on July 19, 2020.
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