Sermon on July 19, 2020: 7th Sunday after Pentecost
The parable of the wheat and the tares might be the hardest parable that Jesus tells. The hardest to hear, and the hardest to understand. Hard to hear because it’s a parable of judgment; hard to understand because the judgment may be on us. This parable is the companion piece to the parable of the sower who went out to sow, where the seeds fall on many kinds of ground; we heard this parable in church last Sunday. In my sermon, I wondered how our experience of church helps and hinders us in tending to the quality of our spiritual soil, so that it will become a fertile ground where the word of God can take root. Today, we are reflecting not on different kinds of soil but on two very different kinds of plants: one that makes bread and gives life, and one that can’t.
Have you ever wondered why Jesus chose to speak in parables? You’d think that when God becomes a human being and teaches other human beings about God’s kingdom, that God would want to be crystal clear about what it should look like. You’d think that God-in-the-flesh wouldn’t want to leave much margin for error or room for interpretation, and would instead provide us with the definitive picture—not by telling opaque stories like parables. But it turns out that God is not interested in spelling it all out for us, so that we can escape the struggle of living a Christian life. God is at work by planting seeds within us, not by dropping off full-grown plants at our door. God invites us into the struggle of seeing in a way we couldn’t see before, and giving us those things for which we are incapable of asking. The gifts which we didn’t know were gifts. That’s why Jesus spoke in parables: so that by peering into them, our eyes might be shaped into a new way of seeing.
But the parable of the wheat and the tares is one that I am not particularly inclined to hear or understand. It is a parable of judgment, and this judgment may be on me. The crowds only got to hear the parables, but it’s when Jesus is alone with his disciples that he lets them peer further in. And that’s when we learn the difference between the wheat and the weeds: “the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one,” and at the end of the age the children of the evil one will be thrown “into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
If we are surprised or shocked by these words, it may be a sign that we haven’t been reading our Bibles very closely. As I said in a sermon not long ago, the picture of Jesus as a “really nice guy” is not the Jesus that we find in scripture. The Jesus who welcomes and forgives and heals is also the Jesus who judges the proud and wrecks temple property and speaks truth to the powerful. As a rule, Episcopalians and other mainline Christians don’t really emphasize the Jesus who judges, even though every Sunday we stand up and say we believe that Jesus “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” In our well-intentioned eagerness to fashion the church into a judgment-free zone—an impossible task in which no church succeeds—we forget that without judgment there can be no such thing as Good News. Judgment is only bad news for those who tighten the bonds of injustice, who fail to share bread with the hungry and give shelter to the homeless and clothing to the naked, in the words of the prophet Isaiah. Judgment is bad news for oppression; but for the oppressed, it is the hope that God will not allow injustice to go on for ever. Truly, that at the last day, Christ will judge the living and the dead, and it is he who will have the last word.
The challenge of the parable of the wheat and the tares is that we may be tempted to assume the position of judge, when it is only Christ who judges. We can run roughshod over this parable, if we aren’t careful. We can too easily project our favorite divisions onto the parable in an “us-versus-them” fashion. Who are the children of the kingdom? Well, obviously, I am—I and everyone like me who generally agrees with how I think. Who are the children of the evil one? That’s everyone else—those kinds of people that I have been groomed to resent and despise, for whom I nurture a grudge. That’s an easy sort of thing to do to this parable, isn’t it? The hyper-polarization of our present moment lends itself to this kind of reading. The us-versus-them mentality may feel good, but in truth it does violence to Jesus’ words. When we hear his parable, we shouldn’t be looking at those around us, and wondering which ones are the tares. Instead, we should be looking into our own hearts, and searching for the tares that are sown among the wheat.
To know and understand the character of our faith is to engage in the hard work of spotting weeds among wheat. We know that good seed has been sown in us, and it has grown into wheat as we have grown, and has yielded a harvest. But if we survey the field of our faith long enough, we will also find plenty of weeds—and the signs of weeds that we can’t even see. Some of those weeds may be unique to us as individuals; others are the strains of seed that have spread from field to field, and which all fields will have in common. A wheat field can be so intermixed with weeds that it’s nearly impossible to separate the one from the other.
One way to understand the interplay of wheat and tares in the church is to see it through the lens of race and faith. For most of my upbringing as a Christian, and I’m sorry to say, even for most of my formation as a student in seminary, I did not see the interwovenness of race and faith, seeds which were being sown together, both wheat and tares. I did not begin to see it until my last semester in seminary, when I took a course from a professor named Willie Jennings, who was one of only two Black teachers that I ever had in my twenty-two years of formal education. Dr. Jennings opened my eyes to perceive the tares that had grown up amidst the wheat. In an article written a few years ago, Dr. Jennings describes the problem this way:
“Race and Christian faith have always played together in the Western world, woven inside of each other like strands of braided hair… We have never unbraided the strands of race and Christian faith, and because of this our Christian faith is deeply diseased. That we are Christians is not in dispute; that we understand what it means to perform our faith, to think as Christians—that is contested terrain. What we are in need of at this crucial moment are women and men who know how to think their faith, perform their faith in ways that untangle the racial imagination from the Christian imagination. What we desperately need at this critical moment are indeed Christian intellectuals.”
To be an adult Christian in America at this moment requires us to disentangle the racial imagination from the Christian imagination—to perceive the tares that have been sown among the wheat. This is not an exclusively American problem, nor it is a recent problem. For example, the interwovenness of race and faith allowed the German Christians to imagine a Jesus who was not Jewish, preventing them from seeing Christ in the faces of their Jewish neighbors. The rest is history. And history, as James Baldwin reminds us, “history is not the past. It is the present.”
If we are visited by the grace and mercy of God, we will begin to spot the tares among the wheat. And even if we do, we are not ourselves able to root them out. The angels are the ones who will do that work. The parable reminds us that we are not the agents of our salvation—that only God is the one who can unbraid the weeds from the wheat. Only the Spirit of God can root out the tares. That weeding work is painful. Uncomfortable. If given the choice, we would probably not ask for it. We’re not ready to have our fields refined by the Spirit’s fire. I know I’m not. Because it means that something is going to be burned away—even something that I may think is right and good.
But the judgment of God is also the grace of God. In the end, the burning of the tares is good news, even when we think that it isn’t. God’s judgment is at the same time God’s mercy—they are one and the same. The parables of the kingdom conceal just as much as they reveal. God knows our needs before we ask, and our unworthiness in asking; and God gives us those things for which we cannot, we dare not ask. They are given not because we are worthy, but because Christ is. And that is the Gospel at the heart of the parable: that God is merciful to us even in judgment; that the wheat will be preserved even as the tares are burned; that the righteous may shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father—a kingdom which has no end.
Amen.