Really
Text: Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
It is a blessing to have four Gospels.
The Gospels are not four views of the same event (not like the fabled elephant and the blind reviewers). None are first-hand accounts. It is unlikely that the authors of any of the Gospels ever met Jesus in person. Each Gospel is a retelling of a story well-known to a particular group of followers of Jesus.
They share common themes and some events, but each Gospel version has a particular purpose. Each writer writes for a different community of people in different times (as much as forty years separate the writing of Mark from that of John, for example) and in different circumstances. Each writer has a different agenda. So each interprets the story of Jesus differently.
You might have a favorite Gospel, and which one might vary over time, as both your intellectual understanding and faith change, and as your life changes. Each Gospel has a different flavor. Matthew—from which our reading comes today—seems to me to be the broccoli of Gospels. It is an acquired taste. Sometimes it is just what you want. But sometimes it is just too weird and bitter. Like today.
The parable we just heard appears only in Matthew. Matthew’s community existed late in the first century. Not a great time for Palestinian Jews and non-Roman gentiles. Lots of political and social pressures, and dangers for followers of Jesus, who in addition were trying to figure out just who they were (old Jews? new Jews? something besides Jews?). They were, it seems, a discouraged group whose problems were more than they could handle. And it also seems that one of those problems was internal: who could be part of the community? Who were welcome and who were dangerously disruptive? Which were the desired wheat, and which were the unwanted weeds? And not just weeds, but a specific kind of weed—darnel, a poisonous plant that until it matures looks just like wheat. So: both hard to identify and treacherous.
The allegorical interpretation that Matthew appends to this parable was no doubt a comfort to Matthew’s community. It assumes that there are good people and bad people, and the bad people were evilly placed among the good. It would explain a lot. But as always, it is risky to turn parables into allegories. Parables are more like poems than essays. They purposely evoke strange feelings in us.
Matthew wants to bring forward one interpretation of the parable, but Jesus is more gentle in the actual telling of the parable. In Matthew, Jesus’ explanation emphasizes the burning of the weeds, the weeping and gnashing of teeth at the end of time. (Matthew is the “gnashing of teeth” guy. The phrase appears seven times in all the New Testament; six of those times are in Matthew. Tells you about Matthew’s issues.)
But it seems that the point of the parable itself is not the burning, which appears there only as a small detail, but rather the restraint that the landowner orders. Do you want us to pull out the weeds, the servants ask. No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them, he answers. Let both of them grow together until the harvest. In a way, this parable is a caution about over-zealous weeders, of which there are aways many.
Matthew’s interpretation has as its foundation the notion that one can easily tell the good from the bad, that badness and goodness is something intrinsic and unchanging in them.
In a book by Wendell Berry—poet, practical theologian, and writer—in the book a character refers to himself as a “theoretical person.” Comments about weeds and wheat tend to turn real persons into theoretical persons. Theoretical people are characteristics and attributes rather than the complex individuals that we all are. “The homeless” are theoretical persons, unlike the real people who, for example, come share meals at Faith Kitchen. Real people have names and stories.
Theoretical people are the 99%, the 47%, and the 1%. They are the Palestinians and the Israelis. They are terrorists, combatants, troops. They are rednecks and immigrants, migrants and rich nerds buying up houses in San Francisco.
Theoretical people are “collateral damage,” a rightly-maligned phrase but one which is no worse than “casualties.” Missiles and drones target theoretical people.
Theoretical people are men in general, women in general, the Chinese, capitalists, The Tea Party, Islamists.
Meeting someone, knowing them, hearing their story, turns them from theoretical people into real people. Civil rights and gay rights both developed momentum when through various channels people began to know a real person of a different (from them) race or different sexual orientation instead of theoretical people who resided only in their imagination, if at all. The New England Synod speaks out for the humanitarian rights of modern Palestinians because its sister synod is the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Jordan and the Holy Land, and people from New England have talked to and visited and shared meals with people in Bethlehem and Hebron.
The New York Times is publishing stories and pictures about those killed in the shot-down Malaysian plane, trying to change them from victims—theoretical people—into real people. It works. Take a look. It is heart-breaking.
But no one does the same for the soldiers in the Ukraine, or the victims in Gaza. How would things change if they did?
Theoretical people, we are confident, can be distinguished from wheat, and weeded out. But real people—like us—are more complicated. It is hard sometimes to distinguish the weeds from the wheat. Worse, real people change from weeds to wheat and back again all the time. Or are a mix of weeds and wheat. Saints and sinners.
That does not mean that no evil happens. Jesus in the parable acknowledges the existence of evil. Weeds exist. But it does mean that we cannot so confidently identify it in others and so easily eradicate it. We cannot always tell the poisonous darnel from the nourishing grain. Being convinced that we ourselves are the wheat is not sufficient. In the parable, the wheat is not the judge.
Such uncertainty argues for extra caution. Benjamin Franklin’s rule of justice—“it is better one hundred guilty persons should escape than that one innocent person should suffer”—is a modern equivalent of the landowner’s ruling of restraint. But I’m not sure whether in our fear we believe that anymore. We are more willing to let innocent blood be shed in order to find and punish the wicked. We are more willing to tear up some wheat to eliminate a weed.
For all that it looks ahead to the coming kingdom of God—which it does—Christianity is a religion of the moment, the present, and the physical. Jesus was unusually unwilling to treat people as theoretical. In his intimate conversations with and willingness to touch unclean people, to heal people when they asked, to eat with tax collectors and sinners, he acted as if he knew each person, treating them as real people. Throughout his ministry, Jesus was surprisingly unconcerned with the theory of things, dealing with suffering and hopes of the people in front of him, purposely oblivious to the person’s character and history. It is not an accident that forgiveness is central to Christianity. Christians are not allowed to see people as theoretical.
This parable is about, Jesus says, the kingdom of God. Jesus does not call us to be the judges. The kingdom of God may be compared, he says, to this way of being: be humble, be patient, be vigilant—not about the danger of the weeds, but about the danger of pulling them up.
