Matthew 13:24-30 &36-43
We don’t have kings anymore and our memory of them is not good. Right now English Heritage is running a debate about who would qualify for the title of the worst monarch in British history – there are so many candidates! When Israel chose its first king Samuel the prophet spelled out what it would mean:
He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen.
1 Samuel 8:8-18
That is how it is with kings and queens; good ones are as rare as hens’ teeth. But imagine a king who saw himself as a servant of others, who loved his people more than he loved his own life; imagine a kingdom ruled by the power of love and not force of intimidation. This is the kingdom of God [1] and Jesus never stopped talking about it.
The Kingdom of God is like…
On the face of things it looked as though Jesus was talking about politics. His friends were part of an oppressed people longing for political liberation. This shaped the way they read their Bible (the Old Testament) and produced the expectation that the Messiah would be a military commander who would defeat the Romans and restore Israel to the status it had in the good old days.
Jesus kept saying, “No, this is what the Kingdom of God is like… ” and each time he told a story that puts a picture in our heads, a picture of what happens when the sovereign Lord of history gets to work.
And again you have a guy chucking seed all over his field – last time the seed stood for the word of God but this time it represents people who serve God: we know this because Jesus gave us a key to understanding the story (37-43). But they are not alone because the Devil has scattered his own servants among them and the world is populated by God’s enemies as well as his friends. There are some of God’s servants want to rip out the weeds, but God won’t let them in case the wheat is harmed, instead he waits until harvest when the field is cut and wheat and weeds are separated at last.
The first people to hear this story would have a very specific picture in their heads, the biggest pest for those farmers was a weed called Bearded Darnel – as it grew amongst the wheat it was impossible to distinguish the food crop from the weed, they looked identical. Only when the grain was ripe could you tell the weed from the wheat but by then the roots were so entangled that you could not pull out the Darnel without pulling up the wheat. So the whole lot was harvested together, and then threshed. Then local women would pick out the Darnel by hand. Bread contaminated with Darnel would make people ill because the weed seeds were toxic.
“This is not the kingdom you are expecting”, Jesus was saying, “The time for judgement is a long way off – so you need to be patient”. Meanwhile, God is filling the earth with his people – one-by-one individuals from every nationality and ethnic group are finding faith in Jesus and learning to live as his apprentices. This is what the Kingdom of God is like: people choosing to serve God – not because they are fearful but because they love him.
But of course, some chose not to love God, the Devil sows his agents in the world. Their aim, above all else, is the subversion of the Kingdom.
Subverting the Kingdom
But severe punishments were laid down in Roman law for people convicted of sowing weeds in their neighbours fields – this kind of thing really happened. A farmer could attempt to lower the value of his competitors crop by sowing weeds into it, his competitor would have to hire gangs of local workers to clean it up before he cold sell it.
The weed in question was Bearded Darnel – as it grew amongst the wheat it was impossible to distinguish the food crop from the weed, they looked identical. Only when the grain was ripe could you tell the weed from the wheat but by then the roots were so entangled that you could not pull out the Darnel without pulling up the wheat. So the whole lot was harvested together, and then threshed. Then local women would pick out the Darnel by hand. Bread contaminated with Darnel would make people ill because the weed seeds were toxic.
This is what the weeds are: servants of the Evil One. We are being given a stark picture of reality here: there is no neutral ground; the field contains either God’s servants or those who serve the Evil One.
Some people are certainly enemies of the kingdom – they do everything they can to bring God into disrepute and argue against the gospel. When someone becomes a Christian in a Muslim country and they are persecuted because of their faith – that is a pretty good example of being an enemy of the kingdom.
But most people don’t behave like this – they are not Christians themselves but are happy for other people to be. Like the Darnel and the wheat, there is no visible difference between these people and Christians. How can they be enemies of God?
Well imagine living in Britain in the early 1940’s when the whole of Europe was in enemy hands. Everyone’s back was against the wall and the whole nation had to work together to survive. Now imagine being neutral in that conflict – others can be committed to defeating the enemy, but it is not your personal priority, you are just keeping out of it and getting on with your life: Look after number one is your motto. Victory might be important to those who like that sort of thing but you would rather not be involved.
You may think that you are neutral, but in fact you are using up resources without contributing to the fight – you are helping the enemy by being uninvolved. Apathy is not neutral – it puts you on the enemy’s side; disinterest is not neutral; it puts you on the enemies side.
In the great clash of spiritual kingdoms it works the same. If we are not actively engaged in serving the king we are, in fact subverting his kingdom by giving encouragement to others who do the same. No-one is neutral – you have to serve somebody. Now this is a very stark warning in our apathetic culture – the greatest enemy of the gospel in Britain today is not persecution or opposition, but the apathy of millions who do nothing about the kingdom or the gospel.
Now we need to know that this ‘neutrality’ is dangerous…
Asserting the Kingdom
In the end those weed seeds had to be removed by hand and then burned. Jesus says that one day weeds and wheat will be separated and the weeds destroyed. This is an awesome thing to say – so let’s pause and think about it for a moment.
Read the bible right through and you will see that there is only a vague idea of the afterlife in the first two-thirds of it – the Hebrew people had little idea of what lay beyond death even if some of their prophets had flashes of insight about it [2] . It was Jesus who introduced the idea of heaven and hell in the form we now understand it, if Isaiah or Jeremiah had done so we may have baulked at the idea, but the Son of God was the one to spell out the concept (40-43).
Rejecting the idea is a bit like rejecting him, really. He is patient enough to wait so that people have an opportunity to repent, but one day justice will be done and there is no escape.
Human justice is incomplete and imperfect, but in the Kingdom of God justice is inevitable and it is final – we must be ready for it. That does that mean for us today?
It means that we need to be clear that all of us have sinned and fall short of God’s glory – every one of us deserves to be treated like weeds.
What, even the neutrals? Yes, remember that this is a conflict in which there is no neutrality. In 1995 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered by Bosnian Serbs under the noses of Dutch peacekeepers who were there to protect them. There were 400 Dutch, lightly armed but able to call in air support and they did nothing. The UN charter on genocide says that everything must be done to prevent mass killings: but the Dutch soldiers did nothing. Now, who is responsible? Jesus is solemnly clear: there is no neutrality in this conflict of kingdoms, to do nothing is to aid the enemy.
It explains why Jesus died on the cross – taking in himself God’s just response to our sin. That means we can be forgiven and set free.
It means that we need to be clear whose side we are on – the choice we make has a significance that will last for eternity.
[1] Or as Matthew puts it, the Kingom of Heaven
[2] Psalm 16 is an example of this – but this kind of expression of hope is rare in the OT