Eight Sunday after Pentecost
“Wheat and Weeds” — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Genesis 28:10-19a/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Matthew 13:24-30,36-43/NRSVUE)
About twenty years ago, the company I worked for was going through what a disinterested observer might call “significant organizational change” — though those of us who actually had to live through it probably used far less polite words to describe what was happening.
During such turbulent times in an office, when the works never stops, all sorts of people are coming and going, and stress abounds, people’s patience can run a bit short, and this was true in one department whose personnel were particularly disgruntled — and not shy about making that fact known to anyone would listen.
This was an unpleasant situation for everyone involved, but especially so for their boss — a well-intentioned fellow who mostly just wanted everybody to do their jobs, get along and be happy. His initial strategy for putting an end to their griping was a fairly simple one: he was going to take them all out for lunch.
On the surface, this seemed like a decent enough idea. I mean, they were spending long days cooped up inside crunching numbers and eating at their desks; they truly did need a break, and the chance to get out the office was welcomed by all concerned.
By all accounts, the lunch was rather enjoyable for the people in the group, and their boss thought that he’d diffused the festering discontent, which he had — at least for a little while, anyway. I say this because, after a few short weeks of relative peace and harmony, things started to get ugly again. So how did the boss respond? Well, having achieved some measure of success the first time, he decided to run the same play: it was time for another lunch. And, low and behold, the exact same thing happened. He eventually tried this a third time and the problems resurfaced again.
In the middle of all this, the powers-that-be at our company decided to send a bunch of us — including not only yours truly, but also the person who was in charge of the disgruntled lunch bunch — to a management training seminar. When we arrived, we learned that one of the lessons on agenda was “Dealing With Group Conflict.” I remember thinking to myself, “This should be interesting” — and indeed it was because the case study presented was basically the one I just described. The boss in that case had reached out in frustration to this management consultant to get his take on the situation.
“What’s the problem?” the consultant asked.
“They’re stressed, they’re tired, and they’re always complaining; I’ve tried to do something nice for them with the hopes of making things better, but it never seems to work,” the exasperated boss responded.
“Well, what is the message you’re conveying to them by doing what you’re doing?” the consultant inquired.
“That I care about them and that have their backs?” the boss answered in the form of a question, which, I must say, belied a certain lack of conviction in his own answer.
Our speaker replied, “It seems to me that what you’re actually telling them is that if they keep complaining you’ll keep taking them out to lunch, so why would they ever stop complaining?”
You could have heard a pin drop in the hotel ballroom in which our seminar was being held as that one began to sink in — leading me to conclude that a whole lot of other people had tried to solve office problems with free lunches and failed.
Truth is, even when we set out with the intention of doing good, things can go off the rails in unanticipated ways — I’m sure we’ve all experienced this before. And sometimes it takes a different perspective to help us see things that we, for whatever reason, don’t see.
In the 1930s, the sociologist Robert Merton addressed this in a social and economic context in his theory of the “Law of Unintended Consequences.” Merton cited the quintessential example of Prohibition here in the U.S., where a policy with the seemingly laudable goals of regulating (and thus reducing) vice actually ended up creating a thriving and very lucrative business opportunity that enabled organized crime to take root and thrive.
During the 1950s, theologian (and UCC pastor) Reinhold Niebuhr explored this same basic premise from the vantage point of morality and faith. Niebuhr concluded that very human tendencies like self-interest and pride lead us to overestimate our own ability to understand all of life’s complexities as we seek to problem solve, resulting in some disastrous consequences throughout history for us and for the world in which we live.
In a nutshell, we don’t know what we don’t know, but we often screw up when act like we know what we don’t know — you know? Said a bit differently, the road to hell is sometimes paved with good intentions. And that seems to be at least part of what Jesus is driving at in today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel, the “Parable of Weeds among the Wheat.”
Jesus lived way back in the first century when people were still quite confident that sickness was caused by demons and that the earth was flat, so he couldn’t exactly lean on modern disciplines like sociology or theology or any other “ologies” to analyze what was happening in the world around him.
But Jesus, it’s fair to say, did have a pretty solid grasp of human nature, and he could also tell a good story in order to explain complex ideas, which is exactly what he chooses to do here. And while Jesus’s listeners may not have known much about science, they did know an awful lot about farming, so this particular tale would have resonated with them in a way that it probably doesn’t with us.
As it begins, Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a landowner who sows wheat seeds in his field. One night while everyone is asleep, an enemy comes and sows weeds among the wheat before sneaking away unnoticed. When the wheat begins to grow, so to do the weeds. The slaves working in the fields ask the landowner if he wants them to try and pull up all the weeds, but he replies, “No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.” His solution to the problem is to let the wheat and the weeds grow alongside one another until the harvest, at which time it will be clear which is which, and the weeds can be done away with once and for all.
To give Jesus’s extended agricultural metaphor some additional context, the actual weeds to which he refers are likely what’s known as darnel, a plant that closely resembles wheat right up until the harvest, at which time it becomes much easier to distinguish them. Dealing with these two identical-looking plants existing side by side — one good, one not so good — was a problem that Jesus’s first listeners encountered on a daily basis.
In the second half of today’s reading, Jesus’s disciples ask him to explain this parable, which he does — though I’m not sure his explanation clears it up. According to Jesus, he is the one who sows the good seed (the children of the kingdom), the devil is the one who sows the bad seed (the children of the evil one). The harvest is the time of the last judgement and the harvesters are the angels, who will swoop down separate the weeds from the wheat, burn the former, keep the latter, and all will be good. The end. But, once again, you’ve gotta wonder, given that Jesus is the one telling this story, if it’s really that simple.
I mean, by reading it that way and leaving it at that, someone might conclude that there’s no point in doing anything to make the world a better place because God will just sort it all out in the end. But that conclusion is completely inconsistent with all the rest of Jesus’s teachings.
And yet that’s exactly what some folks — even some folks in the Christian church — were saying about the work of Martin Luther King and others involved in the civil rights movement: “Don’t make trouble; don’t upset the apple cart; just put up with it for now and God will eventually fix it all when Judgement Day finally comes.” Really? Do you think that’s what Jesus actually means?
Okay, so Jesus is going to come back at some unknown date in the future, at which point everything is going to be set right; but that doesn’t mean we’re absolved of our obligation to live into our God-given call to make things better right here and right now — even though we don’t necessarily fully comprehend what’s wrong or how to deal with it, even though we’re imperfect beings with imperfect understanding.
In this parable, Jesus acknowledges the presence of good and evil in the world, but it’s worth noting that he doesn’t go so far as to explain why they coexist or even what they mean; they just kind of are, and we’re left to figure out the rest.
Is evil the product of an actual person — namely, the devil? Or perhaps this devil is yet another metaphor — a way of externalizing, of distancing ourselves (as people and as societies) from those less admirable aspects of our humanness that we wish weren’t a part of it; you know, things like, greed, self-interest, pride and ignorance; things that inspire us to do harm instead of good; things that lead us to do harm when we’re actually trying to do good. I’ll leave that one out there for you to ponder at your own convenience.
What I’m left wondering at the end of this parable, though, is what those workers in the field ended up doing. Did they heed the landowner’s call to do nothing, which would certainly have been the less risky option (and also the lazier one)? Or did they get down on the ground and actually try to do something — carefully studying individual plants trying to figure out which were wheat and which were weeds, removing the weeds as best they could given what they saw and knew in order to give the wheat the best possible chance at surviving and thriving — knowing all the while that there was a chance they might not get it right?
They were humans (albeit fictional ones) so it could have gone either way. But having observed what Jesus says and does throughout the gospels, and having heard what he calls his disciples to do, what do you think those workers in the story should have done?
But if they did choose to do something rather than putting it all back on God, and ended up getting it wrong — despite their good intentions — I’d like to think they paid attention and learned something along the way that would help things go better next time.
Let’s face it, we’re all going to run afoul of the law of unintended consequences at some point; the question is whether we’ll have the humility to admit we were wrong, the desire to learn from our mistakes, and the courage to try again.
And perhaps that’s all that God expects from us as we await that day when all will be on earth as it is in heaven.