Pentecost 5A 2011-07-17
Matthew 13: (Parable of Wheat and Tares)
In the late 19th century, science was fairly well mapped out. Physicists were certain that they knew everything. They thought there was nothing new left to discover. The only thing that remained was obtaining more and more precision in measurements. Nothing much had changed in about 200 years since the era of Newton and others. Everything was incredibly deterministic. You could count on equations determining results. Springs, pendulums, ballistics… all classical systems that provided no surprises. And then the world changed. Physicists started looking at both smaller and larger systems. They started looking at the realm of the atom and at the fundamental forces of gravity. Prevailing models underwent major revision. What people thought was certain, suddenly became inherently uncertain. What was highly determined by equations and exact became probabilistic. The notion that atoms were hard particles disappeared. Atoms became known as packets of probability. Instead of being able to know exactly where a particle was located, you have to speak of probabilities of states that the particle existed in. One of the famous thought experiments that was created to help people think through this new reality, is known as Schrödinger’s cat.
In this thought experiment, Schrodinger imagined that a cat is locked in a box, along with a radioactive atom that is connected to a vial containing a deadly poison. If the atom decays, it causes the vial to smash and the cat to be killed. When the box is closed we do not know if the atom has decayed or not, which means that it can be in both the decayed state and the non-decayed state at the same time. Therefore, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time - which clearly does not happen in classical physics.
Thought experiments and actual experiments have shown that this strange branch of science, quantum mechanics, despite all of its counter-intuitive predictions, does indeed describe reality. I once lamented to one of my professors that I didn’t understand quantum mechanics. He replied with gusto, “Well, NO ONE understands it.” Living in this world, we are used to very certain results. We know that when we throw a baseball, it takes one and only one path to its target. In the quantum realm, particles take every possible path. We must hold back our certainty and only speak in terms of probabilities. It can seem incredibly unreal.
Taking on these descriptions of reality is difficult. But suspending our certainty can be even more difficult in the religious realm. Such is the case of Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds. A landowner has his servants go out and sow seeds. Now, these seeds are vitally different than the seeds of last week. Last week in the parable of the sower, the seed was the good news. This week the seeds are human beings in creation. The seed that the owner has sown is good seed. It is meant to grow a crop of wheat. But in the dark of night an enemy sneaks in and sows bad seed among the wheat. Weeds pop up among the wheat. Weeds choke out the wheat, stealing resources that the wheat needs to grow fruitfully. Jesus takes on the reality of the world in this parable, most notably the question “Why is there evil?”
The parable continues with the servants asking if they should go and pluck out the weeds. The owner tells the workers not to. Instead they should wait until the harvest, THEN the two can be separated. You see, the weeds that were sown, are not just any weeds. The Greek text here identifies the weed as a type of weed that is indistinguishable from wheat until fully grown. If these weeds are pulled up before the harvest and burned, there is distinct possibility that wheat might get pulled up with the weeds in a case of mistaken identity. So no, the owner deems it necessary that the servants simply wait to see if the plant is wheat or weed… or both. Jesus doesn’t really answer the philosophical question “Why is there evil in the world?” Jesus simply describes the reality… there is evil, and evil people in the world. What he does lay out is God’s strategy. Wait. In the end, the two will clearly be different. Then they will be judged.
This strategy seems inefficient… perhaps even unjust. How is it that God can just let evil continue? Why doesn’t God just pluck it out now? Of course as humans we do want expediency. We are very certain we know right from wrong. We can clearly see evil as evil. If it were up to us, we would be out plucking up all those plants we thought were weeds. And then we might be doing something akin to the time I went to a friend’s house. He was weeding his herb garden. We were chatting. I was helping in one section. He went inside. I saw some grass poking out. I pulled it out. He returned from inside and I, proud of what I had done, told him that I yanked the grass out. He looked at me and said, “that was tarragon.” It looked just like grass. I was sure. Certain. I was wrong.
While Jesus uses an agricultural parable to speak about evil being seeded into creation, it resonates strongly with the creation story in Genesis 2, where God acts much like a gardener, working in the mud to create human beings. And the question of the servants is much like our response to the tempter in the garden. The serpent said, “Eat the fruit of the tree. Your eyes will be open and you will be like God.” There is the heart of all sin. That we wish we were God. We are not content to trust God to know good and evil. We want to make those judgments. And it just seems so incredibly wrong for God to wait to bring about judgment.
We want to bring about justice. We want to say perhaps that a woman who clearly showed horrible judgment in lying to the police about the death of her young daughter but was not convicted by an earthly court, should somehow pay. We are so certain of her guilt because of what we have been shown by the media and certain personalities. It seems wrong. And yet, God will say, “wait.” The reality is, God will judge every single person. Every single one of us will face God’s judgment of our lives. Like every single one of us might want to do to some other person about something or other, God will speak the word “guilty” to every single one of us. Our lives are weedy. In moments of brutal honesty, we know that. We are not what we could be. We do not do the things that lead to life. We choose the path of slavery and death, again and again. And yet, despite knowing that we all will hear the verdict “guilty,” God waits.
God waits because God is in the end, thankfully not like us. God does not simply seek justice. God will indeed bring about justice. The one thing that Jesus makes clear in this parable is “Everyone will face justice.” We need not fear anyone escaping what they deserve. But God’s judgment of us is not simply about making us pay, giving us what we deserve, the way we might want to judge others. God’s judgment is ultimately an act of love toward us. God’s judgment is about transformation. The love of God speaks in those words of judgment the way no human judgment can operate. When God in love speaks the words of judgment upon us he does not leave us the same. Those words transform us. When God exiled human beings from the garden after the Fall, he imposed the sentence of death upon us all. Because he did not want us to live forever in that fallen state. Now when we are raised at the end of the age, he speaks words of judgment that transform us, burning away all of our brokenness and guilt and shame, everything that separates us from God and one another, so that we will not be raised to eternal life and still fallen.
God’s judgment purifies us. It is entirely possible for humans to fill their lives with nothing but weeds, so that when God’s judgment is spoken upon them, they shrivel and burn away with nothing left. But the promise of the parable is that there will be some… some who apparently live in both realities. Weeds and wheat. They grow up in the midst of both states, a living quantum reality, a being both dead and alive at the same time. Observable to no one but God alone. The righteous will be saved from the eternal fire, having undergone the purification wrought by God. So what is the difference? What makes the righteous seed righteous?
In the end, God will know the righteous seed because the righteous seed sown is Christ. If we are all guilty, the only righteous seed that could be saved is Christ. And if there are humans who are saved, then it is because God sees Christ present in what has grown. Now we can hear this and ask questions about who those might be. What if they did not hear the gospel? What if they did something terrible? What if… What if… What if… We can in the end trust God to temper his justice with mercy. If they are saved, God has found Christ there. And we might be tempted to look for Christ in all sorts of places, but this we know. God has promised to join us to Christ in one particular act, the waters of baptism. God joins us to Christ in the waters of baptism so that the wheat which is Christ might take root in us.
In baptism, we are united to Christ and placed within a community where the good news of God’s activity, past, present and future, are proclaimed so that faith might grow in us. Christ then continues to come to us and nourish our faith with his body and blood so that seed of faith that takes root can grow and bear fruit and begin our transformation even now in this world. Even as weeds seek to choke the life out of us. Christ’s action in us does indeed create a strange reality, beings both dead and alive. Dead in sin, but alive in Christ. We live in both realities and at times we might not be able to tell one from another, or we might be tempted to be certain about another person’s identity.
Both the justice and mercy of God seek our transformation from weeds to wheat. In the end, only God can know our true state… but this is a loving God who seeks us out. Rather than just throwing us all out and starting over, this merciful and just God can see us as we are truly meant to be, images of Christ. And God waits. Waits for us to be seeded with Christ, fed and nourished by Christ, and in the end raised with Christ to a life made completely whole (no longer divided and split), a sure and certain reality.
Thanks be to God. Amen.