Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43
Fr. Murphy walks into a pub in Donegal and says to the first man he meets: Do you want to go to heaven?
The man said: I do, father.
The priest said: Then stand over there against the wall.
The the priest asked the second man: Do you want to go to heaven?
Certainly, father, was the man’s reply.
Then stand over there against the wall, said the priest.
Then Fr. Murphy walked up to O’Toole and said: Do you want to go to heaven?
O’Toole said: No, I don’t, father.
The priest said: I don’t believe this. You mean to tell me that when you die you don’t want to go to heaven?
O’Toole said: Oh, when I die, yes, father. But I was thinkin’ you were putting a group together to go right now!
Though most of us believe in a heavenly place after death, none of us is in a great hurry to get there. And most of us have a sense that it’s a better place is not necessarily a given. So there is a concern that there may be an alternate destination that hopefully can be avoided.
Jesus in the gospel lesson this morning talks a bit about this. In the story Jesus tells about a man who sows good seed in his field, but at night his enemy comes and sows weeds among his seed. As the grain matures so do the weeds, and the servants want to go and pull up the weeds. But the man stops them lest the damage the grain in pulling up the weeds. He tells them to let them grow together until the harvest and at harvest time he will separate the weeds from the grain, burning the weeds and gathering the grain.
Then, just to make sure that his disciples get it, he explains the parable to them. And there are a number of things that we need to pay attention to among them.
Jesus tells us that the world – the whole world – is a mixed bag. There is good and evil in the world, including the church. The world is not perfect, nor can it be. There are the good seeds, the sons of the Kingdom planted by Jesus, and weed seed, sons of the evil one – the devil. Yet most of us function with the premise that perfection is possible.
When true accidents happen, situations where negative things have happened to us but there has been no malice intended, don’t we still want to attach blame? Don’t many still file law suits because we don’t really believe in accidents? Things should be perfect. If not, it must be somebody’s fault. And these days we even blame weather on someone. The reason that it is too hot or too cold or too many hurricanes is because somebody’s to blame; we can fix it.
And it is the same in the church. Don’t we expect the church to be perfect? We forget the fact that we are all sinners, here seeking God’s mercy and forgiveness. We seek his guidance and strength in word and sacrament to live in Christ, to grow in him, yet we are not perfect. But we get offended when others in our church family don’t meet our expectations or treat us how we like, or stumble in their faith.
The devil is always busy sowing seed, especially in the church: Doubt, judgmentalism, and by that I don’t mean it’s wrong to discern wrong from right, but thinking one is somehow better than another, false teaching, undermining truth. He wants a weedy church, fruitless and unattractive.
I heard the story of an encounter of a pastor with a person. The person asked him if he went to church. No, he said, because the church is full of hypocrites. Oh, I understand, said the pastor, but please come anyway. We always have room for one more.
Martin Luther, in a sermon on this passage, made another cogent point about the wheat and tares church. Luther says:
Again this gospel teaches how we should conduct ourselves toward these heretics and false teachers. We are not to uproot nor destroy them. Here he (Jesus) says publicly let both grow together. We have to do here with God’s word alone; for in this matter he who errs today may find the truth tomorrow. Who knows when the word of God may touch his heart?
The miracle of the church is that the weeds can be transformed into wheat.
According to Jesus’ understanding, there is no grey area in the middle; one is good seed or weed seed. Both will grow and flourish, according to their source, one Jesus the son of God, the other the devil. And in their maturity they will reflect their origin – those they identify with, who they serve in their life: one sons of the kingdom, the other, sons of the devil. But only one will bear fruit of value. And it is important to know which one is which because it matters how we live. It matters who we identify with, who we own as our sower. There will be an end to life, and a judgment, which will decide to which end each will go; the weeds gathered and thrown into the fire where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, and the good seed, the righteous, who will be gathered together to shine like the sun in the kingdom of their father.
Max Lucado wrote a reflection that is pertinent here. Lucado writes about a weed in the midst of grain:
I’ve wondered at times what kind of man this Judas was. What he looked like, how he acted, who his friends were. I guess I’ve stereotyped him. I’ve always pictured him as a wiry, beady-eyed, sly, wormy fellow, pointed beard and all. I’ve pictured him as estranged from the other apostles. Friendless, distant, undoubtedly he was a traitor and a quisling. Probably the result of a broken home. A juvenile delinquent in his youth.
Yet I wonder if that is so true. We have no evidence (save Judas’s silence) that would suggest that he was isolated. At the last supper, when Jesus said that this betrayer sat at the table, we don’t find the apostles immediately turning to Judas as the logical traitor. No, I think we’ve got Judas pegged wrong. Perhaps he was just the opposite. Instead of sly and wiry, maybe he was robust and jovial. Rather than quiet and introverted, he could have been outgoing and well-meaning. I don’t know.
But for all the things we don’t know about Judas, there is one thing we know for sure: He had no relationship with the Master. He had seen Jesus, but he did not know him. He had heard Jesus, but he did not understand him. He had a religion but no relationship.
As Satan worked his way around the table in the Upper Room, he needed a special kind of man to betray our Lord. He needed a man who had seen Jesus but who did not know him. He needed a man who knew the actions of Jesus but had missed out on the mission of Jesus. Judas was this man. He knew the empire but had never known the man. Judas bore the cloak of religion, but he never knew the heart of Christ.
We learn this timeless lesson from the betrayer. Satan’s best tools of destruction are not from outside the church; they are within the church. A church will never die from the immorality in Hollywood or the corruption in Washington. But it will die from corrosion within – from those who bear the name of Jesus but have never met him and from those who have religion but no relationship.
Judas bore the cloak of religion, but he never knew the heart of Christ. Let’s make it our goal to know Jesus deeply.1
The call is for transformation – from weed to wheat. To know Jesus, know his will for our life, and produce fruit that bears witness to him because ultimately, it does matter. Jesus tells us there is a harvest. There is a final destination.
Gallagher opened the morning newspaper and was dumbfounded to read in the obituary column that he had died. He quickly phoned his best friend, Finney.
“Finney”, asked Gallagher, “did ya see the paper dis mornin’? They say I died!”
“Yes, I saw it!” replied Finney. And he paused for a moment. “And if you don’t mind me askin’…where are ye calling from?”
And where would you like to be calling from someday?
1. Shaped by God (original title: On the Anvil) copyright [Tyndale House, 1985, 200] Max Lucado.