“Then the righteous will shine like the sun in
the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears, listen!” From the Gospel
according to Matthew, chapter 13, verse 43.
In
the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
The
whole of the thirteenth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, in which today’s reading
is found, is a collection of stories about seeds, growth, and the Kingdom of
God. To make one continuous selection, today’s reading, named in the old
translation as the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares, is actually put together
from verses separated by the Parable of the Mustard Seed and the Parable of the
Yeast, and even a short bit on the use of parables. In that short bit, Jesus
says, “I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of
the world.” So all these seed-stories are meant to reveal a secret, something hidden
from the beginning, from the foundation of the world. Jesus makes it easy for
us to understand today’s parable, since he provides not only the story but an
interpretation as well! This puts a preacher in the odd position of having
somehow to improve upon, or even add to, Our Lord’s understanding of his own words.
So I
went to the beginning, to the book Genesis, to read what it says about the foundation
of the world. Right after the waters were gathered together and the dry land
appeared, God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed,
and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.”
This is on Day Three of the creation, in the first Genesis account in chapter 1
of that book. There is in fact nothing hidden about the creation of
seed-bearing plants; it is the most important thing that happens after the
creation and the appearance of dry land. The seeds of the Kingdom are planted at the moment of creation, in the "kingdom of the Father." So I think that what “hidden” means
here is "embedded in the creation;" it can also mean “overlooked,” “forgotten,” “ignored,” or perhaps simply “not thought
of.” Jesus is proclaiming a way of understanding the world which may not have been
thought of before, or which has been overlooked. Jesus is teaching a way of
seeing the world, the actual physical world, which reveals something of God’s
purpose and the nature of his Kingdom. This purpose and nature are built-in, as it were, in the created world. The seed stories, and today’s story of
the Weeds among the Wheat especially, draw on real-world experience to say something
about God and his relationship to the world which we know.
A
farmer sowed good seed in his field, and someone else came along and sowed
tares among the wheat. “So,” the Gospel says, “when the plants came up and bore
grain, then the weeds appeared as well.” The main point here, which is so
obvious that perhaps we don’t think of it, is the inevitability of growth. Yes,
the wheat and the weeds grow up together. Of course they do! They grow,
inevitably and necessarily. Now of course something can interfere with the
process and ruin the crop, bad weather, disease, and so on, but, left to
themselves, both wheat-seeds and weed-seeds will grow to maturity following the
laws of nature. (I should say at this point that nowadays we don’t call weeds
“weeds;” they are now “native plants,” which may or may not be endangered!). What we may call a “law of growth,” which includes the growth of the Kingdom, is in the
background, the foundation, of this and all the other seed-stories in this chapter.
There
are many things we can say about seeds and growth, that help us to understand
the nature of the Kingdom. The first thing we notice about seeds is how small
they are, indeed hidden in fact, most of the time, hidden meaning here simply "out of sight." “Hidden from the foundation of the
world,” as Jesus says. Growth begins with small, almost invisible, individual
seeds. They are planted and grow in the ordinary, everyday world that we know.
They grow invisibly, secretly, silently, revealing their nature when they break
the surface of the soil and present themselves as beautiful plants. This quiet
process is so commonplace that we hardly notice it, we take it for granted. As
one commentator writes, “Growing things make no noise.”
So it
is with the Kingdom. There is no force coming from outside of the world to
impose the Kingdom on us. Rather, the Kingdom is in each one of us, the
“children of the Kingdom,” each of us a seed growing according to the law of
God in us, each of us in the ordinary, everyday world that we know, each of us
in our quiet way (or perhaps not so quiet!) doing what we can to make God’s
Kingdom known in the world. The story of the Wheat and the Tares, or the Wheat
and the Weeds, is a story about the ordinariness of things, about the Kingdom
coming into being in the world that we know. It is about each seed becoming
what it is supposed to be, by following the law of its nature. And all seeds
together are collectively transforming the world, perhaps silently, and secretly.
Not
without opposition, however. “An enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat…so
when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well.” (It is necessary to remember that the weeds in this story, the tares, the proper name of this weed, are indistinguishable from wheat). This
describes the world that we know, in which good and evil exist together. Here
again the emphasis is on the ordinary, the everyday, real this-world
experience. The Kingdom of God is growing all the time, and opposition to it is
constant and always present. Our Lord’s response to this is interesting. He
says, “Let both of them grow together until the harvest.” This is to avoid
uprooting the good with the bad, but it is also to avoid being too quick to
decide which is good and which is bad. As I said a moment ago, “weeds” are now
“native plants,” and it is not clear that they are necessarily bad. And we remember that wheat and tares resemble each other. Jesus would
not let the slaves gather up the weeds, but he does send his angels to “collect
out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers.” It may be clear in a
mature wheat field which plant is wheat and which not, but in the everyday world that
we know, it is not always clear what is good and what is evil. Just as weeds
become native plants, so too apparent evils at one time become goods at
another. That is why Jesus doesn’t let the slaves, which we may think of as the lower forces of
our nature, decide what is evil and so try to uproot it. Rather, Jesus send the
angels, which we may think of as the higher forces of our nature, our nature as transformed by deepened
spiritual insight, insight which is slow to condemn, to make the selection. Only then can true evil be uprooted.
Only then will the “righteous shine like the sun in the kingdom of their
Father.” Only then will we know how to distinguish between wheat and tares,
between good and evil, between sinners and righteous. Amen. (VII.2014.Adv., 23.VII.17.Adv.)
