Why can’t we weed out the horrible people?

If there has ever been a time when you were horrified by human cruelty, violence, exploitation, and evil, today’s gospel passage is for you.  If you have ever wanted to get rid of the really horrific people who inflict suffering on the innocent, so that the rest of us could live in peace, today’s gospel passage is for you.  If you have ever wanted God to get rid of these really horrific people, so that the innocent wouldn’t continue to suffer, today’s gospel passage is for you.

The weed Jesus is talking about here is an actual weed called darnel [lolium temulentum] which grows in wheat fields.  It grows to the same height as wheat, and it looks exactly like wheat during most of the growing season, so that it’s impossible to tell the difference between them.  It is only when the ears of grain emerge that the difference can be seen, because the ear of darnel is black and the ear of wheat is brown.  However, by that stage of growth the roots of the darnel have become so intertwined with the roots of the wheat, that that the darnel cannot be torn out without tearing the wheat out with it. But the grains of darnel are poisonous, so the grains have to be separated out in the end.

The situation Jesus is talking about here is an actual situation. Roman law prohibited sowing darnel among the wheat of an enemy,[[4]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Tares#cite_note-CSK-4)[\[5]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Tares#cite_note-5) . The fact that sowing darnel in someone else’s wheat needs to be prohibited by Roman law and punished means that people were doing it on purpose to harm someone.  

Maybe there have been times when we looked at human cruelty, violence, exploitation, and evil, and considered the goodness of God, and wondered how all this horrific stuff could happen in God’s good creation.  If so, we can relate to the slaves who ask the householder, “Master, didn’t you sow good seed in your field?  Then where did these weeds come from?”  He answered, “An enemy has done this.”  Jesus points out to us that God is not okay with human cruelty and exploitation.  They do not come from God; they are opposed to God.  They come from the enemy of God.” 

So the slaves offer a possible solution. “Then do you want us to go and gather them?”  But the master turns down that offer, and he explains why: “No, for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.  Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, ‘Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”  

When the disciples ask Jesus for an explanation of the parable, the explanation is pretty direct.  The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the enemy who sows the weeds is the devil. The good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one.  At the end of the age, God prevails, God does get rid of these really horrific people, goodness is restored, the innocent do not continue to suffer, and the righteous shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.  

The parable shows us two main points.  #1 Getting rid of evil people will happen eventually, but it won’t be today.   #2 Getting rid of evil people is God’s job, not our job.  Both of these points are important both as we deal with the world around us and as we deal with the Church.

Sometimes people talk as if all the evil is in the world and all the goodness is in the Church.  We aren’t making that mistake here. Because the Church is made of human beings, anything that’s a problem in humanity will be a problem in the Church.  We might wish that sin and evil did not exist in the church, but that’s not reality.  

I want to make a distinction between bad behaviour and a bad person.  In another part of Matthew’s gospel, Matthew 18, we read how to deal with bad behaviour in which another member of the church sins against you.  It says, “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.”  It is an excellent way of dealing with someone’s sin: both direct and compassionate. Sometimes that’s all it takes to solve the problem and restore the relationship. However, other times more help is needed, so the instructions continue: “But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses.  If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church.”  What I appreciate about these verses is that they refuse to let a vulnerable member of the church continue to be harmed by someone more powerful.  Sinning against someone is often a way of asserting power over that person. These verses also take seriously the way one person’s sinning against another can damage the bonds of the church community if it’s left unchecked.  So they teach that the rest of the church should not ignore the problem; the rest of the church should be part of the solution.  There are some times where the offender won’t listen even to the church.  So the passage continues, “If the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”  That can sound harsh, especially if we’re used to equating Christianity with niceness.  However, it is a very painful thing to see what happens to churches in which someone’s sinful behaviour is not nipped in the bud and is allowed to go on.  The sinful behaviour often grows, and spreads to others, and affects other victims. Eventually it gets to the point where if a whistleblower does speak up, the whistleblower is maligned.  The system becomes dysfunctional, and healthy people no longer want to be part of it.  Sometimes the church shrivels up.  Sometimes the church gets bigger but it becomes toxic, or manipulative, or corrupt.  Sometimes the church collapses completely.  The consequences of not dealing with sinful behaviour early on, when it’s a manageable size, can be severe.

You’re not doing anybody any favours by avoiding dealing with the sinful behaviour. Still, I want to emphasize that the focus here is on the sinful behaviour.  The goal is to stop the sinful behaviour while maintaining the relationship.  It is only when the person refuses to stop the sinful behaviour that the only option left is distance in the relationship: “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector”.  That is the last resort to protect the faith community.

Dealing wisely with the bad behaviour is very different from wanting to get rid of bad people.  Wanting to get rid of bad people has a corrosive effect on your own soul.  There are good reasons why that is God’s job and God has not assigned that job to you.  One is that God is much better than any human being at determining who the evil people truly are.  God sees into the heart and soul.  We see only the outside of people, so we are always subject to error in being fooled by the charm of an evil person, while being too judgmental toward someone who isn’t really evil.  

The other problem, as I’ve mentioned before, is that the things we criticize most in others are the things we struggle with most in ourselves.  Modern psychologists call this tendency projection.  Centuries earlier, Jesus identified it as wanting to take the speck out of your neighbour’s eye without first removing the log from your own.  It also goes by the memorable phrase, “You spot it, you got it”.  The wrongness we see in others, and want to eliminate by eliminating the people, is the wrongness that is hiding in our own hearts and souls too.  Jesus teaches us that our energies are much better employed by removing the log from our own eye and dealing with our own sin.

Jesus does not deny that evil people exist.  Instead, he reminds us that like dealing with darnel, our attempts to eliminate them will harm the good wheat we are trying to grow.  These young, tender stalks of wheat are trying their hardest to get the sunshine and soil nutrients they need to grow and flourish and produce their wheat.  They need their roots.  If someone comes in and starts digging around to get the darnel roots, the tender stalks of wheat will have their roots wounded too.  All of them will be wounded, some of them fatally.  Similarly, it’s hard to thrive in a community in which someone’s always trying to root out neighbours they think are evil.  It’s not a healthy environment.  It’s usually contemptuous and self-righteous.  Scapegoating is a pernicious temptation for all of us, and Jesus warns us to avoid it whenever we can.  

For each of us, our job is to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and to love our neighbour as ourself.  For each of us, our job is to deal with our own sins the best we can, and to pray for God’s forgiveness for the sins that remain in us.  Those are big enough jobs that we’ve got enough to keep us busy for the rest of our time on earth.  We don’t need to try to take over God’s job. The less we try to take over God’s job, the more energy we can devote to doing our job, loving God and loving our neighbours.   Loving is better than weeding anyway.  The more of our energy we put into loving, the more likely we are to be among those whose sins are forgiven and among the righteous who will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.