Weedy Wheat
Yesterday morning I preached a sermon based on Matthew 13:24–30,36–43. Go ahead. Give it a read.
I had picked the text several weeks ago when I was really busy with something else and once I’d finally gotten around to reading the sermon text during our family staycation I thought to myself…
Great. What have I done? This parable is…terrible. Terrible parable.
Initially I was not a fan because, c’mon, I prefer when Jesus talks about children, and love and peace — not the sons of the evil one, judgement, and people being thrown into fiery furnaces with weeping and gnashing teeth.
So I resisted it.
That’s when it clicked.
Over the years I’ve learned something that many others already know: it’s important to pay attention to what we find ourselves resisting. If there is something I’m resisting, I can almost guarantee that God is calling me into that thing. It’s true for you too. If there is something you’re resisting, you can almost always guarantee that God is calling you into that thing.
Why would God do this…to smash us? To hurt us? To annoy us? Nope. God does it to bring us to a place of deeper wholeness. To transform us. Why does God do it this way? I have no idea. But as the poet Robert Frost wrote:
The best way out is always through.
Who’s Down with KoG?
Matthew’s gospel is divided into two main parts and the theme that unites them both is the Kingdom of God.
Matthew (who was a Jew) was writing to the members of his own Jewish community of Christ followers. This is why Matthew is traditionally known to be the Jewish Gospel.
More than the other gospels, Matthew is interested in things that are distinctively Jewish — thing like…you guessed it…the Kingdom of God. And because his readers are Jewish AND biblically literate, he doesn’t need to spend much time (if any) explaining this distinctively Jewish stuff. Why waste the ink? They knew all about it.
Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Look! Here he comes! Our king! Fulfilling prophecy — riding a donkey — He is going to pull out his sword, defeat the Roman Empire, hop on his throne, and establish his Kingdom on earth. Right? Well — not exactly.
In the big story of God’s people (think Old Testament, a.k.a. Hebrew Scriptures) the Kingdom of God was a big deal. They had been waiting for it. Eagerly.
Back to the two parts of Matthew’s gospel.
In Part One Matthew establishes that the Kingdom of God has now come into the world through the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus brought a NEW style of kingship to the field. Suffering love and service. And this kingdom Jesus brought stands in aggressive opposition to another kingdom of this world, the Kingdom of Satan (the evil and turmoil and brokenness that is known and present in the world). Two kingdoms in conflict. By the end of part one, just about everyone wants Jesus dead.
In Part Two, which begins in the middle of chapter 12, the conflict between these two kingdoms develops, the plot thickens. The disciples start to stand out even more like sore thumbs. Jesus’ teaching and parables take a more hostile turn. They’re more shocking. More upsetting. More outrageous. (Maybe not always to us — but remember, we’re not 1st century Jewish folks.)
It’s not long before the opposition succeeds in killing Jesus. But in a crazy divine twist of fate, Jesus’ death and resurrection represents [Surprise!] the defeat of kingdom of Satan. Conflict resolved. One Kingdom.
I mention all of this because the parable we’re considering comes early on in Part Two of Matthew’s gospel — the development of the conflict between the two kingdoms. We are in the conflict building, tension building unit of Jesus’ teaching curriculum.
Jesus never said what the Kingdom of God IS because how do you really describe something that is transcendent? How do you explain something that is beyond what can be conceived? Understanding the Kingdom of God isn’t a purely intellectual endeavor. This is why when Jesus was gonna teach on the subject he doesn’t ever say, “The Kingdom of God is…” He always said, “The Kingdom of God is like…”
In this parable there are two different sowings — or two different plantings. The Kingdom of God is like a man that planted good wheat seeds in his field and that night while everyone was sleeping an enemy came over and planted weeds among the wheat. What’s more crazy is that after he found out about it, the man allowed the wheat and the weeds to mature together, in the same field. Who let’s weeds mature?!? And the question Jesus is asking is,
What kind of seed are you?
The Parable Squirm
Jesus often, if not primarily taught in parables. Parables are neither allegories nor illustrations. I love a good allegory. Allegories can have many points, they can be saying many things — parables only have one point. And while parables only have one point, they can’t be reduced to the “point.” Otherwise they’d just be illustrations.
I also love a good illustration. But parables are not illustrations. An illustration is a means of explaining something that could be understood in any number of different ways. So while parables have only one point, they also have no point that can’t be communicated without using the entire parable itself! Are you with me? Let me use an illustration.
Irreducible complexity is a fancy science phrase that describes a single system made up of several interacting parts and if you were to remove any one part, the entire system would cease to function. In a way, parables are irreducibly complex.
And even though they may only have one point, they can also generate new and deeper meaning in different places and at different times. They’re like paintings, musical compositions, or a poem. Not Rorschach ink blots. They are beautiful. And complicated.
There is a mystery about parables. But remember, in the spiritual sense, mystery isn’t something we can’t or won’t understand, mystery is something we are always understanding. God is Mystery. We can’t get Mystery, but Mystery can get us. Its something we are immersed in. Something we don’t see but allows us to see. Like light.
We can’t actually see light, light allows us to see what is around us.
Parables don’t mean anything, parables give meaning to things.
Parables don’t command us what to think. They invite us in. To hear a call and then to respond to that call.
Jesus’ parables had a squirm factor. The parable squirm. They were intended to make folks uncomfortable. It’s incredible that then and now, Jesus’ parables bothered people. They disturb our assumptions, our frameworks, the worlds we’ve created. This explains why we want to understand them so badly — because they have attacked the way we see and think about stuff.
Field of Dreams
The man sowed good seed, the enemy sowed weeds and there they are, together. Sharing the same dirt. It’s true in the world. And of course it’s true in the church. Yep. The church can be a dangerous place too. One moment the church can be healthy, united, and courageous — and they next moment pitiful, faithless, and stale.
It’s a respectable question with a surprising answer…
Worker: Should we get rid of the weeds?
Owner: No.
Across the board, God allows the good and bad to commingle! We’re all mixed in together. As one author puts it, “Where did the weeds come from? Is a perennial human cry.” This truth is why Richard Rohr has called God, the Great Allower. For reasons we can’t always explain, everything belongs.
Does this mean we ignore injustice in the world? Turn a blind eye to the violence in our communities? Tolerate the ways that people are still being exploited because of the color of their skin or the country they’re from? NO!
The truth is that even our best effort to get rid of the weeds could end up doing more harm than good.
But there is hope.
We’re promised that the weeds will not last. Evil is not here to stay because it cannot survive in the True Light. As my good friend likes to say,
If it ain’t right, it ain’t finished.
The world we live in is tough. Broken. Hurting. Not perfect. Let’s be honest, there’s a little thistle in each one of us. There might even be weed in some of you. And whether we’re talking about the world, the church, or in our own deep and secret places, there is nothing WE can do about the weeds — then again, I guess doing something about the weeds has never been our job anyway.
We’re so quick to position ourselves against. Against ideas. Against people. Against____________. It’s easy to be against stuff. And it can be exciting. But Jesus wants us all to to be unified FOR something.
What kind of seed are you?
Several years ago I listened to a lecture by Dr. Laura Smit who is a theology professor at Calvin College. She was on the subject of Reformed Theology but what she said was also an expression of what the Kingdom of God is like. She said,
As reformed people, we don’t start our theology by talking about our personal experience of salvation. We start by talking about this: Who is God? We recognize that God is infinitely beyond us. Sovereign. Dwelling in inaccessible light. That God is a consuming fire.
We recognize that while we are in time, God is beyond time. God made time. Where we are finite, God is infinite. Where we have needs and fears and vulnerabilities, God has no needs. God has only abundance. God has no vulnerabilities, only joy. Nothing we do in life can diminish God’s joy. We cannot make God less. This is very good news! But it’s also scary. Because on our own we have no way to get to God. The gap between us is enormous.
We are made to know God. Made to glorify and enjoy God forever — to be in a relationship with him and we can’t do it. This is the great dilemma of the Old Testament and all of human life. We’re made for a God, [made for a Kingdom] we cannot reach on our own. And the great solution is Jesus Christ.
Jesus is our mediator [who has brought God’s Kingdom] and has come to be with us as a fully human person and also fully God. Jesus is the one who stands between. We don’t just say that 2000 years ago Jesus paid off our sin debt and now we can come freely to God. No — we say that even now, Jesus is our mediator. He has ascended and is at the right hand of the Father. He is our prophet, and priest, and KING, today.
And when we recognize that Jesus Christ is fully prophet, priest, and king we get access to the power we need to do this work of mission, [to be good seeds in the field]. We get that power when the Holy Spirit irresistibly woos us into union with Christ, who escorts us safely into the presence the consuming fire of the Father. And there we find ourselves surrounded by the Triune Community of Love [with an all access pass] to the fullness of God’s joy.
Then [as citizens of God’s Kingdom, where Christ is King] we can do our work as the Body of Christ [we can be good seeds] not from a place of guilt, or fear, or burden — but from a place of joy and freedom. Because it is not being done by us or our power, but by Christ working through us. Jesus invites us to share in his identity as God’s beloved sons and daughters. We get to be mediators — extending the reign of God into the world.
This the reality of the Kingdom of God and what it means to live into that Kingdom. We get to go out and proclaim the Good News that the Kingdom of God is HERE.
It’s not for us to concern ourselves with who should be IN and who should be OUT. It’s not for us to judge and separate the true members of God’s community from the counterfeits. All of this is God’s business. Not mine, not yours, not anyone else’s. And anyone or any group who makes an effort in doing so, may not be saved themselves. Is there tension in that? You bet.
So I’m sorry if there isn’t a clear and concise takeaway here. Parables don’t command us what to think. They invite us in. To hear a call and then to respond to that call. The question is not urging us to answer with a confession — it’s urging us to answer with Kingdom action.
What kind of seed are you?
