Wisdom 12:13, 16–19 · Psalm 86 · Romans 8:26–27 · Matthew 13:24–43
There
is a weed that grows in the wheat fields of the Middle East so cunning
the ancients called it a counterfeit wheat. We call it darnel. In its
early weeks it is nearly indistinguishable from the good grain, and only
when the heads appear does the imposter reveal itself — by which time
its roots have wound so tightly around the roots of the wheat that to
pull up the one is to pull up the other. Every farmer who first heard
our Lord’s parable knew the dilemma, and knew the householder’s counsel
was hard-won wisdom: “Let them grow together until harvest.” Patience is
not weakness; sometimes it is the only wisdom there is.
Consider
the book from which our first reading is drawn. The Book of Wisdom was
written in Greek, in Alexandria, perhaps a century before Christ, by a
Jewish sage addressing his own people — a minority living in the shadow
of a hostile culture, tempted to conclude that power belonged to the
empire and that their faith was a relic of a smaller world. To them the
sage offers his meditation on the power of God, and here is its paradox:
“For your might is the source of justice; your mastery over all things
makes you lenient to all.”
That line overturns nearly everything
the ancient world — and much of ours — believes about power. In the
logic of empires, might is the source not of justice but of domination;
the insecure ruler lashes out because he is never certain of his throne.
But the God of Israel is so completely sovereign that he has no need to
prove himself by cruelty. Precisely because he is almighty, he can
afford to be merciful: “though you are master of might, you judge with
clemency, and with much lenience you govern us.” Mercy is not the
opposite of power. Mercy is what power looks like when it has nothing
left to prove.
And then the sage draws the moral that stopped me
this week: “You taught your people, by these deeds, that those who are
just must be kind.” God’s own way of exercising justice is meant to be
our schooling. We learn to be just by watching how God is just — with
room left for repentance, the door held open, what an older theology
called interpretatio benigna, the kindly reading extended even to those
who have not earned it. Justice without kindness is only vengeance
wearing a robe.
Which brings us to the parable, and to a word I
hear even good Christians use as though it were Christian: karma. It is
not. Karma is an impersonal law — a cosmic ledger by which every deed
returns to its doer, coldly, without mercy and without appeal. I
understand its appeal, especially when we have been wronged; we want the
universe to balance the books. But the parable of the wheat and the
weeds is something far greater, and far more searching, than karma.
Yes,
there is a reckoning. Let no one preach a Gospel so soft that it
forgets the harvest. At the end, our Lord says, “the Son of Man will
send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all who cause
others to sin and all evildoers.” There is such a thing as divine
justice, and those who spend a lifetime deaf to the wisdom of God’s word
will not discover, at the harvest, that it never mattered.
But
here is the difference from karma, and it is everything: the judgment is
not a mechanism. It is held in the hands of a Person — and a merciful
one. The harvest is deferred. Why does the householder not act at once,
as the servants beg him to? For the same reason the God of Wisdom
governs with lenience: to leave room for repentance. Every day the
harvest is delayed is a day of grace, in which a weed might yet, by
grace, become wheat. Karma cannot forgive; karma cannot convert. Only a
living and merciful God can look upon the counterfeit grain and say: Not
yet — give it time — it may yet be saved.
Notice, too, whom the
Lord does not trust with the sorting — us. “Do you want us to go and
pull them up?” There is real zeal in the question, but the answer is no.
We cannot tell, in this life, the wheat from the weeds with certainty;
the roots are intertwined, and every attempt to purify the field tears
up as much good as bad. And — let us be honest — the line between wheat
and weed does not run tidily between us and them. It runs through the
middle of each of us. On my best days I am a mixed field; so are you. If
God pulled the weeds this morning, which of us would be certain of
standing at noon?
So what does God do with a field like that —
like your soul and mine? He waits. He tends. He sends, as Saint Paul
tells us this morning, his own Spirit to intercede within us “with
inexpressible groanings” when we do not know how to pray as we ought.
The patience that stays the master’s hand is giving you and me the one
thing we most need: time — to repent, to let the good grain grow strong.
The door is still open. But it will not stand open forever, and the
wisdom of the saints is simply this: to become wheat now, while it is
still today.
We see the sage’s paradox take flesh in Jesus Christ,
who possessed all power in heaven and on earth and revealed it not from
a throne but from a cross — the just one who was kind, powerful enough
to forgive the men who drove the nails. That is greatness in the kingdom
of God: not domination, not the satisfying sorting of the world into
friends and enemies, but justice wedded to kindness, strength that
stoops to save, patience that waits and hopes until the harvest.
And
if that is how God is powerful, it is how we are called to be powerful
too — in our families, our arguments, our common life, wherever we are
tempted to yank up the weeds and be done with it. The Lord asks the
harder, holier thing: to be just, and therefore kind; to leave the
harvest to him; and to spend the time we are given becoming the good
grain he can gather, at the last, into his barn.
May the God whose might is the source of all justice make us, his people, both just and kind. Amen.
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