July 19: “What to do with the weeds?”
Reading: Matthew 13:24-32 (NSRV)
He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘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.’
He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”
“What to do with the weeds”
Anita Fast
When I first moved into my home in East Vancouver over 20 years ago, it didn’t take long for me to fall in love with the backyard. The yard was full of perennial plants that appeared with vigour every spring without me needing to do anything. Perfect!
One of my favorites was this phenomenal plant that would go from a tiny sprout to 10 feet tall almost while you watched. In March I would tear down the hollowed out and dry stalks that had become weak and brittle over the winter, to make way for hardy new growth. By May it had all grown back, creating a leafy green canopy that provided the best summer forts and hiding places my kids could imagine.
Then I found out that my magical plant was Japanese knotweed - a species classified as a noxious weed in BC. Landowners are legally obligated to control the spread of the plant on their property. Whoops.
And so I made another mistake. I dug it out. Well, apparently, the Japanese knotweed evolved to survive lava flows, so it only laughed at my feeble attempt at eradication. By removing its most concentrated clumps, I only strengthened the rhizome. To this day I continually pull out shoots of knotweed that faithfully show their leafy heads all over my yard.
I am not winning.
Last week Shadia once again brought scripture profoundly to life with her land-based reading of Matthew’s parable of the sower, and its connection with the Palestinian landscape.
Today we continue to read through Matthew’s parables, and listened to another two about land, seeds, and abundant growth.
Matthew is unique in the 4 gospels with his focus on the end-times and the separation of the righteous from the wicked. He often takes simple agricultural themes and turns them into a definitive apocalyptic drama featuring cosmic enemies, angelic executioners, and eternal torment.
If you have read the Bible or been part of the church for long, you likely are familiar with how Matthew’s gospel later allegorizes the first parable about the wheat and the weeds. The wheat becomes the ‘sons of the kingdom’ and the weeds, the ‘sons of the evil one’. God’s angels separate them in the end-time harvest and they are thrown into the fires of destruction. Many scholars believe it unlikely that this allegory originated with Jesus.
So I left it out of the reading this morning, and included, instead, Jesus’ subsequent parable - the parable of the mustard seed. I suspect it wasn’t an accident that these two were told together.
So let’s have a closer look.
In most of our contemporary Bible translations, including the one Jenny read for us, the Greek word ‘Zih-zah-nee-uh’ is simply translated as ‘weeds’. However, this plant was a very specific plant - ‘darnel’ - a toxic grass that, over thousands of years in the ancient Fertile Crescent, evolved an impressive survival strategy - perfectly matching wheat in height, appearance, and growth cycle so that ancient humans would unknowingly harvest, store, and replant it alongside their crops.
Because their root systems intertwine, yanking out darnel before harvest meant destroying the wheat. Only at harvest, when the darnel seeds turned blackish-grey and the wheat seeds a golden brown, was it safe to separate them.
Because darnel looks identical to wheat but is highly toxic, sowing darnel in a neighbor's field was a common and devastating form of revenge - so serious and common that there was a Roman Law against it.
Jesus is not being hypothetical or hyperbolic in the parable of the wheat and darnel - he is describing a common agricultural struggle that his audience would have known well.
However, as a parable about the kingdom of God, it also does what Jesus’ parables always do - it turns the table on expectations.
The wheat, the darnel, and the weed-sowing enemy is not the main point. That is just what life is like. The point is, this is also what the kingdom of heaven is like. You may have noticed that Jesus didn’t say the kingdom was limited to the sowing of the good seed. It was the whole thing - both the wheat and its toxic twin. Both the farmer and his enemy.
However, as Christianity became wed to political power, this just wouldn’t do. The church began to try to protect the kingdom of God. This parable became a justification for persecution, torture and execution of people the church or empire deemed ‘undesirables’. First Christian heretics, then Jews and Muslims, and later, the brutal colonization of the Americas.
This drive to divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’ for the sake of pursuing ‘purity’, or even ‘justice’ and a ‘better world’, still thrives in our theologies, our institutions and our communities today. We are not exempt.
Our sense of justice often wants not only to call out, but also root out those we see harming or threatening our world, our society, our church. For us that may be Christian Nationalists, or right-wing conservative politicians, or the homophobes, misogynists, or zionists. Won’t the kingdom of God thrive only once we get rid of those toxic weeds infesting our beautiful fields of wheat? But this only furthers the logic of empire.
Jesus reminds us that the land shows us a different way. The kingdom is already among us and includes both the wheat and the darnel. Evolved together and intertwined at our roots - we cannot - ever - pull out only one without harming the other.
Yet, what, then, do we do with the weeds? (for my part I have provided a bouquet of my yard weeds for us to enjoy since Sandy, our usual flower-provider, is away!)
Jesus describes standard indigenous farming practices as reflective of a different logic - Kingdom, or as we often like to say, “kin-dom” logic. As Shadia highlighted from last week’s parable - “What we are quick to call a pest, creation calls kin”.
In many Indigenous worldviews, what we call "weeds" are not inherently viewed as worthless, troublesome nuisances, or threats to be eradicated. Rather, these plants are often seen as relatives, resilient teachers, or healers.
This doesn’t mean that nothing is done when plants threaten the health of an ecosystem or the people who tend it. What it does mean is that the “isolate-and-eradicate” approach is replaced by relational repair - guided by attentiveness, coexistence and respect.
If we only focus on the danger of darnel plants, we miss the gifts they also bring.
Darnel’s medicinal properties were many - it was used as a natural anesthetic, a pain reliever, and a treatment to slow menstrual bleeding and hemorrhages. As a poultice it healed broken bones, drew out splinters and treated skin conditions like herpes, sores and gangrene.
Because of its intoxicating effect, the plant’s seeds were intentionally baked into bread, or brewed into beer to provide an extra psychoactive ‘kick’ - the ancient world’s cannabis.
Furthermore, in a landscape short on lumber, the way people heated their homes and cooked their meals often included burning bundles of weeds. Those bundles of darnel thrown into the fire at harvest was this plant’s contribution to the feast.
Jesus’ next parable about the kingdom brings the point home. The mustard seed.
Like darnel, the mustard seed was also highly invasive in the ancient world. It was notoriously aggressive, crowding out neighbouring crops and was nearly impossible to eradicate. Farmers in first century Palestine did not intentionally plant it in their fields and gardens, in fact Rabbinal law forbade it because it ruined cultivated farmland!
So here we have Jesus telling two parables about what the kingdom of God is like. Back-to-back stories about invasive plants illegally sown in a field.
The first parable teaches that the kingdom includes everyone - even our enemies. That alone can be hard to swallow.
The mustard seed knocks it out of the park.
Because here we have another invasive and illegally sown weed-seed that actually is the seed that grows to provide shelter to the birds of the air - a familiar symbol of the nations.
It’s not that the undesirable, the dangerous, the enemy grows alongside what we consider desirable and good, and we leave them there knowing God will get rid of them some day for us - even if that’s where Matthew’s apocalyptic fervour wanted to take Jesus’ parable.
It also isn’t that those enemy-sown plants aren’t really that dangerous and threatening - they might be. Darnel poisoning could, and did, kill. In no way do I want to be misinterpreted as saying “things aren’t really so bad”. They are.
The Good News is that even when the enemy has done their worst, God has already done their best and those very dangerous, undesirable enemy-sown seeds are, in God’s realm, our relatives, our teachers, sometimes our twin and our mirror. And when we embrace this kin-dom logic, then we will see the gifts of the realm of God grow.
Our roots are intertwined, we have evolved together, and even those we don’t want in our fields provide gifts, medicine, and life. Empire logic divides and destroys. Kin-dom logic listens, watches, and learns.
Maybe this is why we are taught to love and pray for our enemies rather than kill them. Perhaps this is why one of the most frequent commands in the Bible - both the Old and the New Testaments, is “Do not be afraid”.
It may seem unbelievable in times like ours when violence is rampant and polarization is pulling at every thread that seems to hold the world together.
Do not be afraid.
This IS, after all, the kin-dom of God.
We may not be able to say when or why or certainly not how, but prepare to be surprised by what grows, unexpectedly, from those seeds that we fear the most.