Who's Going to Pull the Weeds?

So last week we heard the story of the sower who went out to sow and who spread seed on every sort of soil – hard-packed soil, rocky soil, thorny soil and good soil. The sower, we decided, was a confident farmer, sure of a harvest. So confident that it didn’t matter where he threw those seeds, some of it was going to fall on good soil and produce a hundredfold.


What was that seed last week? The word of the kingdom. And what did we want to be? The fertile earth. Last week we were the soil. This week we are the seed.


It’s a little bit later in chapter 13 of Matthew now. Jesus is still telling parables – those confounding stories about everyday things that were clearly not about everyday things. And this time he is telling the story of the wheat and the tares.


Now, I call it that, the story of the wheat and the tares, but that’s because I grew up in a King James church where when you got to verse 25 it talked about tares. Does anyone have a King James Version? Verse 24 says: “Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field.” So Jesus is making a comparison here between the reign of God, which is unseen, and a man sowing good seed in his field, which you can see.

Then we read verse 25: “But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way.” While men slept…(presumably women slept, too, but this is the King James Version and we’ll switch back in a minute)…while men slept, an enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat. Tares! Oh, my goodness, what are tares? They’re what you use when you want to go up to the second floor of a building, right? You go up the tares. Or maybe you call them teps. I don’t know.

No, of course, I’m kidding. Tares are weeds. In fact, (I learned this yesterday), they are a specific kind of weed. They are probably darnel or vetches. And do you know what vetches are? They are people who don’t say ‘Thank you.’ Like when you hear someone called an ungrateful vetch. No, actually tares…vetches…are nitrogen-fixing leguminous plants that often appear in grain fields.*

So that’s how this parable got the name of the wheat and the tares. Some people these days want to call it the parable of the wheat and the weeds. But really, if we want to be scientific and politically correct about this, we should call it the parable of the wheat and the nitrogen-fixing leguminous plants.

Now this is a strange little story here. How many people remember hearing this parable before? Matthew is the only gospel that tells us this story. And, again, like in the other parable, the sower is a kind of strange farmer. He plants the field but he doesn’t want to de-vetch it. So what happens to your garden if you never go out and get rid of the tares? It gets overgrown in a hurry, right? So we weed our gardens, right?

Not this farmer. And worse yet, this farmer’s got enemies. And this is an enemy who keeps a bunch of vetch seeds in his shed so that he can sneak over to the neighbor’s garden in the middle of the night to sow the vetch in with the good seeds. Today, this would be the guy who sneaks over and TP’s your house. But back in the day, they sowed weeds.

So the servants see that there’s a problem in the fields. The farmer himself doesn’t seem to be too bothered about what’s going on out there. Hasn’t seen that there’s a vetch problem. But the slaves know and they go to the farmer and let’s see what they say. Look at verse 27. “Master, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? So where did the weeds come from?” Do you ever ask this question? I do. I go out and look at the tomatoes and I say, “Where did these weeds come from?” And right after that I ask, “Where did these mosquitoes come from?”

What’s the answer? Where did these weeds come from? “An enemy did this.” The farmer knows. He may not be watching the fields too closely, but he knows an enemy is out there. The enemy planted the weeds. The enemy sent the mosquitoes, too, I’m sure.

So what do the slaves want to do? They want to go pull them up. That’s a sensible thing. Get rid of the weeds that might be choking out the wheat. But what does the farmer say? In verse 30 he says, “No, let both grow together until the harvest and at the harvest time I will have the reapers collect the weeds first and burn them up while I gather the wheat into my storehouse.”

Now a couple of things here. First, the farmer. Why would he want to try this method? The text says that he’s concerned that pulling up the weeds would also uproot the wheat. So there’s an agricultural reason. But I think he’s also got the same attitude as the sower in the first parable. He’s confident. He knows there’s going to be enough grain at the harvest to take to the storehouse. There’s a plan for the weeds. They’re going to be taken care of. But meanwhile the enemy is not going to take up a minute of his time. The farmer knows what the end of the story is.

Secondly, the servants. What are they worried about? They want to know why the weeds are there and they want to know who’s going to get rid of it. So they are philosophers and then they’re pragmatists. Why is it here and who’s going to do something about it? But the farmer does not share their concern. He’s focused on the harvest which is, Jesus tells us, the kingdom of heaven.

Now let me tell you another story. It’s a true story. It happened 50 years ago. 1961. If you went around the South 50 years ago you would have seen a lot of signs that it was still a segregated society. Water fountains for whites and coloreds. Bathrooms for whites and coloreds. And bus stations with separate waiting rooms for whites and coloreds. That was the language and the practice of the day. But in 1960 the Supreme Court ruled that this was unconstitutional, at least for interstate transportation. You couldn’t have separate waiting rooms based on race. But the ruling was not being enforced.

So a group of 13 people – African-American and European-American – black and white – trained in non-violence -- decided to test the ruling by taking a bus ride from Washington D.C. to New Orleans. Together. They called them Freedom Riders.

So they left on May 4 and they went to Richmond and Petersburg and Farmville and Lynchburg. No problems. Then they went through North Carolina to Charlotte. Into South Carolina and at Rock Hill they ran into the first resistance. A group of people met the bus at the station and beat up the riders as they got off the bus.

They kept going. They went to Atlanta, Georgia and they got threats. They went to Anniston, Alabama and on the outskirts of town a mob attacked the bus. They slashed the tires. They threw a firebomb into the bus. They blocked the doors to keep them from getting out when the flames took hold. A gas tank exploded and the crowd moved back from the bus just long enough for the people to get out. The crowd moved back in to beat them up. An undercover police officer fired a gun into the air and the crowd dispersed.

A second bus of Freedom Riders kept going. They came into Birmingham and another mob was waiting. They beat the riders again, paralyzing one of the riders for life. The police finally came and they arrested the riders, putting them in jail for what they said was their own safety. Then they took them over the border into Tennessee and dumped them off.

Another group of Freedom Riders came. They took the bus to Montgomery and again they were met by a mob that beat them up. It looked like the rides were going have to end.

On the night of May 21, a large crowd gathered at the Black First Baptist Church where Martin Luther King, Jr. came to speak. Over a thousand people were in the church. Outside a few federal marshals had come in to surround the church, but there weren’t enough. As Dr. King preached the mob overturned cars and through rocks through the windows of the church. Tear gas started to seep into the church from outside where the police were trying to disperse the crowd. Dr. King told them that it wasn’t safe to leave the church, so they stayed in the church.

At 1 AM, Dr. King called Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General of the United States, from the basement of the church. Kennedy was upset with him for causing trouble. Kennedy thought the Freedom Riders were giving the country a bad image. King told Kennedy that the world was changing. That African-Americans were changing. “I am different from my father,” he said. “I feel the need of being free now.”**

Now here’s why I’m telling this story. If the Freedom Riders had not been fired by their faith. If they had not been trained in nonviolence. If they had not been continually hearing the message that what they were about was the civil rights of black people. If they had not had a sense of justice. If they had not had their eyes on the prize. If they hadn’t known that God’s kingdom was coming. If they hadn’t believed that goodness was stronger than evil. If they hadn’t believed all these things, they might have gotten sidetracked.

They might have started to become obsessed with the crowds outside. They might have returned violence for violence. They might have given up in despair. They might have gone back home. But no, they were going to New Orleans. The original group was gone, but new riders came to take their place.

So two days later, another group of 27 riders – white and black – left Montgomery and they were singing as they rode out of town:
I’m taking a ride on the Greyhound bus line.
I’m riding the front seat to Jackson this time.
Hallelujah, I’m travelling:
Hallelujah, ain’t it fine?
Hallelujah, I’m traveling down Freedom’s main line.


When they reached the Greyhound bus terminal in Jackson, Mississippi, there were no mobs. They were not beaten. They were ushered into the white waiting room of the bus terminal. And then they were ushered into paddy wagons that took them to jail. At their trial the next day the judge turned around in his chair and faced the wall when their lawyer spoke in their defense. They were sentenced to sixty days in Parchman, the state penitentiary. Some of them were housed in death row.


It seems like another world now. It seems like far more than 50 years have passed. But the Freedom Riders saw the goal. And they rode the Greyhound bus into something a little more like the kingdom of heaven.


So what did Jesus say about this parable? When the crowds had left and they went back into the house, he explains the parable to the disciples. What do they call the parable? Look in verse 36. They call it the parable of the weeds in the field. They are just like the servants. They go straight to the weeds.


But Jesus goes through the whole parable and he says the sower is who? The Son of Humanity. Jesus himself. The field is what? The world. And the good seed are who? The children of the Kingdom. And the vetch – who are they? The children of the evil one.


Now immediately we get the message and what’s the first thing we want to ask? Am I a good seed or a weed? We want to know where we stand with God because we see where this is headed. The weeds end up on the fire. And later Jesus will say that those who don’t measure up will be thrown into the fiery furnace where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. There is a judgment on the way. And we want to know are we vetch who gnash or are we the wheat in the storehouse -- those who will shine like the sun in the kingdom of God?


Scholars will tell you that the community of early Christians that Matthew was writing for was under a great deal of persecution from Jewish groups. In the midst of the conflict they would have heard this story as a word of hope. It might be bad now, Matthew seems to be saying, but in the end God will bring you home. In the meantime we must bear up in the struggles.


In our therapeutic culture we might say that there is wheat and tares in all of us. That’s even biblical. We are created with the all the potential of the good seed. But sin has entered the world and our lives, distorting us from what God intends us to be. So within each of us the struggle is ongoing and God has come to deal with the evil of the world and in us and to redeem our tarnished promise.


But let’s not make this too easy. There is much that God says an emphatic ‘no’ to in the world. It’s not always as overt as the mobs around the First Baptist Church in Montgomery. Sometimes the evil in the world slips in under cover of darkness. We need a purging fire to put to death all that keeps us from God. We need to come face to face with some things. We need to look in the mirror and see the callous heart that won’t let us love our neighbors. We need to see the fear that keeps us from doing what we know is right. We need to see the apathy that tells us the lie that we can’t make a difference. There’s a lot of things God says ‘no’ to.


John Wesley told his Methodist preachers that they should commit themselves to a disciplined lifestyle. That they should work diligently, teach the word, and never spend time triflingly. They should attend to their spiritual lives. They should read the scriptures. And they should do all these things, not for wrath, but for conscience’s sake. Not for fear of the fire, but for the integrity of their souls.


In the end, God knows the harvest will come. And God is not consumed with worry over where the evil in this world comes from or how it meets its end. What God is concerned about is the kingdom and what God wants is children who will not live their lives in fear of the fires of hell, but shining in the light of the kingdom that is to come. Not for wrath, but for conscience’s sake.


Keep your eyes on the prize, brothers and sisters. Keep your eyes on the prize. Thanks be to God.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tare_(leguminous_plant)
**Quoted in Harvard Sitkoff, King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop, [Hill & Wang: New York, 2008], p. 77.