Let Them Grow

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

I had a chance last week to visit with an old friend, and as we caught up on our lives, she happened to tell me about how hard it was to talk about her own faith when she was talking with a friend of hers who is an atheist. Their conversation was stuck on one particular question: Why do bad things happen? 

If there really is a good God, how can war and disaster rage across the world, and why doesn’t that good God protect innocent people from tragedy?

This is a good question.  It’s one that many of you have asked me in one way or another, and honestly, it’s one that most Christians and many theologians wrestle with. So I’d like to turn to Jesus for help with this question, but I’ve known Jesus long enough that I am pretty sure that instead of a simple answer, I’d get a story. And in fact, I’ve got a pretty good guess what story it would be.

“Listen,” Jesus would say, “it’s like when a farmer planted excellent seed in his fields….”

Sound familiar? You heard this story this morning, didn’t you?

The farmer planted good seed, and then weeks later, as all the plants grew, the farmer’s staff realized that half of the crop was inedible, dangerous weeds – the kind of weed that looks a lot like wheat, until you try to use it or eat it.

The staff are horrified, naturally.  These weeds might take water and soil and sunlight away from the good wheat!  They might choke the good stuff to death.  People who don’t know better might think the weed is actually wheat, and get hurt by it. Bad things are happening!

So they go to their boss, horrified and puzzled, and they ask that important question:
“We thought you planted just the good stuff. How did this bad stuff happen???”

And suddenly they are asking the hardest question of our faith:

If God is good, and nurtures good, how can these weeds – these deceptive, dangerous, and destructive things – happen to the good seed? 

How can tragedy and pain and illness happen to good and innocent people?  How can war grow and renew itself and spread danger and anger and fear among good people?

It’s a question that’s been on my mind a lot this week, as I watch news of the rising conflict and violence in Israel and Palestine and Iraq, and speculation about what brings down airlines over Ukraine.

How can God let disaster and violence kill so many people, and destroy the world?

Do you have an answer?

The boss in the story does. He says, “An enemy has done this.”

That’s the shortest and simplest answer to the problem of evil: It’s not God.  It’s an enemy.

That can reassure us that God is good, not prone to sow evil, just as the boss did not go crazy and plant weeds on purpose.

But then the servants ask the follow-up question: What are you going to do about it? Are you going to send us to pull up all the weeds? 

God must want to fight evil, right? Help us uproot it, eliminate it, make the world safe for the good seed.

Shouldn’t we expect God to take on evil, to get rid of the work of the devil to protect us? Yet evil clearly thrives in some places in our world.

That’s when the farmer in the parable says to his staff, “Just leave it alone. Let the weeds grow and thrive right along with the wheat.”

Let the evil and the danger stay rooted in with the good seed.

We’ll sort it all out at the harvest.

Well, that’s a pretty good answer if you’re the boss in the story, but it’s a heck of a disappointment if you see yourself as the wheat, stuck among the weeds – or if you care deeply about the well-being of that wheat, the way the servants seem to care.

“It’ll all come right at the end of the age,” is good to know, but in the middle of the suffering and destruction and pain that evil brings in our world right now it’s not always a satisfying answer.

It seemed like a lousy answer to the first disciples, and the early Christian communities, too.  It has seemed like a lousy answer to theologians for centuries, and it certainly doesn’t satisfy me in a world where refugee children are denied shelter, planes fall out of the sky, and wars rage around the world.

“It will come right in the end,” is an answer that only truly works at the end.  But Jesus is giving us some clues about how to live in the middle of the story; in the middle of evil, too.  Because that farmer’s decision to leave the weeds in the field is a decision to have confidence in abundance.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the weeds from the flowers, in a garden or in life.  And when we weed a garden, we’re judging the plants, deciding which ones are bad, dangerous, or simply ugly.  We’re trying to protect the plants we think are useful, good, and pretty – to save the resources of soil and sun and water for the “good’ ones.

But God is whispering to us that there really is enough to go around.  That there’s plenty of sun and soil and rain and nurture for the good seed even while the bad seed thrives.  We don’t lose God’s grace just because it also falls on the enemy, the uninvited immigrant, or the bullies.

And God is whispering that what looks wrong and evil and useless to us might look very different to God.

That’s probably not enough to convince a devout gardener or a convinced atheist. But Jesus isn’t telling this story to the gardeners or the atheists.  He’s telling it to people like us, the people who trust God to protect us from evil; people who look for God when disaster and tragedy strike.

And the deep and enduring truth of this weedy story is that in the presence of evil God is always enough, and more than enough.

No matter how thick and choking the weeds and the danger and the evil, God rains enough grace, shines enough love, is deep and nurturing enough that the evil cannot destroy the wheat, and the weeds are not the end of the good gift of our lives.

It can be hard to understand in a world of war and refugees and disaster and pain, but the farmer says, let them grow.

Because they cannot destroy you.

Not now.  Not ever.

It’s not an answer to the question of evil, but it is a promise.

God doesn’t pull the evil from the world, or the pain from our lives. But God is enough, and more than enough, to ensure that the pain and evil don’t destroy us, and the grace and the love will still bless our growth, and nourish our roots, until the end of the age.