THE WHEAT AND THE WEEDS

Matthew 13: 24-30

In 1880, a very slim novel was published that has been an intriguing delight to readers ever since. The work is called FLATLAND, and the author’s memorable name is Edwin Abbott Abbott. Listen to what one reviewer said about FLATLAND:

“Flatland is one of the very few novels about math and philosophy that can appeal to almost any layperson. This short fantasy takes us to a completely flat world of two physical dimensions where all the inhabitants are geometric shapes, and who think the planar world of length and width that they know is all there is. But one inhabitant discovers the existence of a third physical dimension, enabling him to finally grasp the concept of a fourth dimension. Watching our Flatland narrator, we begin to get an idea of the limitations of our own assumptions about reality, and we start to learn how to think about the confusing problem of higher dimensions. The book is also quite a funny satire on society and class distinctions of Victorian England.”

The author playfully calls the book a memoir of one of the citizens of Flatland, and that resident is named A. Square. Like those in the time of Christopher Columbus who presumed the world was flat, sometimes our senses and even our scholarship can keep our minds boxed in. When a child plays “Heart and Soul” on the piano, a simple melody is all that the right hand plays. But add the harmonies and contrasting line of the left hand and the song gets much more interesting, that is, unless you used to torment your family by playing it continuously! The great composer Ravel had a sense of “I’ll show you!” as he defied musical conventions by creating a symphonic piece that simply repeats the melody over and over, adding instrumentation and crescendo to make it a most interesting and engaging piece; again, unless it is played over, and over, and over! Before Disney and Pixar came out with computer animation that appeared three dimensional, cartoons were two dimensional figures of people and drawings of landscape, sometimes colored in rich detail, but still clearly two dimensional. The news Winnie the Pooh film is a classic two dimensional delight, while the last Harry Potter film has ventured into the land of 3-D. And except for a few experimental attempts, watching science fiction films thirty years ago at a theatre was a grainy, often poor quality experience of sight and sound compared to the state-of-the-art theatre where I saw James Cameron’s “Avatar” and Christopher Nolan’s “Inception, ” with digital projection, 3-D, and digital sound made seeing those movies a game-changer.

Today let’s look at this parable, how it functions, and what it might mean apart from the allegorical interpretation found six verses later. First, a parable like this-- the wheat and the tares in King James language, the wheat and the weeds in modern language-- brings words of judgment from God like those proclaimed by prophets in the Old Testament and John the Baptist in the New. But instead of the prophets throwing fastballs toward each crowd they faced, building resistance of will and deafness of hearing, Jesus chose another device: parables; Biblical curveballs. Far from being charming stories, they had multilayered and sometimes ambiguous ways of acting out a story. By contrast in my childhood, westerns had “black hatted” and “white hatted” characters to differentiate the good guys from the bad guys! Professor Stan Saunders of Columbia Seminary adds: “In response to growing division and rejection [that Jesus faced], Jesus begins speaking in parables, a form of teaching that at once reveals and conceals. Israel’s prophets had used dramatic sign-acts—signs that perform what they signify—to convey their messages forcefully. Jesus’ parables are also sign-acts, in that they both describe and intensify the growing division in Jesus’ audience. His parables beget crisis, forcing the hearers to embrace, or turn away from God’s empire.” [PREACHING THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW, Westminster John Knox Press, 2010, p. 120.]

Next, let’s think about the purpose for Jesus telling this parable,--and the one about the sower before it, and the one about the mustard seed, and the one about the hidden leaven—it was to raise the awareness of the times in which they were living: There was” goodness” metaphorically speaking, and “evil.” But who is who? Evil was lurking, mixed in with good. Matthew loves to bring good and evil into the same sentence, in much the same way that good and evil exist side by side in the world. Listen to these words from the parable as we react to them: “The Kingdom of Heaven.” Some have said that sounds like a quaint land of fairytales when really the faithful were looking for a new and just empire, a Godly empire, to rule in place of the current oppressive “Roman Empire.” They were looking for a new and just empire in which God was honored. But God’s empire is not brought in by force; it is brought in by justice, and witness, and transformation. “Someone sowed good seed in a field.” Some say that the sower stands for Jesus; but could it have been another person in his day instead? Could it have even been someone living under the oppressive Roman regime who nevertheless was trying to do the right thing? Could the seed have been called good in the eyes of Israel and the new message Jesus was bringing be labeled as “bad seed” because of his revolutionary new ideas? If you are like me, you’re not fond of ambiguous stories; I like to know who the redemptive characters are in a story. But our point of view—whether it is as an insider, outsider, Christian, non-Christian, management, or laborer—affects our perspective. The parable then continues about an enemy sowing weeds among the wheat. Now we wonder if the enemy is the devil, or in the eyes of the Chief Priest or of Rome, could the enemy be Jesus? We keep listening and remembering that the crowd was made up of people in many walks of life. “When the plants grew up, the weeds appeared as well.” Notice then that the workers, or servants, certainly don’t want the blame on this one, so they bring their discovery to the master’s attention, deflecting blame. “Didn’t you give us good seed to sow? Why are there weeds there?” And the master, not willing to take the blame either, said “An enemy did it.” So then the workers ask if he wants them to go and pull out the weeds. The weeds in the case are, by almost all accounts, “darnel” or in Greek “Zidzania,” a wheat looking weed that also can carry a poisonous contaminate, potentially ruining an entire harvest. Agriculturally, pulling the weeds, or killing the weeds, is the right thing to do. Apocalyptically, that is, in the description of the refiner’s fire of the final judgment as Old Testament prophesies described, both the bad and the good in the world grow together, and will be separated at harvest and the weeds (or tares) are then burned. The imagery of the hymn we sang today first, “Sing to the Lord or Harvest” and the next hymn often sung at Thanksgiving, “Come Ye Thankful People Come” are not just about an agricultural harvest. The metaphor turns crops into people and the harvest into a final judgment.

Finally, we do have the allegorical words that Matthew says were Jesus’ words of explanation in verses 36-43. Certainly at that time Jesus had left the crowds and had gone with his disciples into a house. It was inner circle time. I am glad he gave an explanation to his disciples. Jesus’ gave them the message about final judgment, that there will be one, even as evil and good grow together. In spite of hoping to understand new concepts or new technologies the first time you hear them, aren’t there times when you’ve said to your teacher “Would you run that buy me again and explain it to me?” The disciples, in that way, are just like us! They almost never understand Jesus the first time they hear him! Sometimes they ask him, as they did in Matthew 13:36. But other times they are left silent and wondering.

The parables: they deceptively powerful tools for prophetic change and for describing our human condition and brokenness. But our Lord chose to use them with purpose: together, we can learn to hear them from fresh perspectives. In your bulletin you should see a sheet with nine dots on it. Perhaps you have done this exercise before: you are to connect all the dots with four straight lines and don’t lift your pencil. This is what I’m calling this week’s THROUGH PARABOLIC EYES experience! The answer is on the bulletin board in the narthex and another copy on the fellowship hall bulletin board. Or perhaps a child can show you how it’s done! Like wanting to color outside the lines in a coloring book, sometimes lines, or boxes, or dots can be self-restraining. FLATLAND taught the world that. What are the new possibilities for understanding our world when we can see it in Technicolor, and not just black and white? How is the experience different when you watch INCEPTION in 3-D instead of 2-D? And what might we learn about God’s Kingdom—or Empire—if we think outside of the box of expectations and conventions, with the tools of wonder, of possibility, and of God’s infinite love?

Jeffrey A. Sumner July 17, 2011