(Audio)
“Explain to us the parable of the weeds in the field.”
The short-term implications of the parable are more obvious. The weeds and the wheat must grow together. But the complete explanation considers not just the process but the end.
The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels.
The world is a field precisely because it is designed to produce a harvest. The point of the parable, therefore, is not simply that we should all just get along together. It is not simply trying to say that we cannot avoid difficult people and circumstances and so ought to make the best of it. The point is that what is happening now is happening so that the maximum harvest can be collected. Even the apparent freedom of the Evil One to act in sowing seeds is permitted, not simply because nothing better was on the table, but rather because even from his action God could bring some greater good.
The Son of Man and his angels are more than able to dispose of the weeds at the proper time. Yet here and now weeds provide a real occasion for the servants in the field to doubt their master's providence or even his competence. The fact that the wheat must grow in the midst of adversity makes it seem as though they could have been grown better in some pristine garden where there were no weeds. We recall that they were originally planted in such a garden and it was only due to sin that:
cursed is the ground because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field. (see Genesis 3:17-18).
Was this disaster not preventable? Could the seeds of these weeds not have been kept from the garden? Adam, the first gardener, could have done so for God "put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it" (see Genesis 2:15). If God had not allowed him to chose the curse the blessing offered could not exist in any meaningful sense. In the garden of Eden the wheat could have become all that it was meant to be by staying true to itself and growing even in the presence of that first seed of temptation. But with an eye to the eventual harvest God had a plan to bring good even from the curse. He sent his Son to be the new gardener, to till the field of the world, to make it bear supernatural fruit even and especially amidst trials. In this way we learn that nothing can hinder the growth of that which is divinely planted. Nothing can hinder the harvest. And so we must not go off and do our own thing. We must not come up with our own agricultural program, hermetically sealing ourselves off from all possibility of challenge or difficulty. We must grow where the LORD plants us because it is he who can bring us to the harvest.
Then the righteous will shine like the sun
in the Kingdom of their Father.
We are made to shine like the sun. That is the whole point of what is happening in the field here and now. We need to return to trust in the gardener, to not running and hiding when the field does not meet our expectations.
Among the nations’ idols is there any that gives rain?
Or can the mere heavens send showers?
Is it not you alone, O LORD,
our God, to whom we look?
You alone have done all these things.
Shine Like the Sun - Matt Maher
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