Matthew 13:12-30, 36-43
When Angels Reap
Rev. Pam Hawkins
July 17, 2011

Audio - MP3

The other morning before the heat of the day kicked in, I went out to our patio garden to enjoy my morning coffee and some alone time with God. Some of my best conversations with God happen in that garden, especially when I am elbow deep in dirt with a trowel in one hand and a tender new plant in the other. I’m fairly sure that it took a few months before our dear neighbor, Katie, stopped worrying about me talking out loud with no one else around.

But that morning, it was too early for Katie to be up, and I was looking forward to being in my garden in some silent, “still” prayer with God. For a few minutes, all went well. In the early morning light, my eyes skimmed from pink begonias to the bright purple butterfly bush to fuchsia impatiens to scarlet-red coneflowers. It was peaceful and calming just like I’d imagined, . . . until out of the corner of my eye I spotted a weed. Not a huge one, but a weed nonetheless, right where the concrete and brick edge butts up against the soil.

I tried to ignore it. I was not there to work, but to spend quiet prayer time with God. Yet, the weed kept bothering me, and I asked myself, “What harm can it do to get up and pull out that one little, bothersome weed?” So that’s what I did. And as I was standing up with my fresh catch dangling from my fingers, I spotted another weed, so I did the same thing. And before I knew it, the time I had set aside for prayer was gone, and although there were lots of little weed carcasses lying on the patio, I had sacrificed my plans to be still with God.

Weeds can do that to a person. To a farmer or gardener or homeowner, weeds can light a fire under our attention, and if not removed or destroyed, weeds can kill, infest, overrun, or at the very least, taint, the purpose we plan for a little square of earth. Sometimes we just cannot tolerate the presence of weeds when they show up where we live. I’ve seen a few of you tugging at the weeds that show up in our yard here at Belmont. You know what I mean.

So it is no wonder that Jesus gets our attention with this Parable of the Weeds that we only find in Matthew’s Gospel. Of course the weeds in Jesus’ parable are far more problematic than the weeds in my little garden. Those listening to him knew he was talking about “tares,” what one biblical scholar calls “a devil of a weed.” Another name is the bearded darnel, not much better, and the way a bearded darnel stays alive is to surround the roots of good plants, suck up most of the available nutrients and water, and then get so entangled with the good plant’s roots that it is impossible to pull up the “tares” without destroying the other plants’ way of life. Trickier still, is that until a tare grows enough to produce seeds, it looks just like wheat – and the Tare seeds are literally poisonous. There’s nothing good to say about this weed.

No one in Jesus day would risk letting tare seeds fall into their fields and just leave them there if they could do something about it. And tares were not just bothersome or unsightly for the people of Jesus day, in wheat fields they were devastating. So to let tares grow could mean having no wheat to feed or support your family. In other words, these weeds threatened the personal and economic health of the community.

But in case we missed it, the weeds of our parable don’t just fall into the field. Their seeds don’t blow in with the wind or fall from the wing of a bird or get accidentally brushed off of a neighbor’s robe. No, these weeds are planted on purpose, in secret, at night, while everybody is asleep. Everybody except the enemy who’s doing the planting.

Of course, all along the ones listening to Jesus know he’s not really talking about weeds, but rather about their faith communities and the world in which they were trying to live and about how hard it is to live in the messiness of knowing who is good and who is bad; who is in and who is out; who is friend and who is enemy. At time this parable was being told, there were all kinds of enemies trying to do harm to the people who followed Jesus. Enemies who wanted to sneak in however they could to infiltrate and destroy the way of life of a community just trying to care for its people, sustain its practices, and make its way in the world.

“Citizens, beware! Our good way of life is under attack and surely we won’t stand by and do nothing. Let’s rid ourselves of the evil our enemy has brought into our field.”

“Do you want us to go and get started?” they ask the landowner, who of course, they know will say “yes.” Any good leader in the same situation would. It’s not that complicated, and certainly not uncommon that when evil threatens what a community cherishes, the human family will try to protect and care for what God has provided. God knows, we try. God knows that our human history is ripe with genuine, difficult, compassionate, sacrificial, struggle-laden efforts to identify, confront, and end oppressive, violent, and cruel acts against creation. And Jesus does not say that evil does not matter to God. Quite the contrary for anyone with ears to listen!

But God knows, also, in our human condition, “yes” has too often led to weeping and gnashing of teeth on earth as it is in heaven because someone wanted to control the outcome that is not ours to control.
•    In Bosnia and Rwanda and Palestine, in our own country’s history and that of every land.
•    In concentration camps where Jewish children were starved to the point of death.
•    On college campuses where gay teens are ridiculed to the point of suicide.
•    From mistaken identity on death row to racial profiling on city streets.
•    Where churches are burned, and zoning laws exclude, and mosque or synagogue windows are broken.

God knows the human struggle to identify good from evil. But according to the Parable of the Weeds, according to the message of Jesus, this is not our job as people of God.

It is not up to us to set up a committee or training or task force to identify and remove evil from the world. To reject evil, yes, to resist evil when we are confronted by its power, yes, and for this we are equipped by God’s grace. But not to identify evil on our terms and eradicate evil on our terms, according to Jesus.

And yet, here we are living in God’s world where evil, injustice, and oppression are real and not figments of our imagination. How do we to get our heads and hearts around what Jesus is teaching, instead of wanting to get our hands around “evil” that people keep causing and bringing into the world that God loves so much?  Where do we start?


What if we start over and imagine that everyone belongs to God?  

It’s not a small thing to ask, to really imagine that everyone belongs to God…
It means not being in charge of measuring faithfulness or beliefs or doubts.
It means resisting judging who is in and who is out.
It means trusting.
It means including.
It means looking for good and turning the other cheek and doing unto others as we want done to us and those we love.

But it does not mean being passive about evil. Passive is not a Jesus kind of word. Jesus does not say ignore evil, just that it is not our God-given job to try to do it in, to try to battle it on our own, and to try to control the outcome. God has awarded that harvesting contract to someone else, according to our reading today. And to us, well our life-assignment, if we decide to accept it, is to become rooted and grounded in the love of God wherever and with whomever we are planted, friends and enemies.

And who knows where that kind of rooting and growing will take us. It might take us into restorative justice working with victims of crimes and their perpetrators toward some level of mutual restoration, or it might take us into the Ulster Project, where Catholic and Protestant youth from Ireland spend time together learning to be friends instead of enemies. We might find ourselves studying and learning the model and testimony from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where perpetrators told the truth about the atrocities they committed during Apartheid and their vicitms heard the truth and then reconciliation had a chance to grow. Or, like here at Belmont, it just might take us into a conversation or a Bible study or a relationship with someone whose beliefs about God or scripture or grace or hope or church are completely different from our own, maybe even offensive, but we commit, together, to grow as members of the kingdom of heaven to which everyone belongs.

Friends, Jesus, by the grace of God, invites anyone to choose the way of good. And at the same time, Jesus is very clear, painfully clear, hard-to-hear clear, that God does not ignore cruelty and human suffering and human destruction of creation. There will be a harvest enforced by God and carried out by God’s chosen reapers – angels. Holy beings who see as God sees, knows what only God can know, and share God’s piercingly clear heart of discernment. And although that may not feel close enough or soon enough for us at times, God promises that if we commit ourselves to grow in love of God and neighbor and enemy, we will also grow in a peace that passes all human understanding.

So let us imagine, no, let us remember, that everyone belongs to God, you and I, friend and enemy, stranger and neighbor, and then let us each recall that our scripture text today reads, “Let both of them grow together.”  

Let the growing here begin, let it continue, and let the growing never end by the power of the Holy Spirit and under the watchful care of the angels of God.

Amen


1. Theodore Wardlaw, “Homeletical Perspective” on Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43, Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volume 3, Pentecost and Season After Pentecost 1, ed. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2011), 265.