Religious fanatics have probably done more damage to religion than all the atheists, agnostics and public sinners put together! As Blaise Paschal said, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction!” Cock-sure and blind as bats, they claim to have perfect eye-sight when it comes to good and evil, setting themselves up as judge, jury and executioner!
We are painfully familiar with fanatic Muslims who would fly planes into high rise buildings as a way to rid the world of “degenerate western influences” or our own Puritans who would burn so-called “witches” at the stake to keep their church “pure.” In our own church, fanatics had a heyday in what we know as the “Inquisition.” The “Inquisition” was invented by religious fanatics who wanted to do a good thing: rid the church of heresy, error and sin, but they chose some of the most vicious, cruel, inhuman and unChristian, methods imaginable to accomplish their goals! Many good, holy and even saintly people were brutally killed by those misguided people with their "good" intentions - all in the name of God, of course! As Jesus reminds us in today's gospel: beware of overzealous, fanatic weed-pullers!
Today's parable is one of my favorites. In it, Jesus reminds us that in his kingdom here on earth, the good and the bad exist alongside each other and nobody but God can really tell the difference! To make his point, he again turns to farming for a parable. He tells the story of a farmer who planted good seeds in his field, only to find out that, as they sprouted, weeds also appeared growing right there with them!
In this parable, God is that farmer and we are his hired hands. One day, the farmer’s hired hands came in to report the presence of weeds growing among the wheat and to suggest that they could to fire-up their big weed-eaters and go to work on them! The wise farmer gives them a quick and firm “no, don’t you dare!” “Leave the weeds alone and let them grow together with the wheat till harvest time!” Wisely, the farmer tells his hired hands that if they uprooted the weeds now, they would end up pulling up the wheat along with them because, at this point, no one could tell one from the other!
This is a wonderful parable because the specific weed Jesus is talking about is an especially noxious weed that looks exactly like wheat when it is young and tender. In fact, people back then had a nickname for the particular kind of weed Jesus was talking about. They called it “bastard wheat!” Not only did it look exactly like wheat when it was young and tender, its roots also entangled themselves around the roots of tender wheat shoots! Not only can they not be distinguished, one from the other, their roots had become so entwined that if you tried to pull the weeds up too early, you would end up destroying the precious wheat crop by pulling up the wheat too early as well!
When the time finally came for harvest, the weeds and wheat would be cut together and threshed. Threshing was the process of separating the seeds from the chaff. The wheat seeds had a golden color and the weed seeds had a slate gray color which made it easier to separate them. The weed seeds were slightly poisonous, having a bitter taste and causing dizziness and sickness, so they had to be destroyed. The precious wheat could then be stored in the farmer's barn.
The point of the parable is that, unlike human beings who tend to judge quickly, God is lenient and patient.
This parable clearly reflects Jesus’ own experience of being condemned by religious people. They thought of themselves as the precious wheat while the social outcasts that Jesus associated with as noxious weeds. Jesus could see that often it is the other way around! As Scripture says, “People see externals, but God can see into people's hearts.”
My friends, the message to us today is simple! Good and evil exist side by side in the church and in the world, but we need to be very weary of overzealous fanatics who want to "pull weeds" and “clean house” - whether they come from the church or the government! More often than not, those people do more harm than good because they really cannot see what they are doing, or even understand the purity of their own motives, all that well! As Jesus put it, "Be aware of wolves dressed up to look like sheep!"
What to do with "weeds," has always been, and will always will be, a problem for the church! However, as the parable teaches us today, we also need to know that weed-pullers have sometimes created bigger problems than the "weeds" they so eagerly want to pull! As Jesus said, "...if you pull up the weeds you might uproot the wheat along with them. Let them grow together until harvest." As Billy Graham so wisely put it, "It is the Holy Spirit's job to convict, God's job to judge and my job to love!"
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