Harvest Hope

Photo by Gábor Veres on Unsplash

The First United Presbyterian Church

“Harvest Hope”

Rev. Amy Morgan

July 19, 2020

Matthew 13:24-30; 36-43

24 He put before them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; 25 but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away.

 26 So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well.

 27 And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, 'Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?'

 28 He answered, 'An enemy has done this.' The slaves said to him, 'Then do you want us to go and gather them?'

 29 But he replied, 'No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. 30 Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.'"

36 Then Jesus left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples approached him, saying, "Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field."

 37 He answered, "The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; 38 the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, 39 and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. 40 Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. 41 The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, 42 and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 43 Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!

It was the first time I’d ever tended a garden. Growing up in the Texas hill country, everything grew wild. In my apartments in New York and New Jersey, the only greenery I encountered was cut flowers from the deli. But in our first home in Michigan, we inherited a garden that had been on the Pontiac home and garden tour under its previous steward, a woman in her mid-90’s who had tended this garden for decades. 

The child of that steward and his wife, my husband’s uncle and aunt, were coming over for dinner for the first time since we’d moved in. The day before, we spent the whole afternoon attempting to make it look like we knew what we were doing. We cut the grass and pulled weeds like they were a personal affront to our civilization. Especially the mass of giant green stems in the front garden bed. Those pernicious stringy plants had sprung up faster and taller than anything else in the bed. They’d troubled me for weeks, as I watched them form seed pods that would soon create even more weeds. I pulled out every last one of them, filling the wheelbarrow.  

When our dinner guests arrived, they remarked on how lovely the rose bush next to the front door looked (I hadn’t touched it). And then Jason’s aunt asked, “What happened to all the cornflowers in the front? They should almost be in bloom this time of year.”

Cornflowers. Those flowers so lovely they got a shade of blue named after them. I’d ripped them all out, hours ago, assuming they were an undesirable weed. They’d been intentionally planted by Jason’s aunt years ago, an annual expression of her favorite color. 

In our home here in Colorado, which also has extensive gardens, I was determined not to make the same mistake. With so many new varieties of vegetation, I decided to let just about everything grow for the first couple of years until I could get a handle on what was a weed and what was a wanted plant. I noticed early on a lovely plant with silver leaves that crew up in clusters in one of the rock beds. I thought it was such a lovely thing, it must be intentional. Until I began to find it everywhere – in every flower bed, in the middle of the lawn. And I noticed that it quickly grew from a small cluster of plants into a six-foot-tall forest. Of cottonwood trees. 

I wouldn’t think of a cottonwood tree as a weed necessarily. They are a native species with many uses and are spectacularly lovely. But because I allowed them, along with a number of aspen seedlings, to grow for so long unmitigated, I’ve spent the entirety of this summer digging up these clusters of plants before they take over the world. 

Some say a weed is simply a plant that is growing where it’s not wanted. But there really is more to it than that. A weed is often a plant that draws nutrients from other plants, that threatens the well-being and productivity of other plants around it. A weed is something that doesn’t produce desirable results in a garden landscape. 

And when it comes to agricultural production, a weed is downright dangerous. 

The weed in today’s parable from Jesus is an especially noxious one. It’s known as darnel,cheat wheat, or poison rye wheat.  Even a few grains of this plant will adversely affect crop quality as its roots surround and choke nutrients from the good wheat. Its seeds are poisonous to people and livestock, causing anything from hallucinations to death. It can be a host to a variety of crop pests and diseases.

And, here’s the real problem: both the seeds and the plants of this weed look almost exactly like good wheat. As the plants grow together, the differences between them are very subtle. Only when the two plants bear fruit does the weed stand out, its seeds turning black instead of brown. 

Mitigating this weed is extremely challenging. The farmer in Jesus’ parable did everything right, making sure he sowed clean seed. The servants are mystified when they discover the weed growing and want to pull it out immediately. But the farmer tells them to wait. If you pull the weeds early on, you can uproot the good plants because the roots of the weeds surround the roots of the wheat. And because they look so similar, you’d likely pull up as much good wheat as weeds. Wait, says the farmer. Let them grow up together until the harvest. 

Parables are stories that use familiar, conventional wisdom to teach us about something strange and mysterious. Jesus’ listeners would have understood and agreed with the farmer’s patience. They would have related to the challenge of mitigating this pernicious weed, of having to let it grow until it showed its true colors at the harvest time. 

What was more difficult for them to grasp was how this is like the kingdom of heaven. Even Jesus’ closest friends don’t get it. So they ask him about it later. And Jesus explains. 

The explanation he gives fits in with the way those first readers of Matthew’s gospel would have understood the world. There are two kinds of people – good and bad; children of the kingdom of heaven and children of the devil. And while it might be difficult for us to tell the difference sometimes, God knows what’s what and will sort it out in the end. This explains for the earliest followers of Jesus why there is still evil in the world after Jesus brings the kingdom of heaven to earth and why it isn’t being rooted out immediately. Everything must grow together for a time until our true nature is revealed. Then, as Jesus later says in Matthew’s gospel, the sheep will be sorted from the goats. 

This theological understanding of humankind doesn’t hold up so well in the post-modern era, when we understand that even good people do bad things, even noble actions can have flawed intentions and destructive actions can be carried out with the best of intentions. While we have heard people described as a “bad seed,” most of us at least suspect that we are all a bit of a mixture of good and bad seed. 

And yet, we still have the same impulse as those servants. When we notice something is amiss, we want to deal with it immediately. When a public figure or brand name is accused of misconduct, unacceptable speech, or offensive ideologies, the “cancel culture” promotes canceling their voice, product, brand, or creations. Pull up the weeds immediately before they can grow and contaminate the good people or society any further. Officers in the Presbyterian Church take a vow to uphold the “purity of the church,” and in service to that vow, some have taken to uprooting entire congregations. 

Because we do recognize the mixture of wheat and weeds in each person, some of us feel compelled to root out our faults and failings with the greatest efficiency. We embark on personal perfection projects, using any tools at our disposal, from self-help gurus to cosmetic surgery, attempting to root out our sinful tendencies and unattractive qualities. 

But Jesus is not offering us a twelve-step program for growing ourselves into good wheat or a prescription for weed killer. He’s telling us a parable. He’s describing what the kingdom of heaven is like. 

And what he describes is exactly the world we live in, the experiences we live in. It’s a mixture of good and bad, healthy and harmful. There are those intentionally working for good and those intentionally subverting that goodness. And sometimes those are the same people. Sometimes we are those people. 

But God allows the wheat and weeds to grow together in a “holy and purposeful ambiguity,” to borrow a phrase from Austin Seminary President Ted Wardlaw. This holy and purposeful ambiguity forces us to accept the paradox that good and evil can look almost identical. This reminds us that we ought not be too quick to judge, and to eager to uproot all the evil we perceive. In trying to efficiently and effectively remove what we see is wrong, we might take plenty of good with it and leave plenty of evil behind.

As some of us have studied the Enneagram over the last several weeks, we’ve come to see that each of our most positive qualities can also present our greatest challenge. Our gifts have a shadow side. There is weed and wheat mixed together in each of us, what Augustine called corpus permixtum, a mixed body. Augustine applied this term to the church, but we can see this in our larger society and in each of our individual bodies, too. When Jesus tells this parable to his devoted followers, he is moving toward his arrest and crucifixion, when those followers will show themselves to be a corpus permixtum, a mixture of wheat and weeds.  

God allows this mixture to grow together purposefully, for the health of the harvest. The bad isn’t uprooted because it would also impact the good. This ambiguity allows for continual rebirth in us and in the world. It is generative, allowing goodness to grow and flourish, even if it must happen alongside evil for a time. 

In between Jesus’ telling of this parable and the explanation he gives, he tells two other parables about the kingdom of heaven. They are the parables of the mustard seed and the yeast, and they both describe the out-sized influence that goodness has. A tiny mustard seed becomes a great tree; a tiny bit of yeast leavens the whole loaf. Even if it feels like the weeds are taking over, the good wheat will shine like the sun in the end. The presence of evil in this parable doesn’t mean ruin for the harvest. What Jesus has sown is good, and that goodness grows and is fruitful even in the midst of evil.

At times, it feels like the weeds are winning. When we can’t change ourselves for the better, when the culture seems to be moving in the wrong direction, when there is just so much that is clearly wrong, we can easily despair. It’s natural for us to want to get rid of those wretched weeds. And there are absolutely times when we must deal with evil in ourselves, our church, and our community with discerning discipline. Jesus doesn’t promote spiritual or moral relativism or the tolerance of abuse, oppression, or injustice. 

But the ultimate hope Jesus points to is that there will be a time when God will eradicate all the evil that is so pernicious, and so well-disguised, so interwoven into the fabric of our being and our society, that we can’t touch it. At the harvest, when the time is ripe, the wheat and the weeds will show their fruit, and God will sort it all out for us. That doesn’t mean that the bad will get what’s coming to them. It means that all the forces and causes that contribute to suffering and pain and brokenness – in us and in the world – will be eliminated so that all that is good and life-giving – in us and in the world – can be gathered together in joyful abundance. 

Our work in the meantime is to listen to God and wait. To live in that holy and purposeful ambiguity, knowing that wheat and weeds, good and evil, can be almost indistinguishable sometimes. And to await that final harvest with hope. 

To God be all glory forever and ever. Amen.