When I was a kid my father had a small garden in the backyard, which was his pride and joy. Now my Dad worked long stretches of shift work for the weather bureau, and there were times when he could not get to caring for his garden. His patch was beginning to look a little messy and chaotic. So one day when I was about 8 or 9, I decided I was going to help my father by pulling the weeds out of the garden. My problem was that I did not know what was a weed and what was a good plant, so I had to make some guesses. I think I pulled out a whole row of beans. I’m sure it must have been a vegetable that I didn’t much care for, anyway. Of course, my Dad was not real pleased with that, but lucky for me he saw my good intentions, and not the actual results of my “good” deed, and he taught me the difference between weeds and good plants. He also taught me that sometimes we have to let the plants grow long enough to be able to identify whether they were good plants or weeds.
It is a good thing to keep our gardens weeded. Otherwise the weeds will take over the garden, stunt the growth of the plants we want to grow by competing for food, sunlight, and nutrients. We all admire the garden that has lush growth of tomatoes, corn, and beans, all in straight rows, with no weeds in sight. We know that the gardener there will have a great crop. The slaves in the gospel parable knew that, too. They probably wanted to be seen as good workers, who produced a good crop. They wanted to pluck out the weeds so the harvest would be plentiful. But the householder knew that the roots of the weeds grew in a way that the roots were intertwined with the wheat. Weeding would destroy most of the harvest.
Weeding is fine when it comes to our gardens. The problem comes of course when the crop is people. Our human impulse is to cull out the people who do evil things, weed out those who aren’t productive, or at least marginalize them so they don’t get in the way of us productive people. Perhaps we can help God along a little bit, by getting rid of the weeds, and by exterminating evil. Perhaps we think we can help God bring the Kingdom a little sooner. But our roots are intertwined, and exterminating evil only damages us as well.
The movie Hotel Rwanda is about the genocide of Tutsi’s by Hutu tribes-people. The Hutu believed that the Tutsi’s were inherently evil, by nature of their birth. They called them cockroaches, and because they believed that by exterminating them they would make Rwanda a better place, they felt justified in all kinds of horrendous torture, mutilation, and killing. They diminished themselves, doing evil things trying to fight evil. It happens in many places, in Nazi Germany, in Darfur, in Serbia. These are not distant, ancient events. They have happened within our recent memories, and by people not so very different from us, even by Christians.
Great evil can begin with wonderful intentions. Hitler began with the notion of restoring national pride and honor to Germany. Osama bin Laden began with the intention of standing up for the poor and downtrodden of his people in Saudi Arabia. The folks who flew airplaines into the World Trade Center believed that they were instruments of God’s vengeance, and that they would receive God’s blessings for what they saw as their heroic sacrifice. They could not see the evil they were doing had transformed them into weeds themselves.
But Jesus tells us there is another way. And that way is to be patient, to wait, and let him sort it all out. Jesus does not say that we are all good, that evil does not exist, or that if we wait long enough all evil will be turned to good. But he does say that it is not up to us to judge that evil. When we do we may find that there is evil that exists in our own hearts, and we will be judging ourselves.
Yes evil resides among us. And we as a society must do what we can to protect us from its effects. But we cannot think that we can weed it out, and leave only the wheat. We may find that if we let it grow, that what we thought was weed, is wheat that just looks a little different.
If we look closely enough, we may even find that we even have a few weedy characteristics ourselves, though we may try to hide it. For the most part the world is not divided into good people and evil people, but each of us contains both good and evil intentions. If we let him, Jesus can transform evil into good, weeds into wheat, and if it cannot transformed, it is up to God to deal with the consequences. That is the hope Christ gives us – the hope of transformation and redemption.
Harvest day will come soon enough. We cannot escape God’s judgment. How will God deal with the weeds then? Of course, that it not for us to know. We tend to think in terms of absolutes, that people will either be all good and acceptable and gathered into the barn, or they will be evil and be burned. But if we are all a mixture of good and evil, good intentions and selfish bad intentions, how will God deal with us then? If God is just, how will he separate the good from the bad in each person?
When I was in college I worked as an orderly in a hospital. I recall one young man who had been badly burned. I had to help get him up from bed and support him as he walked up and down the corridor. Every day his burns had to be washed and cleaned. They tended to scab over, and so some areas had to be scrubbed. You can imagine how excruciating the pain must have been. I’m sure there have been advances in how burns are treated today. But in order for that young man to be healed and whole, he had to be washed, however painful it was.
I would suggest that could be a metaphor for one way for us to think about God’s judgment. Although, it is not language we tend to use in our church, we have all heard about being “washed in the blood of the lamb,” and coming out reconciled, forgiven, clean, and whole. It sounds like a rather benign kind of process. But I wonder if it isn’t more like an acid bath, when our scabs and dirt are scrubbed away. We will be shown how our sins have hurt those we love, how our actions and intentions have hurt God, how we have hurt ourselves. Our remorse will be painful. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. The deeper our sins, the deeper the cleaning must go. In order for us to be healed and whole, we must be washed, however painful it may be.
We already know the painfulness of sincere confession and repentance as we catalogue the ways we have hurt God, or others, or ourselves. We recognize the scabs that have formed over our wounds. Through self-examination we see that what we thought was wheat, might really be weeds. Perhaps the more we can scrub away now, the more we can live as fruitful wheat now, the less scrubbing we will need later. Even the good wheat must be threshed and separated from the chaff.
We sometimes wonder how God can be both just and merciful. By God’s justice, we are not off the hook. We are responsible for our weeds, the unhealthy things we allow to grow up beside our good character. But by God’s mercy, God is unwilling to sacrifice whatever is good in order to keep his garden pure. Even if that means that life will be chaotic and messy. Even if that means that evil will have its day. But the good news is that all of us will be gathered in the harvest, even if we must take a bath, and we will be washed clean and be healthy and whole. At the harvest, justice and mercy will meet each other, and we will be gathered in.