Weeds
My yard is full of weeds. Honeysuckle and dandelions and winter creeper and Virginia creeper, and wild violets, and clover, and English Ivy, and crabgrass. A friend recently told me I should dig it all out and plant sod. But it’s green, and it holds the soil together. It makes the butterflies and wild rabbits happy. And I don’t have an HOA. So I mow the weeds and call it good enough.
I’ve been thinking about my yard this week because of today’s Gospel. Last Sunday, we met a sower who scattered good seeds in places where you wouldn’t expect anything to grow: on a path, and among rocks and thorns. And we prayed that we might sow good seed in the same way, sowing love and faith and hope even in unlikely places. And today, Jesus tells another farming story. A story about another sower, and another kind of seed. This parable is harder than last week’s was.
The kingdom of heaven is like someone who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone slept, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. No one noticed what had happened until the plants began to mature, wheat and weeds growing together, with their roots intertwined. And the farmer has to decide what to do.
A note about the weeds in this story: Scholars tell us that the weed Jesus talks about is probably darnel, a plant that the ancients called “false wheat.” In its early stages of growth, it looks almost exactly like wheat. But it grows into something else — inedible, and sometimes even toxic.
As I said last week when we talked about the parable of the sower who sowed seeds on all sorts of ground, a parable never has just one meaning. I’ve often wondered if the explanations of parables that the Gospels do give us might have been added by later scribes who weren’t comfortable with the paradox and ambiguity of the bare stories Jesus told. But even if that’s true, one explanation of today’s parable certainly is the one the Gospel’s text gives us, that it’s a metaphor for good and evil existing side by side, and of a final judgment left to God.
And note what today’s parable doesn’t say. It doesn’t say that the weeds aren’t actually weeds. You may have heard that you shouldn’t attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. That’s true. But it’s also true that malice is sometimes real. The weeds in today’s parable were planted on purpose, and Jesus doesn’t pretend otherwise.
Malice is real. Weeds are real. But what should we do with the weeds growing in our own fields? Should we rush to pull them out of the ground?
The landowner in today’s parable says no. In gathering the weeds, you would uproot the wheat. Let them grow together until the harvest.
Oh, but the weeds are such a problem!
Wheat and weeds grow together in the same soil, side by side, and — to step out of strict metaphor for a moment — even within a single human heart. But Jesus says we can’t root out the weeds. Not yet.
First, because we’re bad at telling the plants apart. Wheat and darnel look alike for a long time. Some of our world’s worst chapters begin with people who are certain which plant is which and set to weeding.
And second, because the parable isn’t a perfect metaphor. Darnel can’t ever become wheat. But weed-like people can.
So what do we do about the weeds in our midst?
We can see them and name them. Letting them grow doesn’t pretend that they aren’t there. The landowner in today’s parable never says the weeds are good. What he says is this: the harvest isn’t yet, and the reapers aren’t us. Or to return to the metaphor, judgment belongs only to God.
And God sees more clearly than we ever will.
That can be a good thing. As the poetry of today’s psalm puts it, “Where can I go then from your Spirit? If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand will lead me.” And a few verses later: “Darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day.”
Remember how the weeds got into the field. The enemy came at night, while everybody slept. Nobody saw. But darkness is not dark to God. Nothing in that field is hidden from God’s sight.
But still the weeds grow. Our bulletin skips a part of today’s psalm. It’s not the pretty part. The psalm goes from poetry directly into a prayer for vengeance. “Wings of the morning” becomes “Oh, that you would slay the wicked, O God!” “I hate them with a perfect hatred; they have become my own enemies.”
The psalmist wants God to weed the field. Now, and firmly. But I wonder if even that very prayer is a sort of weed. And I wonder if the psalmist knows it too. Because the psalm concludes with a prayer that we did read: “Search me out, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my restless thoughts. Look well whether there be any wickedness in me.” First, slay the wicked. But then check me, because I might be one of them. Wheat and weeds sharing a heart.
So what can we do? We can do what we were told last week. We can keep sowing. If we can’t pull up hate, we can plant love right next to it and let the two share the light. Where there is hate, may we sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is sorrow, joy. That prayer still holds. Maybe that’s all we can do. But maybe it’s enough.
That brings me back to my own front yard. It’s full of weeds. The honeysuckle is relentless. But the butterflies love it. And so it all grows together. Maybe I’ll tear it all out next year. But maybe not.
Let weeds and wheat grow together until the harvest, the landowner says. The field is God’s. The harvest is God’s. The judgment, mercifully, is God’s. Our job is to sow, and to wait.