In a classic strip of the famed "Peanuts" newspaper cartoon, Lucy explains to her little brother Linus about the existence of good and evil. She tells him that he, like others, have inside these two forces. Linus looks at his stomach with a distressed look on his face and declares, "I can feel them in there fighting." Humorous, but true.
In today's gospel, we find Jesus telling a parable that uses a similar image - good wheat and evil weeds, "fighting it out" in a farmer's field. It's also the same story in whatever newspaper any of us is reading this morning - "good and evil" fighting it out in the world. There is a force at every level of existence that works against what is good and what is God.
There is a force that seeks to destroy the 'loving nature of creation.' There is a force that exerts every effort to suck the lifeblood out of everything that promotes prosperity and health and hope and peace and joy. Throughout the ages, the faithful have personified the sinister force by many names: Satan, the devil, Beelzebub, Lucifer, or "the evil one." By whatever designation we choose, its intent, its nature, is to un-make what God has created and to deface, distort, and destroy whatever good it may latch onto, as it "eats away" at it with parasitic intensity.
Through today's parable, Jesus gives us an illustration of the power of the evil force that can invade every aspect of life. He makes this clear by "painting a picture" of weeds growing alongside wheat, imitating the good grain and intertwining its roots and growth with what was planted by the farmer, who stands for Christ. And how did the weeds get into the field? Jesus says simply that the weeds came from an enemy, the devil, the evil one.
"An enemy of God" is as good an answer as we will ever find for the source of that which works against God. In the service of Holy Baptism, we know this enemy as "all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God," or as "the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God," or as the source of all that draws us from the love of God. We recognize at the very beginning of our life in Christ that we are constantly invaded by the "weeds."
And though we "renounce the evil" that the weeds represent, we also recognize something else in our baptismal vows. We see that our lives, like the field in the parable, grow with the evil intertwined among the grace, love, and godly obedience that we promise to trust and employ in our Christian living. And we know from this experience that no matter how intent we are to follow our vows, none of us will ever totally avoid the corrupting influences and tempting thoughts that lead us to go against the values of God.
Maybe that's what makes so many of us anxious to do something, anything, about perceived forms of evil in our close communities and in the wider world. In today's parable, Jesus has the slaves ask almost immediately whether they should destroy the weeds. What farmer would not seek to destroy weeds that suck the vital nutrients from a well-planted crop? Wasn't that our first reaction when we experienced the evil of the 9/11 attacks?
When human beings think they know the source and reality of evil, they almost always want to pinpoint it, and do away with it, as swiftly and certainly as possible. Seeing with what we assume is a "crystal clear view" --- we move ahead, absolutely certain that we are right and just in irradiating what seems obviously ungodly. But history shows how often this is folly. Any number of "witch hunts" reveal that they were more about making the hunters feel secure than actually doing something about evil. Still, we often have a strong urge, when threatened or fearful, to find something to cut out, weed out, push down, crush, or otherwise stop and destroy. Should we not admit that this kind of behavior often simply functions as an escape from a more complex reality?
That's the argument Jesus seems to be laying out in his response to the slaves who would dig out the weeds. Wait, he has the farmer insist, until time for the harvest, because the process of "ripping out of the weeds" will certainly destroy the wheat in the process. This truth is hard to accept, as we find Jesus telling us something we really don't want to hear - to leave the "judging" until later, to recognize that throwing the weeds into the fire is God's job, not ours. When we encounter what we see as "evil," we want to find the source and destroy it. But as he so often does, Jesus uses this parable to make us "rethink" our human reactions, and he turns us in an opposite direction by having the owner say, in effect --wait to let the "nature of the godly" prosper and prevail in due course. Profoundly, Jesus is leading us to cease chasing after the bad, and rather concentrate on the good.
Jesus is saying to us that we can relax in knowing that we don't have to be in the judging business or in the business of destroying that which would work against God, because the owner of the farm, God himself, will make it all come out right in the end. I think that our Gospel parable/allegory says something we need to hear: Beware of sinners judging other sinners-- especially with finality. Good and evil exist side-by-side not only in the world-but in each of us as well.
Carl Jung the Psychologist often said to the "self styled" virtuous: "The brighter the halo, the smellier the feet." Or as Paul Tournier, the wise Christian counselor, would say; "The morality of man is like the 'silhouette of a giraffe'--lofty in front--and far lower in the rear." So we are left, finally, with a teaching that we would do best by paying less attention to the weeds --the evil in life-- and simply staying away from it. Better for us to spend more time tending to the wheat- the good in life - fostering its growth and putting it to use as Jesus would have us to do, following the values of God's Kingdom.
Fortunately for us all, the One who loves us most fully and finally is also the One who will judge us most mercifully. The One who knows better than any of us that we have sinned against in heaven in: "thought, word, and deed" by what "we have done and left undone" has promised us in Christ the forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection of the dead. That is a "harvest" to look forward to. AMEN.
(1st Reading Isaiah 44:6-8, Psalm 86:11-17, 2nd Reading Romans 8:12-25, Gospel Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43)
