Weeds and Wheat

God loves things that grow. In fact, God started all of this, everything we see around us, in a garden. Genesis chapter two tells the story of that garden and the first people, whom God put there to “till it and keep it.” (Genesis 2:15) From the beginning, God is sharing His love for growing things with us.

Jesus seems to share God’s passion for growing things. He tells all kinds of stories about things that grow. He tells stories about seeds, a fig tree, vineyards, vines, and branches. In Matthew chapter 13, he tells a story about “weeds and wheat” (13:24-30, 36-43)

What makes this story so interesting to me is the weed that this person sows into the wheat field in the middle of the night. The Bible names it: zizanium (in Greek). It’s scientific name is Lolium Temulentum. It is commonly known as darnel or cockle. In some places, this weed is called “false wheat” and here’s why: it grows right alongside wheat and looks nearly identical to it. But, when the seed in the zizanium, which is heavier than the seed in wheat, appears it makes the plant bow over. Worse yet, the seed of the zizanium is inedible, and can even be poisonous.

The farmer sows seeds that will grow into wheat that can be harvested to feed his family. He sows the seeds with the hope that they will grow and produce ripe grain. He sows only the best seed he has. Then, when he goes to sleep someone sneaks in and sows zizanium. This intruder is as passionate about ruining the harvest as the farmer is about growing good, healthy crops.
Think about it for just a moment. Do you garden? What do you love to grow? It would be like someone coming into your garden at night and planting something that looked just like it, but when it grew and blossomed, destroying everything around it!

If you’re not a gardener, then what are you passionate about? I have a friend who is passionate about his car. He works on it every chance he gets, he keeps it clean, waxed and polished. Sowing weeds among he wheat would be like someone coming in the middle of the night and putting sugar in his gas tank.

Are you passionate about the appearance of your home? The story that Jesus tells could be about you, too. Picture this, you’ve just repainted your house, then someone comes in the middle of the night and eggs it!

The simplest explanation is that what this night-time planter does is mean, malicious, and intent on stopping the growth from happening.

What if it happened to you? You wake up in the morning to find zizanium growing in your wheat field. You leave the house, start the car and it’s dead because of the sugar in your gas tank. You’re coming in after picking up the morning paper and your house is covered in whites, yolks, and shells! How would you feel? What thoughts might coarse through your mind? What would you do about it? What if you knew who had done it? What would you like to say to that person? What might you like to do to him?

Jesus’ story is a story about God, his Father, who began creation in a garden and makes it his passion to help it to grow. How does God feel when someone comes into His garden and sows things that will ruin it? What does God do when this happens?

Amazingly, in the story that Jesus tells his followers, God does nothing! There’s no retribution. God doesn’t go storming over the malicious weed-planter’s house to confront him. God doesn’t begin dreaming up ways to repay the favor. Instead, God does nothing. After these poisonously destructive weeds begin to come up, growing right alongside the farmer’s precious grain, what does he say: “Let both of them grow together until the harvest…”

This doesn’t make sense to me. This is the same all-powerful God, who, the moment He said “Let there be light,” the sun burst into the brightest ball of flame the world will ever know. This is the same creator who watched his people flee slavery and reached down to part the sea in front of them so that they could escape. This is the God, by the way, who sent ten nasty plagues: frogs, locusts, darkness, a river of blood, to free those people. And now, Jesus tells a story where the character who is supposed to represent this same all-powerful God does nothing when someone sows nasty weeds into his garden? It doesn’t make sense. Not to me, and not, apparently to Jesus’ disciples. “Explain the parable of the weeds to us…” they ask. “Make this clear to us, because we’re just not getting it.”

Maybe the disciples are having a hard time, because up to this point they had thought that as followers of God’s Son, that it was their job to pull up all the nasty weeds in the world. Now they’re confused because Jesus seems to be saying: “leave them alone”. Maybe they’re wondering why God doesn’t do a better job of guarding the garden. Maybe they’re starting to wonder which kind of plant they are “Are we the weeds or the wheat? Please explain it to us!” Jesus’ story, rather than make something about God clear to them, seems to leave them more confused. Sometimes, we have these same kinds of confusions.

Jesus’ story, and his explanation to his followers, is a reminder to us all that God is always only concerned with growing. God loves the garden he has created, and wants nothing more than for everything in it to grow and grow. God lets the weeds grow, for now, because He’s never willing to do anything that might harm the things that He’s passionate about growing. If pulling up these nasty weeds, as offensive and poisonous as they may be, could in any way hurt the grain, then God is content to leave them until the wheat is safely harvested and stored in His barn.
The message for us seems to be: Grow! Let God worry about everything else, you just grow where you’re planted. Because, the reality is, God knows exactly what to do with the weeds and God will do whatever it takes to make sure that they never, ever harm the grain.

God is serious about the business of growing. There’s another story that takes place in a garden, and like the story that Jesus tells, it happens at night. After he and his disciples have eaten at the table, after he told them about the bread and the wine and how from now on they would be his body and blood, and how they needed to remember everything they had done at that table…After all of that, Jesus and his followers went to a garden called Gethsemane, and there, in the middle of the night people came for him. They came with charges of everything from blasphemy to treason, they came, ultimately to take him to the cross. His disciples offered to intervene, they tried to stop it, they jumped at the chance to keep Jesus right there in the garden. But, do you know what Jesus did? When people came to take him, and his life, in the end, that night in the garden, he did NOTHING. He didn’t protest. He didn’t fight. He didn’t run. He went with them. To the courts, and then to the cross.

Jesus is just like his father. Rather than lose a single follower. Rather than lose a single grain of wheat, He goes instead. Jesus won’t let anything uproot a single person from being rooted firmly in God’s loving garden…even if it means his own life, he’ll give it.

The story that Jesus tells ends in the fall. It ends when the whole field is harvested. Only then, does God worry about the weeds, and even then, his top priority is getting the wheat into the barn.

How much of your time in life is spent worrying about the weeds? Weeds that pop up out of nowhere. Weeds that ruin your garden. Weeds that poison your life? God’s strategy, when it comes to weeds, is don’t worry about them at all. Just keep growing. If you're having trouble with weeds, and they're getting in the way of your growth, then go back and re-read the story about the weeds and the wheat. In it, God promises that if we focus on growing, in faith, in grace, in our awareness of the people God has planted in this world with us…then He’ll worry about the weeds, and we won't have to!