I preached this sermon on Sunday, July 19, 2926, at Christ Presbyterian Church, Milford, Ohio.
The lectionary text is Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
Have you ever looked at a quilt before it was finished?
To someone who has never quilted, it can look like a mess. Loose threads. Odd colors. Patterns that don’t seem to work together.
Martha Enriquez told me this week that quilters call these “scrappy quilts.” They’re made from odds and ends that don’t seem to belong together.
Then she said something I haven’t been able to get out of my head: “If you look at the overall quilt, even with ugly fabrics, it ALWAYS turns out beautiful.”
I wonder if that’s what Jesus is telling us in today’s parable.
Like the unfinished quilt, the field wasn’t finished either. The wheat and weeds were still growing. Yet judgments were already being made about the field—what to do with the weeds, without knowing the consequences.
Once I stopped thinking about the weeds, I noticed something I’d never seen before. Jesus seems more interested in someone else.
Jesus explains almost every detail of the parable…
· He explains the sowers, both of them, and their seeds.
· He explains the field.
· He explains the wheat.
· He explains the weeds.
· He explains the harvest.
· He even explains the angels.
But he never explains the servants. Perhaps because he doesn’t need to. Perhaps because Jesus expects us to recognize ourselves.
If you listen carefully, the longest conversation in the parable isn’t about wheat or weeds at all. It’s between the landowner – the master – and his servants. The servants are asking questions, making assumptions, proposing solutions, and ultimately being given a different task than they were expecting.
Maybe that’s the real question of the parable: What kind of servant will you be? Will you trust the master, or take matters into your own hands?
There’s an important detail about this parable that would have been obvious to Jesus’ first listeners, but isn’t obvious to us. It’s about the weed. An alternate title for this sermon might have been, “Jesus Condones Weed,” but that’s not really what’s happening here.
The New English Translation calls the weed darnel, and the notes in that translation explain why. Darnel looks almost identical to wheat during the early stages of growth. Until the seed heads mature, experienced farmers can have difficulty telling them apart, the darnel and the wheat. Their root systems will also intertwine, so pulling one often uproots the other. Worse, the mature seeds of darnel can be toxic if ingested.
This detail about what kind of weed or tare that was involved tells us something important. The servants weren’t foolish. Their concern was right. Their response wasn’t.
I. The servants notice something is wrong.
They’ve discovered a genuine problem. They’re asking a reasonable question, “Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field?”
Jesus wants us to turn that into a theological question. “If God is good… If the seed is good… Why are there weeds?”
II. The servants question.
They’re asking the questions every believer eventually asks.
Where did evil come from? Why does suffering grow where God planted goodness? Why does the field – the world – look like this?
Notice they don’t accuse the sower. They begin with trust. “Sir, didn’t you sow good seed?”
III. The servants want to get to the root of the problem.
“Where then did these weeds come from?”, the servants ask. It’s the first step of what businesses call Root Cause Analysis—trying to identify the real cause of a problem before deciding how to solve it.
They are asking the landowner our theological questions. Where did evil come from? Who supplied the suffering? Who instigated injustice?
Again, they don’t accuse the sower. But he’s the landowner, he should know what’s happening in his fields. They hope he has the answers.
IV. The servants want to fix it.
Their instinct is action. They ask, “Do you want us to go and pull up the weeds?”
It’s the old, “Ready, Fire, Aim” approach that makes a project manager like me shudder.
They want to fix the problem the only way they know how. As Abraham Maslow is attributed to saying, “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
They want to clean it up. Separate the righteous from the unrighteous. Protect the field. Protect the world. Protect the church. “Ready, fire, aim.”
The landowner simply says, “No.” No is a complete sentence, especially when coming from God. The landowner has his reasons for saying no. Because…
V. The Master knows something the servants don’t.
With their limited knowledge or experience, the servants’ solution would have destroyed the entire crop.
The servants cannot distinguish between the wheat and the tare as they grow. When the servants can finally distinguish the difference, the roots of the different plants are intertwined. They can’t pull out the weeds without pulling out the harvest.
Sometimes… zeal causes more damage than evil itself.
We know this. Church history contains many examples where Christians tried to purify the church by various means, including force, suspicion, exclusion, or persecution. Sadly, I have seen this happen myself (Alan, Gary), run off by the church. Faithful believers were uprooted in the process.
VI. Waiting is not indifference.
· The landowner doesn’t say, “Ignore the weeds.”
· He doesn’t say, “Pretend evil isn’t there.”
· He doesn’t say, “Walk away until harvest.”
He says: “Let both grow together until the harvest.” Keep tending the field. Wait for everything to mature.
That’s when the harvesters will be able to distinguish the crops; when the angels can discern between good and evil.
That’s the time for judgement. And it’s not for the servants or for us to decide.
