Wheat and Weeds

by Barry Pollard

(Based on Ps 139:1-11, 23-24; Ro 8:12-25; Matt 13:24-30,36-43)

As I prepared, and read through each of our passages, one simple thought kept returning to me: We live imperfectly in an imperfect world.

That may sound profound, but it is hardly a new insight. The Psalm we heard was written thousands of years ago. Paul’s letter to the Romans and Matthew’s Gospel are nearly two thousand years old. God’s people have wrestled with the reality of a broken world for generations upon generations.

The question is not whether the world is imperfect. We all know that. The question is: What does Scripture teach us to cope with that imperfection and live faithfully within it?
A common response today is to blame someone else for our difficulties and problems. We could simply point to the Evil One and say, “It’s all his fault,” and stop there. But as children of the living God, we are called to something deeper than assigning blame. We are called to trust, to persevere, and to hope.

Our first reading, Psalm 139, reminds us that God knows us completely: “O Lord, you have searched me and known me.”
God knows when we sit and when we rise. He knows our thoughts before we think them and our words before we speak them. There is nowhere we can flee from his presence.

Having spent last weekend with family, including two energetic grandsons, watching brothers only three years apart negotiate life together, I was reminded that it is easy to imagine God watching us – like a policeman waiting for us to get things wrong.
But that is not the picture the Psalm gives us. God watches us as a loving parent. Just as my daughter and son-in-law lovingly guide their boys: stepping in to settle arguments, teaching them better ways to behave, comforting them when everything reaches ‘custard point’, so God patiently guides us.
“I can never escape from your Spirit. I can never get away from your presence,” says the psalmist.

Whether we find ourselves on life’s highest mountain or in its darkest valley, God is already there. What reassurance that gives us.

Many people spend enormous energy pretending. Pretending their faith is stronger than it is. Pretending life is under control. Pretending they are not anxious or struggling. God is not fooled. He knows our doubts, our fears, our failures and our hopes, and he loves us still. That is why the Psalm ends with such a courageous prayer: “Search me, O God, and know my heart … Point out anything in me that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life.”
God is not standing over us to condemn us. He searches us in order to heal us. Like every loving Father, he leads his children onto better paths.

Paul continues that same theme in Romans. “All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” We have not received a spirit of fear but the Spirit of adoption. We can call God “Abba, Father”, a deeply personal expression of love and trust. As God’s children we are also his heirs. But Paul adds an important reminder: if we share Christ’s glory, we also share his suffering.

Then Paul speaks repeatedly about groaning. Creation groans. Believers groan. The whole world longs for restoration. Even with the Holy Spirit living within us, we still experience sickness, disappointment, injustice and death. We long for the day when God completes what he has begun, when sin and suffering cease to have a hold over us. For now, we live between Christ’s resurrection and the fulfilment of his Kingdom. We live with hope, but we do not yet live in perfection.

We live imperfectly in an imperfect world.

And that brings us naturally to Jesus’s parable in Matthew. A farmer sows good seed, but during the night an enemy sows weeds among the wheat. The farm workers want immediate action. “Shall we pull out the weeds?” they ask. The farmer replies, “No . . . Let both grow together until the harvest.” It is a surprising answer.
We often want God to remove everything evil immediately. We want every injustice corrected now, every hardship ended today. But instead, Jesus teaches patience.

The world remains a place where wheat and weeds grow together. Good and evil exist side by side. As followers of Christ, we continue living in a world that has not yet been fully redeemed. Are we despairing? Because the weeds and wheat grow side by side, we must always be aware of which crop we belong to. I trust you know that we are holy wheat, eh? So, we must be mindful that we don’t get too mixed up with the weeds.
It is so easy to be conformed to the world and its thinking. Do you, like me, take it for granted that advertisements distort, contracts contain fine print that no one draws our attention to, and professionals conceal one another’s malpractice. There are few areas of life that are uncompromised, few social structures that are not tainted, few relationships that retain any semblance of honesty and wholesomeness. We live in an age which, generally speaking, evades truth.

But Jesus said (John 14:6), “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”  The way, the truth and the life! Jesus is the absolute embodiment of God’s truth, the only path to salvation, and the ultimate source of our spiritual life.

See how far the world has moved away from God’s way.
Anyone who has ever kept a garden knows weeds seem to grow faster than our crops. We prepare the soil, plant carefully, water faithfully even through a hot and dry Tairua summer, and yet the weeds appear almost overnight.
Life often feels like that. We pray. We try to do what is right. We seek God’s will. Yet illness comes. Relationships fracture. Wars continue. Injustice flourishes. Sometimes it feels as though the weeds are winning.

But God has shown us how we are to live, and our response is to shine his light into the dark world. By doing so we actually have an opportunity to influence, for the better, those who fall outside our crop. We can stand up and challenge the truth-evaders. We can lead lives that are honest and wholesome, based on the truth of Jesus. We can show a better way.
Because the wheat and weeds continue to exist, one beside the other, doesn’t mean the farmer has lost control of the field. There will be a harvest. There will be justice. There will be a day when God sets everything right. That is our hope.

One of the oldest questions people ask is, “If God is good, why is the world like this?”
Our readings today don’t offer a neat philosophical answer. Instead, they offer something better. They remind us that God knows us. God is patient with us. God is bringing history towards his promised harvest.

So, yes, we live imperfectly in an imperfect world. But we do not live in it alone. Our loving Father walks beside us. His Spirit strengthens us. Christ has secured our future. The Farmer has not abandoned his field. And one day, the harvest will come.

Anyone with ears to hear should listen and understand!