When the church solidified what was in the Bible, they included 4 accounts of Jesus’ life. The four gospels had some similar stories and some widely divergent ones. But the church leaders were loathe to choose only one, recognizing that each had something important to say. I think they hoped that the legacy they would leave to us was a larger picture of the truth without getting bogged down in the exact details.
Each of the gospel writers wrote in a different time and to a different audience. Mark was first, about 40 years after Jesus’ death, with a concise summary of Jesus’ life. Luke and Matthew came about 15 years later, Luke writing to the burgeoning gentile community and Matthew writing to the Jewish Christians. John was another 5-10 years later, writing to a group that valued wisdom poetry and in a time when Judaism and Christianity were going their separate ways, with a lot of hard feelings on both sides.
And so today’s story comes from Matthew, writing to a Jewish Christian audience. He records lots of parables from Jesus, first telling the parable and then after an event interlude, offering an interpretation of that parable. Most scholars agree that while the parables originate with Jesus, the interpretations of those parables are probably more Matthew’s words than Jesus’ words.
Today’s reading follows that style. Jesus tells the parable of a farmer who sowed a field with wheat. But while everyone is asleep, an enemy comes along and sows weeds into the field. When the plants start to come up, the workers notice and question the farmer about what he planted. He indicates that his seed was good, but that an enemy must have sowed the weeds. When the workers offer to pull up the weeds, he tells them not to, indicating that this may hurt the wheat, and letting them know that at the harvest, weeds and wheat can be separated.
The disciples ask for some explanation of this parable, and Matthew says that Jesus tells them the farmer is the Son of God, the wheat are the children of God, and the one who sows the weeds is the devil.
As a gardener, this parable from Jesus resonates with me. Since I have limited gardening space, I sow in plots instead of in rows. Some seeds can be planted ahead of time in my greenhouse, but some need to be sowed directly into the garden. As the first plants poke through the soil, I get very excited, witnessing the germination of my crop. I’ve learned, though, that it’s sometimes hard to tell plants apart until they grow a few inches and get some leaves. My peas are easy to distinguish, but I have some weeds that look a lot like snapdragons and pansies and cosmos. I often need to wait for weeks of growth before I can do my weeding confidently. My other problem is with the roots. I have some particularly insidious crab grass that likes to grow up right at the base of my flowers. I find it frequently growing up around my pansies about a week after I transplant them outside. If I try to pull it up too soon, I inevitably pull up my pansies as well, since the roots of the crab grass and the roots of the pansies are intertwined. In order to weed, I have to exercise patience. I need to wait until the pansy roots are more established, and then I need to weed carefully, pulling up only the grass, often while holding the pansy in place. Even then, I have been known to pull up a happily growing pansy in my attempt.
Matthew’s interpretation of the parable comes in response to the concerns of the readers of his day. They are living a full generation after the death of Jesus, and their world is not what they thought it would be. As they looked around, they asked, “we thought Jesus lived, died, was resurrected, and brought about the kingdom of God. If this is true, why do I see so many weeds growing around me? Should it just all be wheat now? Where did the weeds come from?” In Jesus’ parable, Matthew sees an answer for them. “All of this is true,” he says, “you are faithful children of God, sowed by God. The field is good, but the devil also sowed seed. The weeds you see are a result of that. Be patient. When the end of time comes, God will separate the weeds from the wheat. For now, though, there’s not a lot you can do about it.”
We probably ask similar questions in our day. Like, why does God allow evil? Why do innocent people suffer? Why hasn’t God intervened more? Have you seen the people around me? There are weeds everywhere I look!
The questions bring me back to my garden. My front yard has a steep slope at the sidewalk. So we dug up half of it, putting in a two-tier retaining wall and filling it in with dirt so we have two large garden areas and no slope to mow. Our original plan was to do the other side, but after spending a week digging troughs, hauling stone and bricks and then hauling dirt from the back of the house to the front, Martha and I have decided that the other half of the lawn would look great naturalized with flowers! So we’ve been walking around our neighborhood peering at other people’s plant choices in naturalized yards. As we find flowers we like, we’re writing down the names of the ones we know and taking pictures of the ones we don’t to be identified by our master gardener friend. But we’ve also been noting road ditches as we drive, and the wild meadows and fields in the parks where we walk the dogs. I think our slope will end up being a mixture of cultured flowers and wild flowers. It will contain both wheat and weeds.
The line between wheat and weed is not as clear as Matthew makes it out to be. I think bird’s-foot trefoil is technically a weed, but I love its bright yellow flower, and I think of it as wheat. My mother’s neighbor with the yappy dog and inconsiderate habits keeps a close eye on her, and would investigate immediately if she failed to bring in her paper in the morning. The girls on my block who greet me each day and love stopping to pet the dogs were left in charge of the cats, but went away for the weekend, leaving them without food or water.
Psychologist Carl Jung theorized about our shadow sides. Essentially, he said that we each have a shadow side, a place where we dump our weeds. But no one ever takes the garbage out, and our weeds are left to fester and smell, affecting our wheat. He encouraged us to deal with our weeds. Acknowledge their presence and then integrate them into the field so that the entire field might be transformed into something more whole.
In general, I think the world is more like Jesus’ parable and less like the way Matthew interpreted it. It really isn’t so simple, and it isn’t simple for the very reasons Jesus indicates in the parable. Below the surface, the roots are all tangled together. Weeds can look like wheat, and wheat can turn out to be weeds. What I see as weed, you see as wheat. In the end, we don’t know. And so the field grows up, wheat and weed together. And rather than trying to figure it out ourselves, Jesus encourages us to leave the sorting to God.
This world, created by God is complicated. It is a world not so clearly defined by weeds and wheat. As we look around at our neighbors, identifying them as weeds that stand in the way of the kingdom of God, I invite us to look more closely. Look at the people whose roots are tangled with ours. You may we called upon to weed where it seems necessary, but try to leave the sorting to God. May all of us be made into a whole, transforming our weed-like qualities into things that grow and bear fruit. Amen.