The Field of Society
Text: Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
I have to admit that I struggle with this parable. One thing I don’t like about parables that compare people to plants is that plants are always and forever the same. A weed does not become wheat. Wheat does not become a weed. They are always simply and forever what they are. But people aren’t static. They are dynamic. One needs to only look at the story of Saul becoming Paul, moving from a man that persecuted others to one whose heart was radically transformed by grace, to see the dynamic quality of the human soul. We are never always weeds or always wheat. We are living, breathing, self-contradictory people. Our lives are never as clear cut as the lives of a stock of wheat or the branch of a weed. Martin Luther described it as always being both sinner and saint. We are a conglomeration, not an absolute.
I had an interesting conversation this week about monocultures and farming practices that helped me understand this parable better. I was reminded that monocultures never exist for their own purpose. Wheat does not naturally want to grow in a field in rows without other plants around it. Monocultures were created by humans to help feed and nourish us. Humans cross pollinated and created higher yielding crops, they created fields where one plant was to grow in exclusion of another. This is not the way of the wild, this is the way of the human. It became abundantly clear to me as I considered the cultivating efforts of humans that Jesus was never talking about individuals, he was talking about society and social issues.
We often think of society as our governmental structure, and that’s because our government is supposed to be run by our society, but really a society is a group of people forming a more or less ordered community. For Jesus, society was not so much the government that controlled the region, it was the Jewish community that he lived and had influence within. Roman society looked very different from Jewish society. He was not as interested in the Roman governmental structure as he was with the Jewish religious structure. That was the society he shared life with and freely critiqued. That was his field.
But in this parable, Jesus begins talking about another field, a field he planted. A new type of society, a new group of people more or less ordered around him. It wasn’t the Church yet, but it would grow into it. He was simply preparing the soil for the harvest. In this society, one that should be perfectly centered around Christ, should be deeply connected to him, weeds pop up. The society created by the redeemer of the world still has flaws. How can this be? How can there be evil in something like this? But there it is and people see and recognize it. God’s society is imperfect.
That rightly leads to anger and indignation. We want to pull up the weeds, to tear all the imperfection out, but Jesus says no. He says “...if you gather the weeds, you’ll pull up the wheat along with them. Let both grow side by side until the harvest.” (13:29b-30)
What does that mean? Are we to not do anything about the ills and evils in our society? Are we to simply let them be? That doesn’t sound like the Jesus I know. He freely critiqued the ills of his society, even going so far as to overturn the tables of the money changers in the temple to get his point across.
So I imagined why pulling up weeds could hurt wheat. All I could think of was root systems. What if the roots of the weeds and the wheat are interconnected? If you pull up the weed, you harm the root system of the wheat. You can’t pull the stock. You have to be more delicate. Societal issues aren’t ultimately solved by quick knee jerk responses. They are solved by carefully tending to the root system so that the wheat overpowers the weeds.
We see this image clearly in the section that is missing from our gospel lesson today, the parables between the parable of the weeds and its explanation. Jesus tells the story of the mustard seed, which starts small but becomes a large tree that birds can nest in. He tells about a woman hiding a tiny amount of yeast in a great bushel of wheat and how it worked through all the dough. Within the context of the parable of the wheat and weeds, these parables emphasize the power of the good. We see a bunch of weeds, but we don’t see what God is doing below the surface. We don’t see the cultivation of the root system that eventually overpowers the rest. The weeds aren’t overpowered by being plucked up, they are overcome by the wheat growing up taller and stronger.
What does this look like in real life? I think about the root system that allowed for the weeds of South African Apartheid to rise up, segregating the majority of South Africans from the minority and causing great harm to the country. Apartheid didn’t begin with white people of European descent segregating native Africans into concocted tribal areas. It began with a feeling of European superiority. It began with white Europeans traveling to the African continent, not understanding nor trying to respect the societies that existed there, and creating a European society that ruled over the nation. South African apartheid was supported by the same root structure as slavery and segregation in the United States. If the system had just been plucked up through war, what would have happened to the wheat around the weeds? They would have been harmed. Innocent lives would have been lost. But more insidiously, as the wheat was struggling to recover, trying to pick up the pieces after the wreckage of war, the root system of racism and European superiority would not have been damaged. New weeds could grow in the areas where both root systems were affected.
When one’s world is disrupted, when those who once had more suddenly have less, it is natural to become bitter and resentful. We see this when we look at what happened to Germany after the first World War. Their economy was wracked by defeat and they were impoverished at the moment when they were trying to recover and renegotiate their society. The Nazi party promised easy answers. People were impoverished and scared about the future. Weedy leaders arose and found a way to gain power through fear, using the exposed roots of the weed of racial superiority. We see this happening in our society today on a smaller scale. Impoverishment in predominantly white areas, especially those areas where people used to easily be able to make a living one or two generations ago, has exposed roots of weeds that are growing up and harming our society.
Back to South Africa, the amazing part of their story is that those in charge freely chose to step out of leadership and create a new system of government. A lot of that was done through pressure from both inside and outside of their country. Many from across the globe freely critiqued their system and boycotted their products. Solidarity was strong. So South Africa changed leadership structures. The new leadership chose to use a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to talk about the root causes of the issue. They chose to be open about the harm their weeds had caused. And in doing so, the wheat grew stronger as it overcame the weeds. Now South Africa is far from a perfect country. They have a great deal of poverty that fuels violence. We all have weeds. But what they did allowed for the weakening of the weeds, and there is much less racial anxiety within a country that built a whole system around the division of races. They tried to address the roots instead of pulling the stalk. Part of what made that system work was the reality that white people are the minority in South Africa, the majority were taking power back from a small group. But it is to the credit of the majority, the native African societies of South Africa, that leaders like Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu arose and grew like wheat to overcome weeds in the nation.
When we see issues pop up around us like weeds in the wheat, our first impulse is to pull the stock. Jesus cautions us not to do so. The root system can be deep and the answers are often much more complex than getting rid of the stock of the weeds. It’s about the renegotiating of the entire society, not just taking out the bad bits when we see them here or there. Jesus promises us that at the end of the age the evils in our societies will be taken down. They will be used as fuel to ignite a new age of peace and harmony. But in that age, the entire field is harvested, wheat and weeds. The society will be completely restructured, the entire field will look different. The harvest will have come. It will be the end of human society as we know it and a new thing will be formed, a society that worships at the throne of God. Until that day comes, we are called to grow strong as wheat, knowing that we can overcome the weeds by looking to the roots, not the stalks.
May we go forth with love, not trying to pluck each other like weeds, but trying to cultivate the roots of good wheat. Amen.
