An Enemy Has Done This
When I was a kid, I used to love going to my grandpap’s
little farm rural western Pennsylvania, where he kept a huge garden filled with
marvelous things. I remember working with him on a weekend in the spring,
watering young plants in the hot bed, and then planting them out in the garden.
In the summer, while we waited for the garden to start producing, my grandpap
would often pay me to go out in the garden to do the weeding—I thought this was
a great privilege because it gave him so much joy to let me do it. Little did I
know…
I spent most of my time at home in a small town, so I wasn’t
around gardens every day. When pap would send me out there on those weekends at
the farm, especially early in the season, my unpracticed eye often had a hard
time figuring out which plants were the weeds and which were the ones we had
planted. It seemed like the weeds disguised themselves to look like the real
thing.
But I was going to pick weeds, dagnabbit, and so, when in
doubt, I pulled it up. At the end of each row I dropped a pile of weeds,
thinking I was a real farmer like pap. When I saw him coming back from the barn
I was excited to show him my work. But rather than praise me, as he was wont to
do as a doting grandpa, he simply looked at my piles of “weeds” for a long
moment—pushing back his railroad cap and scratching his head. He said quietly,
“Looks like some of them weeds are beans.”
My pap was the most patient man I’ve ever known, so instead
of chastising me about my overly aggressive weeding, he took me back through
the garden and pointed out some of the subtle differences between desirable
crops and noxious weeds. Eventually, I got the hang of keeping them separate,
tempting though it was to pull up all the green beans that my grandma so
desperately wanted me to eat (I don’t like them to this day!). But then I began
to notice something else—the more I weeded, the more the weeds kept coming
back. It was like some alien force was causing them to grow up every night.
This was going to be a never-ending battle that my hoe and I would never win.
When Jesus wanted to teach his disciples about evil, he
didn’t craft a theory as many post-Enlightenment scholars have done. Nor did he
offer platitudes and advice like Job’s friends, whom we met last week. No, when
Jesus wanted to discuss the problem of evil, he invited his disciples to turn
their imagination to the field—to consider the weeds.
A farmer named Jesus tugs on his railroad cap and drives his
old pickup down to the Agway and spends a little extra to buy the good seed for
his carefully prepared fields. His farmhands know that the boss knows what he’s
doing, that he knows just what to do to yield a bumper crop.
When the farmhands go out into the fields, however, they
notice that there are weeds mixed in with the good crops. Did the boss get the
cheap seed this time? Is he slipping? Does he not know what’s going on? There
are lots of weeds out here. What gives? More weeds makes more work and so they
protest.
What gives? This is the question we’ve been wrestling with—the
question theodicy—why, God, are there weeds in the midst of your good creation?
Why does evil and suffering pop up everywhere like a noxious weed? We thought
you knew what you were doing when you put this garden together, but now it
seems to be going bad. Why the weeds? These are Job’s questions, the questions
of philosophers and theologians, the questions of the man who stands on the
shore and sees his family swept out to sea by a tsunami, the questions of the
mother who holds a vigil over a desperately ill child in the hospital ICU, the
questions of the widowed spouse who comes home to an empty house. Why, if you
are good and know what you’re doing, are these weeds here, choking out the light
and causing the death of the innocent shoots before they can even begin to
grow? Why does this evil exist in the first place?
Like the farmhands, we want to know what gives. We want an
explanation, some bulleted list of reasons why the world is full of evil weeds.
What the farmer gives us, however, isn’t the answer we might have been
expecting—indeed, it’s only five words: “An enemy has done this.” The weeds are
here for a reason, but not the reason you might expect.
The farmer didn’t do it. God didn’t do it. “An enemy has
done this.” Those five simple words blow up all the popular theodicies we hear
whenever tragedy pops up like a ghastly thistle. “An enemy has done this. In
this simple statement, Jesus makes it clear that evil and suffering is not
God’s will, it’s not God’s plan, it’s not God’s way. The cancer that takes a
young mother’s life, the child killed by madman, the traffic accident, the
crippling disease—none of these are God’s. Did you plant these evil weeds, God?
The answer is no, a thousand times, no. “God is light and in him there is no
darkness at all,” says the writer of I John. “For I know the plans I have for
you,” says God in Jeremiah, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to
give you a hope and a future.”
Yes, we believe that good can come out of evil. But we go
horribly wrong when we believe that God gives us evil so that there will be
good. Evil is God’s enemy—it has been from the beginning. Evil, sin, suffering,
death—these don’t belong in the field and God didn’t put them there.
So, we might ask with the farmhands, who did? Who is this
enemy and why has he done this? Well, in his explanation of the parable, Jesus
explains that the enemy is the devil. We met “the Satan” last week in the story
of Job. In that story, as in much of the Old Testament, the Satan is a
prosecuting attorney. Indeed, that’s what his name means, “the accuser.” In the
New Testament, the Satan shows up in the desert to tempt Jesus, enters into
Judas the betrayer, and does, or attempts to do, a lot of other damage.
We tend to think of the devil as a character with horns and
a pitchfork, a kind of caricature and personification of evil. But putting him
in that form (which is more an image from Dante than the Bible), we might miss
the more insidious truth about Satan. Indeed, the Bible seems to use the Satan
as a kind of avatar for a much deeper theological truth—that the evil we
experience doesn’t always have a logical explanation.
As Tom Long puts it, “The horrors of the Holocaust, the
genocide in Rwanda, the massacre at My Lai, the cruelties of those who prey
upon children…–none of these forms of evil, or others, can be fully accounted
for by political, anthropological, or psychological explanations. There is a
dark spiritual force in evil as we experience it.”
I’ve told you before about my seminary roommate, Mike. Mike
was a good guy, a great friend. We had great times together. But one day a few
years ago, Mike brutally beat his wife to death with the leg of a table in the
church parsonage while his toddler and infant sons sat in the next room—a
horrific crime. What happened? I corresponded with him in prison for a while.
Even he does not know what happened. How many times a day do we read about
senseless tragedies that have no reason to explain them? The only answer is
that there is such a thing as evil, and we don’t often think about it until it
hits us in the face.
The soldiers at My Lai were ordinary American kids when they
massacred people in cold blood. The people of Germany were most Christian and
the vast majority of them were not Nazis, yet they allowed 6 million Jews to go
to the gas chambers. Many of the Hutus who hacked more than half a million
Tutsis to death in Rwanda were Christians who went to church and then picked up
machetes to kills their neighbors. How do you explain that?
Evil is a force in the world—a mystery, a problem that
cannot be solved logically. We know this because despite our best human efforts
we have not been able to legislate, incarcerate, or bomb it out of existence.
Like a bad weed, it keeps resurfacing.
So, we might ask, where does this evil come from? How did it
come to be? There are lots of theories about the introduction of evil into
God’s good creation. Some believe that God created it, others think that it was
already here before God started creating. Some have even posited the presence
of two gods—kind of like the Force in Star Wars—a good force and a dark force.
But the Bible tells us from the beginning that God is the
one and only creator; that God’s creation was made “very good.” But something
happened after God’s creative act that introduced evil and death into creation.
As we talked about in my Sunday night class last week, “How did the talking
snake get in the Garden in the first place?” Unfortunately, we don’t get a
clear answer about that. The Bible doesn’t tell us how evil got here, only that
it didn’t come from the hand of God and that it is an intruder upon the
goodness of God’s creation. Humans have become entangled in it, and humans
cannot eradicate it completely. We don’t understand where it came from; all we
know is that it’s here.
So, what do we do about it? This is the question the
farmhands now present to the farmer. “Do you want us to go out and pick all the
weeds?” Should we take a hoe, a gun, a constitutional amendment, or a bomber
and get rid of them?
“No,” says the farmer Jesus, “for in gathering the weeds you
would uproot the good crop along with them. Some of them weeds could be beans.”
Jesus here expresses a truth that is often hard for us to grasp: we can’t get
rid ourselves of every evil. Indeed, in trying to do so, we’re likely to
destroy what is good as well. Evil and good often share a common root system—we
know that from history, and we know it in ourselves. We don’t always know at
first glance what is a weed and what is not.
OK, so maybe we don’t always know which is a weed and which
isn’t, but surely God does. Why doesn’t God sweep into the world with a scythe
and root out all the evil himself? Well, here’s the same dilemma—if God came
with a mission to cut down and destroy all evil, which one of us would be left
standing when he was finished? Every one of us carries in us the seeds of evil,
the germination of sin, the disease of death. We can’t fully root evil out of
the world because we can’t even fully root it out of ourselves.
Does that mean we do nothing about evil? Not at all. Our own
membership vows remind us of this: “Do you accept the freedom and power God
gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever form they
present themselves?” Yes, we resist evil, we identify the weeds, but the way
that we deal with evil isn’t by cutting it out, it’s by growing stronger roots
ourselves.
Earlier in Matthew 13, Jesus tells the parable of another
farmer, who goes out and sows seeds lavishly. Some of the seed falls on a path
and get eaten by birds, some of it springs up in shallow soil but quickly dies,
some gets choked out by the weeds. But there was some that fell on receptive,
nutrient-rich, prepared soil, from which it produced a bumper crop. The weeds
couldn’t choke it out because it was rooted deeply.
I was talking to my lawn guy once, and I asked him about
controlling weeds like dandelions in the yard. What kind of herbicide do you
need for that? “Well, we spread some of that,” he said, “but the best way to
control weeds in the yard is to make sure the rest of the grass is healthy and
strong. A thick lawn has no room for weeds.”
I think that’s true for us as well. Our best defense against
evil isn’t found in guns, bombs, or legislation—it’s found in being rooted in
Christ—the one who urged us to not repay evil for evil, but to combat evil with
good.
Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow, put it this way:
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive
out hate. Only love can do that.” The weeds will spring up, the tragedy will
happen, the diagnosis will be given, the newspaper will give us bad news. We
cannot control the evil, try as we might. But we can control how we respond to
it—to offer our lives as a fertile ground for faith—faith that saves us; faith
that makes us strong; faith that does good; faith that sees the big picture of what God is up to in the
world.
And what is God up to? The farmer tells the farmhands to let
the wheat and the weeds grow up together. His focus is on the harvest, which is
the reason for planting in the first place. Ultimately, the weeds will not
matter then—they are bundled up separately and thrown into the fire. It’s the
wheat that gets gathered into the barn.
The message of the parable is that while good and evil grow
up together in the present, it won’t always be that way. A harvest is coming.
Evil will be defeated and death along with it. The enemy and all the evil this
world has seen will be piled up and set ablaze. This is the promise of God’s
kingdom, God’s reign and rule on the earth. God will deal with evil
decisively—a mission that has already begun.
It’s interesting that Jesus goes on immediately to tell
another parable about a mustard seed—a plant that is simultaneously a weed and
a valuable plant. No wonder Jesus told us not to try and pull up the weeds—it’s
sometimes hard to tell what is a weed and what is the kingdom of God. God’s
kingdom does not look very potent or large. Indeed, God’s approach to evil,
letting the weeds go for now, may seem weak and ineffectual to many. It’s the
kind of thing a tiny, insignificant god would do—like a mustard seed. But that
mustard seed has the potential, and indeed will become the “greatest of
plants—a tree big enough for birds to land in.” It’s not what we expect when we
look at something so weak and small, but it’s the truth of the gospel: God’s
kingdom is coming, and it’s not like anything the world expects.
Jesus then follows that up with the parable of the yeast. We
think of yeast as a good thing, but in Jesus’ day it was not. In Jewish ritual,
it was a corrupting agent. Kosher Jews still remove all the yeast from the
house prior to Passover. But in the parable, the woman in the farmhouse, who
reminds me of my grandma, mixes the yeast with a huge amount of flour. In fact,
“mix” isn’t the right word here. The Greek word means something more like
“encrypt.” In other words, she smuggles in the yeast that isn’t supposed to be
there, and the yeast invades everything. It’s hidden, undercover, and yet changing
everything.
That’s the way of the kingdom, Jesus tells us. God’s power
is subversive, stealthy, hidden, but in the present it is beginning to permeate
the world. One day, when it has worked all the way through the dough, it will
make it rise.
The promise of the kingdom is that, one day, we too will
rise! God’s kingdom will permeate everything.
For now, however, where are the weeds in your life? Have you
been trying to pull them up, only to see more take their place? How will you
strengthen your roots instead?
I miss my grandpa, who died of heart attack one morning
while getting ready to go out to the garden. But I will never forget what he
taught me – the weeds will always be there, but the harvest is what’s most
important.
Jesus calls us to turn our focus from the weeds to the
promise of the harvest, and we work and live with that future in mind. Our
greatest sign of that promise? The cross and resurrection of Jesus, which will
talk about over the next couple of weeks – a sign that, one day, there will be
no more weeds with them beans.
Source:
Long, Thomas G. What Shall We Say? Evil, Suffering, and the Crisis of Faith. Eerdman’s, 2012.
