July 17 sermon

Text: Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
Preached July 17 at Grace


Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

We’re talking a lot about seeds and planting lately, it seems. I have no doubt you all know a thing or two about such matters, with all the farmers and gardeners in our midst. But somehow I think even your collective agricultural knowledge might not be enough to fully crack the mysteries Jesus addresses for us today. Wheat and weeds are tricky enough, but the problem of good and evil is most certainly beyond our grasp.

“The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field,” Jesus says, and he continues later, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom.” God, through Christ, the Son of Man, made all of creation, and he made it good. But things went awry.

“[W]hile everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well….the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil….”

Martin Luther understood evil as including the devil, the world, and our sinful selves. These things combined to tarnish the initial goodness of God’s creation, and they continue their attempts to thwart God’s purposes.

Where do you see weeds, after all? Throughout the world, to be sure. Watching or reading the news will turn up plenty of examples. But we all have plenty of weeds growing in our own yards as well. There are some sins that keep cropping up no matter how many times we think we’ve uprooted them, and there are always new sins appearing in the mix as well.

With all its causes and in all its various forms, the fact is that evil is a reality in our world, and Jesus isn’t afraid to acknowledge it. Our world is fallen and broken, no longer in full relationship with God.

And, according to Jesus’ parable, the good and evil in the world are now so intertwined that they cannot be separated. The owner of this field tells his workers not to pull the weeds sown by an enemy among the good seed, “for in gathering the weeds,” he says, “you would uproot the wheat along with them.” Good and evil must grow together until the end of the age, Jesus tells us.

It’s uncomfortable to live with this reality, isn’t it? Nevertheless, that seems to be exactly what Jesus expects. I think Isaiah has something to say about it in our first reading as well.

“Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel, and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts: I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god.” So God is God and we are not. If we believe this, and if we intend to let God be God, then the question of whether or not to uproot the weeds among the wheat remains squarely in God’s hands.

How tempting it is for us take matters into our own hands and try to root out the weeds we see. Some weeds are quite obvious and quite damaging and perhaps we could pull those successfully. But other weeds are much more subtle, and it isn’t always easy for us to tell the difference between these kinds of weeds and the good plants around them.

Lucky for us, God has sharper vision than we do, as well as a much better view of the entire field. He knows, as Jesus tells us, that sometimes digging up the weeds would be more disruptive and harmful to the crop than just letting them grow until they can be separated at harvest time.

God speaks further through Isaiah: “who has announced from of old the things to come?...have I not told you from of old and declared it?” God alone is in control of history, and he is constantly revealing and declaring himself. First he does it through the covenant, then through the prophets, and finally through his Son.

And, God says, “you are my witnesses!” God has been and still is and always will be at work in and around us. Jesus tells us that the field is not given over entirely to weeds—there is still good wheat bearing fruit even among the weeds.

There is still good happening in the world—there is still love and forgiveness and compassion. There is still mercy and kindness and courage. There is still patience and generosity and gentleness. We have only to notice it, to revel in it and participate in it, to proclaim it as God’s work.

And so, God says, “Do not fear, or be afraid.” It is not for us to worry about identifying and rooting out all the weeds in the world—everything that seems to be evil. Our part is to trust in God’s sovereignty, realizing that God’s ways are not our ways, as he told us through Isaiah just a couple weeks ago.

Our part is to remember that God has proven his goodness and love in sending his Son to die for us. “There is no other rock,” God says, “I know not one.” God is God and we are not. And this God is a refuge of stability and security and safety, even amidst the storms and sorrow and suffering of life in a world plagued by evil.

And so, trusting in this loving God, we wait with patience and hope, even as we long for God’s promised future. Paul says in our second reading that “the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.” He describes this waiting as “groaning in labor pains” in “bondage to decay.”

All of creation experiences the suffering of sin and brokenness, and we yearn to separate the wheat and the weeds, to rest securely in the kingdom of Christ where no evil can touch us and no harm come to us.

One scholar points out that part of what causes our suffering is that “the Spirit has given us reason to hope for more than we can see….For now, the suffering Paul speaks of…comes from knowing what the world could be, even as we live in the world as it is” (Mary Hinkle Shore on WorkingPreacher).

So the very cause of our hope is also a cause of our suffering! We can see beyond the world into God’s promised future, and so we wait eagerly for its arrival. The eager longing Paul describes is the anticipation of someone straining to see the dawn breaking after a long, restless night. It is the yearning of someone scanning the horizon for the arrival of an expected loved one. It is active longing, always on the lookout.

And the reality of the future God has promised us is precisely why Paul can say, “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.” Suffering is real, and we should never ignore or dismiss anyone’s experience of it. But, even as we suffer, we do not lose hope.

Instead, we endure in the certain hope “that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” Or, as Matthew says, “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” In hope we were saved, Paul says, and we wait with eager anticipation for that which we do not see but which has been made sure and certain for us by God’s promise.

The suffering of this life does not have the final word. The evil one who sows weeds among the wheat does not have the final word. Even death itself does not have the final word. God is God, and we are not, nor is anything else in creation. And God will have the final word.

Matthew tells us that God will root out all evil and sin and brokenness at the end of the age. Both the evil around us and the evil within us will be burned away to leave only good grain. Paul tells us we can expect the redemption of our bodies along with the restoration of all creation—a new life fully reflecting the glory of God. John tells us in Revelation that God will wipe every tear from our eyes and death will be no more.

So we trust in this promise, knowing we have “the first fruits of the Spirit.” The first fruits are representative of the full harvest, a pledge of what is to come. We know that God has great things in store for us, because the pledge he has given us is his very Son!

And the Spirit bears witness that we, too, are children of God, and “if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” We are heirs with Christ in both suffering and glory, death and resurrection, decay and brand-new life. So we wait with patience, trusting God’s promise that he is present in suffering, tending to both weeds and wheat. And we live in the sure and certain hope that, in Christ, God is making all things new. Amen.