“Why is there evil in the world?” is one of those age-old questions in life that always seem to leave us looking for answers. Our biblical tradition suggests that sin and evil had their origins in the Garden of Eden, that place of paradise where two freshly created earthlings give in to their temptation for knowledge and control and defy God’s instruction. It’s a wonderful story, but somehow, unsatisfying in our quest for an explanation of the world’s evil.
Like you and I, Jesus’ disciples and the crowds of people that Jesus preached to surely wrestled with this question as well. There was plenty of evil afoot in the first-century Mediterranean world. Having just shared and explained his parable about the sower and the seeds--good soil and poor soil--Jesus stays with the agrarian theme, but takes the image another step.
The seeds have sprouted into wheat and weeds. When both grow alongside one another, it can be difficult at first to tell them apart. The words wheat and weed even sound the same! In the parable, an enemy--perhaps out of jealously--maliciously plants weeds in a neighbor’s field of wheat. The slaves want to pull the weeds so they don’t crowd the wheat, but the householder says that it’s too risky. They would likely pull up the wheat too. They are told to wait until the harvest.
The problem of evil can be so perplexing that sometimes, out of fear and frustration, we become over-zealous in our efforts to solve it or figure it out. Sometimes we cast blame. Sometimes our attempts at combating evil focus on symptoms rather than the root causes. Sometimes, though well-intentioned, in fighting evil, we inadvertently spread it. We treat systemic racism this way--we try to do things that we think will help or fix the problem, when in actuality, we are only perpetuating it. White people develop a “Robin Hood” syndrome in which we think we know what is best for people of color without letting them decide and without listening to what they need. We can’t dismantle racism without understanding and then reconstructing the systems that have been built by white power and privilege.
We’ve also seen evil inadvertently spread over and over in warfare. By dropping bombs to fight terrorism, we only create more devastation, fueling another generation of hatred.
There is a real danger with this parable in looking at the world as full of two kinds of people--good ones and bad ones, righteous ones and evil ones. We’re seeing this played out right now in our nation as divisions across political, social, economic, and racial lines are being provoked. It’s hard to resist the temptation to have that “us vs. them” mentality. It’s hard to resist the temptation to see ourselves as wheat and condemn others we view or judge or disagree with as weeds. The honest truth is, things are a lot more complicated than that. We are a lot more complicated than that. Each of us has both wheat and weed inside of us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once pondered, “What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.”
With his parable, Jesus is trying to explain the reality that good and evil coexist in the world and sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between the good and the evil. But Jesus is also saying something about how God views the world. “Wait until the harvest,” he says. God as the householder patiently waits for the harvest--a time, God promises, that all sin and evil will be removed, leaving the righteous to shine like the sun. Perhaps there are even weeds, like dormant seeds, that can grow into something beautiful and fruitful. At the end of the day, it’s not our job to make judgments or call the shots. Christ--the Son of Humankind--is the judge.
Our task instead is proclaimed by both the prophet Isaiah and St. Paul: to live with hope and certainty of God’s salvation. Isaiah suggests that even in the midst of strife and turmoil, even when we see only hostility and hopelessness, we can turn to the one beside whom “there is no other rock.” St. Paul reminds us that we have already received the fruits of the Spirit; we have gracefully been given things like love, joy and peace. Therefore we are called children of God, and if children, then heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. This incredible promise is where our hope lies.
Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds is both a wake-up call and a proclamation of freedom. It’s a wake-up call for us to think deeply about the presence of evil in the world, its complexity, and our complicity in it. It’s a wake-up call for us to consider the ways that we act like wheat and the ways we act like weeds; the ways that we act like those slaves, so concerned with judging who is good and who is bad that we inadvertently pull up the wheat and become part of the problem itself. Jesus’ parable also frees us from the bondage of sin, death and decay. God gives us unseen hope that one day God will liberate us from a broken world and from ourselves. Jesus will send angels on our behalf who will remove all evil and suffering and redeem all of creation.
After reading the parable today, I couldn’t help but imagine Jesus preaching the famous words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu to the crowd gathered that day, “Goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate. Victory is ours, through God who loves us.”