Don't get lost in the weeds.

Did you ever wonder what is wrong with people? I don’t mean people who disagree with you or do stupid things or people who have a bad day. There are people out there who just wreak havoc in our world, and that happens within the Church as well.

This is the second of 8 parables in Matthew chapter 13 about the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven. It deals with the very hard and often discouraging fact that people don’t seem to get it. Worse, Jesus indicates that we’ve got “children of the evil one” around us! The image Jesus uses is striking.

Here is a picture of Bearded Darnel or lolium temulentum. 

It is not wheat.  Worse, its seeds are poisonous.  It is very common in Palestine and is almost certainly the weed referenced in this parable.

It is a rather difficult weed because when it grows with wheat it entangles its roots with the wheat and the plants are virtually indistinguishable when young. 

When the plants are mature, they are easy to distinguish because the heads of wheat are heavy and cause the plant to sag.  The Bearded Darnel’s seed is light and the plant stands straight up at maturity.

So, at the time of the harvest, it becomes rather simple to tear away the weeds and gather the wheat.  The good plant is obviously good and the weed stands out like a sore thumb.

That helps us to understand Christ’s analogy.  Any of us who garden identify weeds and pull them.  But these weeds cannot be pulled without destroying the crop.

How can we possibly know if a person is wheat or weed?  We cannot.  People can appear fine on the surface and have deep darkness in their lives.  Other people can be a total mess, yet they are just a prayerful plea of repentance away from accepting Jesus and Jesus changing their lives for all eternity.  When does that happen?  It is different for everyone.  We never know.  We can’t know when seeds planted today or years ago may emerge.

I’ll give you two examples.

A man was raised by a Christian mother and a Pagan father.  He spurned both of their religions and got all caught up in a weird cult. He lived with a mistress for 17 years and never married her even after having a son with her.  Worse, he was training and focused on a career in politics. In his mid-30’s, after decades of his mother’s fervent prayer, Christ got hold of him. He was St. Augustine of Hippo, perhaps the greatest mind the church has known since the Apostles themselves spread the faith.

Another man was raised in a Christian household, but after his mother died when he was just 11, his father sent him away to a boarding school. The school was miserable and cruel. He wondered how God could allow all of that to happen to him. He lost his faith and became an avowed atheist.  He became a soldier and went to war. While he wasn’t wounded, losing many of his closest friends in that war deepened his cynicism about the very idea of God.  He also had a very sharp mind and became a highly successful and renowned university professor. 

He fell in with a group of his peers who persisted for years in explaining the Christian faith to him in a way that eventually touched him. In his mid-30’s, they convinced him of the idea of God. A few days later, while driving to the zoo, Christ got hold of him. I’m speaking of C.S. Lewis, who was the most influential Christian writer of the 20th century. If you have not read Mere Christianity, you really should, along with The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters and The Problem of Pain.

Those are two famous examples, and there are others like St. Paul himself, who hunted and murdered Christians until Christ got hold of him or John Newton who was a slave trader until Christ got hold of him, driving him to write Amazing Grace.

These are notable examples, but this happens all over the world, every day.  Most often when we hear a Christian witness, it will have that theme of “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.” We rejoice all the more when a desperate, apparently lost soul is saved by the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

And so Christ cautions us as his servants to not busy ourselves with trying to tear out what we think might be weeds.  That’s very frustrating, especially when we feel very confident in our judgments. But we can’t ever know the state of someone’s heart or what will happen until they mature and the seeds bear fruit. But even then it will be God’s angels that will do the sorting, not us.

Focusing on the weeds causes damage to the crop and to ourselves. It’s frustrating, which leads to anger, which produces all the wrong sorts of fruit in us: resentment, envy, hardness of heart.  We see so much going wrong around us all the time that the invitation to those sorts of thoughts and feelings is constant. Focusing on the weeds around us causes weeds to grow in our own hearts. It’s really a matter of trusting God and His judgment.

Our call not to be the judge does not mean suspending all judgment. It does mean keeping that primary focus on Christ, seeing with his eyes.

It’s that long view on this and every other trial we face that drives Paul’s famous confidence, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.”

Being who we pray and proclaim to be means letting go of the stresses of worry.

And note what Jesus said toward the end of his explanation of the parable.  He said the Son of Man – Jesus himself – would send his angels to remove every CAUSE of evil and the evildoers.  Every CAUSE of evil.  What does that mean for your heart? Can you trust him on that point? If you do, your heart will be a lot healthier.  Your blood pressure will drop. Your mood will brighten. And the Kingdom will grow in you.

AMEN!