“Let both grow together until the harvest.”

(Matthew 13:30)

 

People have always wrestled with the problem of what seemed to them to be evil in the world about them, and the connection, if any, between the absolute goodness of heaven and the evils and imperfections of earth.

It was this problem that Jesus was dealing with when He told the parable of the wheat and the weeds to His disciples. “The Kingdom of Heaven is like this,” He said. “A man planted good seed in his field. An enemy slipped into his field under cover of darkness and sowed the field with the seed of a poisonous weed. As the plants grew the man’s servants discovered the tragedy. They reported it to the owner. He simply said: ‘An enemy has done this.’ ‘Do you want us to go into the field,’ asked the servants, ‘and pull up the weeds?’ ‘No,’ said the owner, ‘leave them to grow together until harvest. To pull up the weeds now will destroy some of the wheat. At harvest time we will separate the two: burning the weeds and storing in barns the good grain.’”

This parable of Jesus is very valuable to His disciples in all ages because it helps His covenant community to deal with the perplexing problem of evil, telling us how to think and what to do based upon what God thinks and what God does about evil in the world.

First, this parable tells the Christian disciple how he must think and what he must believe about the mysterious presence of evil in the world. He must make up his mind to live with imperfections.

This parable meets the problem of evil head on. It doesn’t entirely explain the mystery, but it certainly doesn’t explain it away. It says that there are weeds in the field of this world. They are real and not imaginary. They are poisonous, too, not just immature, good grain.

Why are there weeds sown among the wheat in the field of this life? Jesus says simply: “An enemy hath done this.” An enemy of the Lord of the field — an enemy of people — an enemy of civilization. And let no one think there is any field free of the weeds the enemy has sown.

Nearly everyone looks eagerly for the perfect job. But it always escapes us. Perfect working conditions, adequate wages, fringe benefits to cover all unexpected contingencies, are just not to be had, though guaranteed by governments or unions. The enemy has sown the field of man’s work with weeds.

Even the blissful field of what appeared to be a perfect marriage has been sown by the enemy with weeds. The idealistic young bride discovers she has not married after all the perfect husband she thought she had. The romantic young husband finds that the girl of his dreams, though altogether lovely in face and form, has got from somewhere (perhaps from his mother-in-law) some weeds of extravagance in spending and in criticism of his personality.

Even the church is a field where the enemy has done his mischief. In this institution which we call the body of Christ — both human and divine — imperfections are always cropping out. We are disappointed and disillusioned by the behavior of our fellow-members in the congregation. Sometimes they wrong us, or slight us, or disappoint us to the point of abject disillusionment.

Sometimes a preacher looks for a perfect congregation where he will be heeded and revered by all. But he never finds such a congregation. There are always those who misunderstand his message, misinterpret his motives, upset his plans. The congregation looks for a perfect pastor and preacher who will proclaim God’s word with clarity, shepherd the flock with thoughtful compassion, and live always in exemplary fashion. But they don’t find him. Their preacher is either dull in his sermons, careless or neglectful in his pastoral responsibilities, disappointing as a Christ-like example, or derelict in all departments. The field is sown with weeds.

“If we are shocked by the presence of evil in the midst of goodness, we are too tender for the struggle. If we hope to find a field without any weeds, we are too naďve for this world. But if we decide that, wherever we are and whatever we must do, we shall do the best we can with the resources available, we are on our way. Life is not always beautiful and it is hardly ever easy.

“In an annual charity baseball game between the Comedians and the Actors some years ago, Groucho Marx was made manager of the Comedians. He had Jack Benny lead off in the batting order. He said to him: ‘All right, Benny, get up there and hit a home run.’ Benny struck out. Whereupon Marx resigned, saying: ‘I can’t manage a team that won’t follow instructions.’ This is no more unreasonable than much of our reaction to life. We demand the impossible and want to resign when it is denied us.” (Gerald Kennedy — The Parables — p. 48)

But this parable is important not only because of the great help it affords the disciples of Christ in their thinking as we contend continuously with the vexing problem of evil in every phase of life. It is absolutely indispensable also as a guide to all members of Christ’s covenant community as we undertake responsible action in fighting against the evils of this world.

When the servants found the poisonous weeds growing alongside the good wheat in the field they came running to report the tragedy to their master and asked: “Shall we pull up the weeds?” This is the natural inclination of the children of light. Uproot and destroy the evil wherever you find it. Throw out the apostate. Purge the congregation of the unfaithful. (Cf. Donatists of North Africa, Pharisees, Essenes, etc.)

In the early days of the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church purged their community of God’s people by burning at the stake many who held to heretical doctrines.

Well, Jesus, in this parable says that the owner of Life’s Field commands his servants not to destroy utterly the weeds, but to leave them alone to grow along with the wheat until the harvest. The servants are not commanded to refuse to recognize the weeds as weeds. They are simply commanded not to utterly destroy them now — to wait until harvest time.

There seem to be at least two good reasons for this: First, since evil is everywhere and in everyone and redemption is the purpose of history, time must be allowed for that process everywhere and in every person. “Let them grow together until the harvest,” is the word of God to man, “lest premature plucking up destroy the good with the bad.”

It is important to root out sin, but more important that the sinner be redeemed, transformed, and saved. How would we like to be purged? We are all sinners. None is perfect. As we gaze in revulsion upon the most despicable people who seem most impossible to us, can we always say sincerely: “There go I, but for the grace of God?” Well, we ought to, for that is God’s truth about us all. (St. Paul — I and II Corinthians)

But there is a second reason we should not set out to exterminate the evil ones. If the first is because we ought not, lest we destroy the good with the evil, or even the evil which still has the possibility of redemption — then the second reason is that we mere men and women cannot exterminate evil. All social reformers come to this sad recognition soon or late. It is a part of the tragic impotence of people so bound up in the tangle of human sin and misery that we can never by human effort alone destroy evil. We cannot free ourselves from the plague of evil desires. The weeds are so deeply sown in our sub-conscious that we cannot even seriously want to destroy all evil. That is why Jesus keeps saying to us — “If your own powers were sufficient in this business of ridding the world of sin, then I would not have had to die for you. I, or someone else, could have just made a strong moral appeal to you.”

For us to make ultimate judgments, or to take into our hands the settling of ultimate accounts, is to get out of our place and play at being God. When Joseph’s brothers feared that he would seek a tardy vengeance upon them after their father Jacob’s death for all the evil they had done Joseph in his childhood, Joseph was horrified and said to them: “Am I in the place of God that I should do this thing?”

St. Paul warned Christians at this point, over and over, reminding them that God has said: “Vengeance belongs to me alone. I, and I alone, will recompense.”

What the Christian must then do in his responsible fight against evil is not only to refrain from plucking up and casting out prematurely, but to be patient and at pain and cost continue to sow the good seed.

In Bojer’s novel, The Great Hunger, a man in time of desperate famine sowed his enemy’s field with good seed so that his enemy might not die, but live, and he explained why he had done what he did by saying that he must in order that for him God might continue to exist.

Finally, this parable of the wheat and the weeds tells the covenant community not only how to think and act in dealing with the problem of evil, but also just how God thinks and acts. It is a revelation of the amazing patience of God, but also of the inevitable judgment of God. It is in perfect harmony with the oft repeated Biblical doctrine of judgment. John Bunyan’s, Pilgrim’s Progress, reminds us that one of the favorite scriptural metaphors of the Last Judgment is the harvest. And at harvest time, says Bunyan, men care only for fruit. “At that day men shall be judged according to their fruits. It will not then be said: ‘Did you believe?’ But were you doers or talkers only? The end of the world is compared to a harvest; and men at harvest regard nothing but fruit.”

The weeds shall be gathered for burning, but the good grain shall be stored safely.

One of the five questions put to people in the Presbyterian Church when they profess their faith and join the church runs like this: “Do you promise to serve Christ and His church by supporting and participating in its worship and work to the best of your ability?”

How are we keeping that promise? God is not going to pluck us out of the covenant community prematurely. The session of the church has enough of the spirit of this parable to refrain from easy ex-communication of the most careless and cantankerous of us. But what are we doing to ourselves and our families when we are so indifferent to the operation of the natural laws of spiritual growth? Can the field of human personality produce good grain when for us Sunday primarily is our day of pleasure rather than God’s day of worship, and our Bible study and daily prayers are a dim childhood memory, and the rigid discipline of personal moral standards have become a discarded superstition of a distant puritan day?

Who can ever forget, much less disprove, the solid logic, the Biblical profundity, and the secure anchoring in actual human experience of Dr. Clarke’s great sermon last Sunday on how Christian maturity comes — if come it does?

The growing season in the field of this world is producing fruit of some sort in every human life. But what kind of fruit? Guinevere, the Queen, in Idylls of the King, knew what kind of poisonous fruit her dissolute life had produced and why, as she spoke of —

“The somber close of that voluptuous day

Which wrought the ruin of my Lord and King.

Ye know me then, that wicked one who broke

The vast design and purpose of the king.

O shut me round with narrowing nunnery walls,

Meek maidens from the voices crying, ‘Shame.’”

There have been now for the last two decades a vast horde of writers, musicians, actors, speakers, preachers, philosophers, et al, who hail with praise “the new morality”. Breaking the shackles of Christian moral discipline, they have exulted in their new freedom and boasted of their greater honesty in spurning personal chastity to grasp social morality.

For myself, I cannot decide which is the more dishonest: to call it new or to call it morality. It is not new, but a dissoluteness as old as Sodom and Gomarrah. It is not morality, but immorality. It is not freedom, but the most debasing slavery.

A hundred years ago a young Frenchman named Guy Di Maupaussant wrote stories, largely autobiographical, in which he scoffed at Christian moral principals. What happened to him? He was finished at 43 and he spent the last year of his life in an asylum.

The Champions of the new lifestyles have scoffed at the traditional Christian ideal of personal chastity and invited our young people of today to stop being squares and get with it in loose pre-marital sex and new lower ethical and moral values.

Always, since the world began, people have been faced with weeds in their fields. But woe unto them who think they can pretend that the weeds are not different from wheat. Since the world began and to the end — God says they are different, and at harvest time they will be surely separated. Then shall the weeds be bundled for burning; and the good shall shine out like the sun in their Father’s Kingdom. He who has ears, let him hear.

 

CALL TO WORSHIP

“For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Let us worship God.”

INVOCATION

“O God, Thou God of all goodness and of all grace, who art worthy of a greater love than we can either give or understand; fill our hearts, we beseech Thee, with such love towards Thee that nothing may seem too hard for us to do or to suffer in obedience to Thy will; and grant that thus loving Thee, we may become daily more like unto Thee, and finally obtain the crown of life which Thou hast promised to those that love Thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who taught His disciples to pray —

ASSURANCE OF PARDON

“The mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting. I declare unto you, in the name of Jesus Christ we are forgiven. Amen.”

PRAYER OF DEDICATION

“O Lord, our Savior, who has warned us that Thou wilt require much of those to whom much is given; grant that we, whose lot is cast in so goodly a heritage, may strive together the more abundantly to extend to others what we so richly enjoy; and as we have entered into the labors of other men and women, so to labor that in their turn other people may enter into ours, to the fulfillment of Thy holy will, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

CALL TO WORSHIP

“As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.”

 

PASTORAL PRAYER

“O Thou Eternal God, for whom no dawn arises and no evening sets, we look for Thee to lift up Thy countenance upon us and show us light. O Thou that bringest deliverance to the captives and songs in the night, scatter our faithless cares to the winds. Humble our self-will beneath the cross. Speak to our conscience with no veil between, till we are wholly at one with Thee. Clear, O Lord, our inward vision that we may see through the false shows of life, and be kept quiet and true by Thy great realities. Reveal to the young, thou Supreme Inspirer, what it is to live this great life of opportunity; and fill them with the pure and undefiled religion which will keep them unspotted from the world. And in the hearts of the elders, let not the fires die or their work linger, till they are overtaken by the fading light and lengthening shadows of their set time. Knowing nothing of the morrow, may we rejoice to be faithful today; gladly accepting the humblest task that waits for us by Thy will, and shines with the holy light of Thine approval.”

We come, O God, with happy prayers of thanksgiving this morning, for all Thy rich mercies to us: for health restored after illness, for protection that came to save us when danger threatened, for courage to undertake new ventures, for renewal of our trust in Thee when faith faltered, for the hope and joy of a baby’s birth, a friend’s arrival, a promise kept, a kindness done, a wrong forgiven. Great is Thy goodness, O Lord our God, and greatly to be praised is Thy glorious name and nature revealed to us in Jesus Christ Thy Son. Amen.

We commend to Thy loving favor the brotherhood worshipping with us this day. May this newly founded fraternity chapter discover in their fellowship the confrontation of their God and be lead ever onward from the bliss of the narrower bonds of brotherhood to the farthest frontiers of our great fraternity in the Kingdom of our God.

Hear our prayers, accept our thanksgiving, and reveal Thy presence, as we pray the prayer our Savior taught us — Our Father, etc.