Weeds

Jesus told a parable about the coexistence of wheat and weeds (Matt. 13:24-30). But can we agree that there are such things as weeds in the world?

Just try persuading almost anyone that there are weeds in the form of real evils taking shape in real people. We are a society intoxicated with the idea of how nice and fundamentally worthy we all are, really, down deep. It shows up in our humor: I have a cartoon that shows a cleric at tea with a matronly lady, saying solemnly, "Oh, I'm still op posed to sin I'm just no longer sure what qualifies."

It shows in our hymns and songs. Some hymnals even alter the familiar "Amazing grace! how sweet the sound, That saved a wretch like me!" to "Amazing grace! How sweet the sound, That saved and strengthened me!"

It shows up in our anxious unwillingness, in a postmodern age, to assert with any conviction the possibility that someone's deeply felt beliefs can be culpably wrong, that cultural practices (especially our own) can be pernicious, that "speaking in my own voice" does not in itself guarantee that I have spoken either truly or thoughtfully. We don't want to call weeds, weeds perhaps because we can't bear to admit how utterly helpless we are in doing anything about them. Maybe we can attribute what we see, to bad environment. Or immaturity. Or even genetics. But surely our weeds are not deep-down, humanly irremediable, badness or wrongness.

There are weeds out there. We admit it every time we pass a moral judgment on the murderous behavior of the opposing sides in Kosovo, or on the brutality of Hutus and Tutsis, or on the encounters of Israelis and Palestinians, or when it comes to interracial tension. We assume it every time we say that our neighbor shouldn't have dumped the trash in our yard, or that that fellow in the supermarket shouldn't have pushed ahead of us in line. These things are wrong. We assert it indignantly and with assurance. After all, it's obvious, as soon as we put aside our high-flown philosophies and think honestly in practical terms: there are weeds out there.

They don't belong, and we don't quite know how they got there. It happened in the dark, when we were sleeping when there was not even a suggestion that we should have been watching or could have done something about it. An enemy came and scattered weed seeds, the story says. The source of the trouble is hidden, mysterious. But it doesn't come simply by "nature" or by accident. No, the owner of the field sowed only good seed. Then an enemy the Devil came, as the snake in the first garden came. That's about all we know about the origin of evil. The thought of its having a malevolent spiritual source makes us uneasy: the idea seems so primitive. But we know the evil is there. And we know it's dangerous.

Antoine de Saint Exupery wrote about the danger in his famous story about the Little Prince, on whose planet both good and evil seeds lived and pushed timid, inoffensive sprigs toward the sun. He says, "If it is a question of a radish or a rose sprout, one can let it grow as it wishes. But if it is a question of a bad plant, it is necessary to pull up the plant at once, as soon as one can recognize it. Oh, there were terrible seeds on the planet of the little prince... baobab seeds. The soul of the planet was infested with them."¹ It was said that if one tackles a baobab too late, one can never get rid of it. It encumbers the whole planet. It perforates it with its roots. And if the planet is too small, and the baobabs are too numerous, they burst it open.

Obviously, then, one must attend carefully to digging up the baobabs be fore the planet is ruined and nothing can be done. Get them while they're little, before they become mighty trees. This is the same conclusion the servants in the parable reached: they asked their master if they shouldn't go and gather in the weeds posthaste.

Let them grow

But the master said No. No; don't pull them up. Let them grow grow, mind you; get still bigger! No indication that things will get better! Let them grow until the time of the harvest. Not a word is said in the parable about the risk of their pushing out the wheat. No mention of the bumper crop of weed seeds they were bound to produce. Just, let them grow. They'll be sorted out later. One doubts that myriad other victims of injustice today would be much reassured by a story that seems to invite God's people to join with Him in letting the weeds grow. They are not to close their eyes. They are not to deny that the weeds are there, you under stand, but they are just to let them grow. So what is going on here?

First of all, a couple of cautions: re member that parables are not trying to say everything that can be said about an issue; rather, they are making a sharp point. And other parts of Scripture the prophets, in their fierce denunciations of sin; Paul, in his firm steps taken to maintain purity in the church would scarcely lead us to the conclusion that we should never confront evil directly. Jesus Himself drove money changers out of the temple. This parable is not the Bible's only word on dealing with evil.

And then, remember that the same word is not equally helpful for everyone: this parable is not primarily for the per son who is in danger of doing too little about the wrong in the world. It is more for those in danger of excessive zeal, for people tempted to crusades and witch hunts or even to the establishment of Utopian communities free of all contamination; it is for ones too little aware of the evil in their own hearts, too little tolerant of that mysterious mixture of good and evil within all people and too quick to divide them neatly into wheat and tares before the time. Oh yes, at the end there will be only wheat or tares, sheep or goats; no hybrids, no tones of gray, no great undifferentiated mass of fruitless shoots with good intentions; no cause for doubt in the minds of reaping angels. We become more and more what we are, until in the end there will be no mistake. But in the meantime, we are reminded of the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: "The universal dividing line between good and evil runs not between countries, not between nations, not between parties, not between classes, not between good and bad [people].... It divides the heart of every [human being] ."² There's weediness inside us, not just out there.

In the end, not even our favorite weeds, the ones that put out some pretty-looking blooms from time to time, will be spared the fire. But in the meantime they are all mixed up together. The trouble is that in trying to root out the weeds, you are all too likely to do more harm than good. Only God's own angels are capable of making a proper separation, and that separation comes only at the end.

Tares from the wheat

Really? What kind of gardener can't tell a weed from a good plant? Well, unfortunately, lots of gardeners can't. On the planet of the Little Prince, the trouble was that the dangerous baobab trees looked very much like rose bushes when they were small. And that's the way it was with the darnel, the weeds that grew in wheat fields in Jesus' day. By the time the darnel was mature you could tell, all right. But when the wheat and weeds were young, they were very hard to distinguish from one another.

Remember that it's the devil's whole nature to deceive us, to masquerade as an angel of light. Appearances cannot be relied upon. For instance, most of us are drawn to people who are bright and friendly, who praise us and flatter us and make us feel good about ourselves and the world; while we may be put off by those who are more reserved, more sparing in their compliments, less cheerful in their outlook. But which will be more likely to stick by us in a pinch? We can't be sure. It's not certain before the test comes. We're often not even certain within ourselves about whether our sensitive nature will finally reveal itself in nobility or in narcissistic peevishness, whether our touch of stubbornness will mature into dedication and courage or into mere selfish willfulness. The shoots of both look a lot alike when they're young.

We can't tell before the time, and when the time comes we can be fairly sure. The roots of the good and the evil are so intertwined that you cannot pull up one without pulling up the other. That's what happened with the darnel and the wheat. Worse yet, the roots of the darnel were stronger than those of the wheat, increasing the damage done by pulling it up.

It is similar at the individual level. You may be absolutely honest and dependable, but you may also tend to be harsh and uncompromising. You may value kindness above all else, but will you therefore be wishy-washy on an important issue so as not to offend any one? You may be meticulous about details, but can you see the big picture and keep details in proportion? You may be a creative genius consumed by your work, but perhaps other people will just have to take a back seat. Just try to root out the weeds without destroying the wheat in such cases!

Go yet deeper, to the level of motives. Time after time over the past many years, someone invariably a sincere, honest person has come to my office deeply troubled about pursuing some worthy goal or interest, not because of lack of ability or resources, but because he or she could discern some selfish motives entering in. In the particular cases to which I have listened, I have almost always ended up by remarking that of course the person has impure motives. I, for one, have never in my life seen a completely pure motive, and I never expect to. If we waited around for perfectly pure motives, we would never do anything at all. It's along those lines that I understand Martin Luther's of ten quoted and more often misapplied advice to sin boldly³ : he recognized that our natures are so compromised by sin that we cannot act at all without sinning; but if we trust in God's grace, we will not be completely paralyzed but will act as best we can. Please note that I am not hereby affirming just any and every motive for pursuing a basically legitimate activity. If you wanted to be a doctor because you were inordinately attracted to blood, I'd suggest that you seek help. I'm just saying that we deceive ourselves if we think we can be wholly selfless, wholly humble, or wholly any good thing.

You can't get around the entanglement of the roots by using pesticides, either. We have been increasingly chastened as we discover what we should have known: poison is poison, and it will get us sooner or later. It gets in the groundwater. It leaves residues on our fruits and vegetables. It creates genetic mutations and other problems we don't discover for years. It really is hard to eliminate the weeds at the beginning, before they have grown up.

Pursue the good

But suppose we found exactly the right chemical, a truly harmless one. Or suppose we had a vast crew of incredibly competent experts, who did nothing day or night but pull weeds, never made a mistake, and had a magic tool to disentangle the roots of weeds and wheat, leaving the wheat undisturbed. And let us further suppose that by some special dispensation, this constant focus on weeds did not turn this crew into the very image of that which they were pursuing, as all too generally happens. Then could we perhaps let them go at it and relax at last? No, not really. For there would still be no harvest. Why? Because wheat has to be watered and cultivated and fertilized or it will die. You can't just ignore it. Giving all your attention to the weeds guarantees disaster. The idea is similar to that of another of Jesus' stories when He spoke of an unclean spirit going out of a person. When the spirit returned and found the house swept clean but empty, the spirit returned with seven more spirits more evil than itself, and the last state of the person was worse than the first (Matt. 12:43-45).

Consider the case of a relative of mine, a very bright young man who has had a good deal of difficulty focusing in school. Because his parents are well able to provide for him the very best help available, he has undergone lots of testing and so forth. On one test a standard children's intelligence test it turned out that he performed exceptionally well on all the subsections except one, which he couldn't do at all. This particular deficit became the focus of concern on the part of his parents: maybe here, at last, was to be found the source of his academic difficulty. One day his mother was talking to me about this situation. She was astonished when I told her that I can't perform well on that subtest either. I never took that test, but I did administer it; and I always had to look up the answers for that particular section. Not only could I not do it, I couldn't even remember the answers when I'd seen them! But the point is, I never felt the need to give this obstacle a moment's thought; and as far as I can tell, it hasn't made any difference in my academic career. By contrast, in my relative's case, the difficulty has become a symbol of defeat, an explanation for failure, a barrier that has seemed insurmountable. How much better it would have been had this weed been left in peace, and the energy it had taken put into the pursuit of something that interested the boy.

Good takes nurture, attention, energy. Leave it alone while trying to root out everything that could interfere with growth, and it dies. One reason the enemy who sowed the weeds knew he could just leave after finishing his weed-sowing is that he thought the farmer would do all the rest of the damage as he tried to eradicate the weeds.

That's the bad news. There are real weeds out there. And all too often our best and most earnest efforts will only make things worse. If we human beings could ever succeed in getting rid of the weeds ourselves, Jesus would never have needed to die.

The weeds are not going to win

But there is good news, too which is what this parable, and also the surrounding parables, are really about. The weeds are not going to win. Even though they are going to be around till the very end, there is still going to be a harvest. Even though the good looks so feeble next to the evils and sorrows and pains and deficiencies of this life, it will not be overcome in the end.

Remember the parable of the four soils, when seed scattered hither and yon met all sorts of hazards, and yet the harvest was a huge one thirty, sixty, a hundred fold? (Matt. 13:8,23). Remember the parable of the mustard seed, in which a tiny seed grows into a mighty bush? (13:32). These are the stories on either side of my story that provide its context. Good God's own good, the good that is the fruit of God's own sowing is powerful beyond all conceiving, no matter how small and threatened it may appear right now. Against goodness itself even Satan has no ultimate power; he can do nothing but sow weeds. But God will not be defeated, and He will not allow His wheat to be lost.

That's why it's safe in our relationships, in our preaching, in our own lives to give the greatest attention not to rooting out evil but to nurturing the good (not a good of our own invention, but the good in all its fullness that God has made known to us in Christ). You will suddenly find more freedom to be kind, and to forgive others and your self, since you are not expecting perfection here and now. You will find more energy to pursue what you believe the Lord wants you to accomplish, since you will be less consumed with what might thwart you when you know that God will not be thwarted. You will be less baffled and stymied by failings and deficiencies and sins, since you know that it is not your job to get it all perfectly sorted out. That's a job for the Lord's own angels, not for mere mortals. You will find, in gazing more on Jesus and less on evil, that you will be come more like Jesus and less like His great enemy. You may even find strength and courage to get some small segment of the world to tilt a fraction of a degree in the right direction.

But if not if you don't see your part of the world budge much don't fret. Pursue what is good anyway. One day, the angels will come. The harvest will be greater than you could ever have imagined. And it will be utterly free of weeds.