When I see a weed growing in my grass my first impulse is to yank it out.  However I have learned that pulling them out almost always does more harm than good.  Pulling weeds just makes them multiply.  Weed killer works great but it can take a long time to work.  But leaving them alone is the most important thing; fighting the impulse to do something right now is hard but necessary.

The people who designed our lectionary decided to omit Mt. 13:31-35 from the middle of our lesson which does us a disservice.  It says, “Jesus told the crowd all these things in parables, without a parable he told them nothing.  This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet:  “I will open my mouth to speak in parables; I will proclaim things hidden since the foundation of the world.” This will be my focus.

What are these things hidden since the foundation of the world?  It is that we think we are smart enough to rush out and pull up the weeds.  God tells us we are not.  For in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat and destroy them both.  Let them grow together until the harvest.  I hope this reminds each of you of Luther’s teaching that we are simultaneously saints and sinners.

Our faulty way is to act now without judgment and wisdom to get rid of the weeds immediately.  Jesus is clearly talking about the existence of evil in the world.  He is saying that God sowed a good creation and then the enemy came to sow bad seed into that good creation.

The sad point is that the enemy can simply go away after doing his dirty work because then we, become the over eager servants willing to do the rest.  In trying to restore order we just make more and more chaos.  This is the contrast between our way and God’s way. 

I think that this parable is really a little sermon on Genesis 3, the fall of people.  The serpent comes into creation and sows the seeds of temptation.  That causes the forbidden fruit to appear desirable, bringing people into rivalry with God.  The shape of that rivalrous desire is to believe we can know the difference between good and evil as God knows it.  In our fallen state we think we know how to weed out the guilty culprit but we don’t.  This bad thinking is exactly the sin that the Lamb of God came to take away from us.

This is something like the text which says why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye.  We really need to stay focused on ourselves and make the changes in the only person we can change which is what we call I.  It is so important to know and to live your own life.  Looking to Jesus , the way the truth and the life as our model and not to each other.

Jesus came to live out the parable of the wheat and the weeds.  The leaders of the people who put Jesus to death were not bad people, they were well meaning, but they were fallen and wrong people.  We can’t be like God, we shouldn’t be like God.  The knowledge of good and evil belongs to God alone.  Jesus was killed as a result of our human efforts at weeding in God’s garden.

It is hard to know and see that we ourselves continue to sow evil.  Until Jesus died on the cross to expose the sin of the world and came back to give us forgiveness and to offer us peace we couldn’t face this awful truth about ourselves.  That is why it was hidden since the foundation of the world, because on our own we couldn’t face it.  We can now face it because we have already been forgiven of it.

Forgiveness is a powerful alternative way of dealing with others that I would call freedom.  We have a choice to make in our relationships with others that even extends to “evildoers.”  It goes beyond non-violent resistance or any kind of protest.  Forgiveness allows us not to be scandalized by someone else’s evil actions and then reacting with some form of retaliation.  Instead Jesus shows us how to break the cycle of escalating reciprocal violence and conflict with forgiveness.

So today we can see that God’s way is different than ours.  He is content to let us alone until we experience the consequences of our own actions.  We are taught to live by forgiveness.  Forgiveness is God’s way that Jesus showed us.

Forgiveness allows us to live without weed pulling, so that we can experience God’s harvest of a new life lived as we share the forgiveness Jesus gave to us.  St. Paul put it something like this:  It is all God’s grace. We cannot perfect ourselves.  But the more we suppress ourselves and kill the old man the more room is left for the Christ in us to dominate.  Matthew 13:17 says; “Blessed are your eyes that see and your ears for they hear.  Truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, but did not see it and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.”   Thanks be to God for letting us see with Jesus eyes and hear with his ears.

1. What makes us think that we are always right?

2. Do you agree with me that the people in Jesus’ day saw him as a weed that needed to be pulled out?

3. How is forgiveness different from criticism and resistance?