“Those Who Are Just Must Be Kind”

 

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.