Monday • 11/1/2021
Monday of the Twenty-third Week After Pentecost (Proper 26)

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 56; Psalm 57; Nehemiah 6:1–19; Revelation 10:1–11; Matthew 13:36–43

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 9 (“The First Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 12:2–6, BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94)

Wheat and Tares

Anger is the prevailing mood of our day—cleansing, purging, “righteous” anger. One might have thought that a worldwide pandemic would bring us all together in a united campaign against a common enemy. Instead, it’s pushed us further into our separate corners, pitting “my rights” folks who won’t mask and who don’t vax against “our common good” folks who will mask and who do vax. In a range of matters political, racial, and economic, rage runs deep. Terms like “block,” “unfriend,” “cancel” have taken on new meaning. They are weapons of moral indignation, as people cleanse their worlds of those they view as unjust, ill-informed, and unholy.

With his parable of “The Wheat and the Tares” (told in last Friday’s gospel reading and explained in today’s), Jesus urges us to hit the pause button. In brief, as I put it in another writing, “The master of the field is perfectly willing to allow weeds to get as much care as the wheat until the appointed time for making all things right. When the time for final judgment comes, the angels, not the workers, will do the final sorting.”

In God’s providence, “the children of promise” and “the children of the flesh,” or, to use another biblical image, “the sons of light” and “the sons of darkness,” live side by side until Christ returns to bring final judgment. It’s been that way since God protected Cain following Abel’s death (Genesis 4:1–16). God bestowed culture-building gifts to the line of Cain, while giving the gift of worship to children of the line of Seth (Genesis 4:17–21,25–26). As strange as it may seem to us, Cain’s descendants and Seth’s descendants live in interdependence to one another. Christ, and Christ alone, will separate “wheat” from “tares” and “sheep” from “goats” (Matthew 13 and 25), and that, at a time not chosen by him, but appointed by his Father (Mark 13:32; Matthew 24:36).

As I was pondering this puzzling parable, I stumbled upon reflections written by Augustine, the North African 5th century bishop. He too lived in a time when people’s fuses were short. The redemptive hopes for a Christianized Roman Empire were falling short: pagans were asking why barbarians were still invading 100 years after Constantine’s conversion, and why riotous living had not been put in check. Here, Augustine writes the first Christian philosophy of history. In it, he calls for patience. The human story, he argues, is one of the simultaneous emergence of, and the divergence between, the “City of God” and the “City of Man.” Each “city” becomes more itself.

In the previous parable about the Sower and the Seed, Augustine reminds his readers, Jesus warns us not to be “stony ground,” “shallow ground,” or “thorny places” (Matthew 13:1–9,18–23). Rather, we should, says Augustine, “plough the hard ground, cast the stones out of the field, pluck up the thorns out of it.” Guard, in other words, against a hard heart that will reject God’s Word. Avoid a shallowness of soul where God’s love will find no root. Remove things like lust and the cares of this world that would choke the life out of us. Instead, our lives should be “good ground,” where God’s Word gets planted deep, and produces much fruit.

In this next parable about Wheat and Tares, Jesus changes the image (Matthew 13:24–30,36–43). We now are what comes up out of the ground. We are either wheat that nourishes, or tares (likely, darnel) that poison. The scary thing is that the wheat and the darnel plant look alike. Both will sit side by side in church, says Augustine, and be indistinguishable from the outside. Jesus warns us, of course, not to let ourselves be tares: life-giving in appearance, but death-dealing in actuality. Comments Augustine:

I am addressing the tares; but the sheep themselves are the tares. O evil Christians, O you, who in filling only press the Church by your evil lives; amend yourselves before the harvest come … He is requiring repentance of you … and may it be so that they who today are tares, may tomorrow be wheat.

That’s something we might very well expect Jesus to say. What’s a bit surprising is what he says to the good wheat: Don’t think it’s your job to get rid of the tares. You’ll destroy yourselves if you do. As Augustine puts it:

Why are you so hasty, [Jesus] says, you servants full of zeal? You see evil Christians among the good; and you wish to root up the evil ones; be quiet, it is not the time of harvest. That time will come, may it only find you wheat! … O you Christians, whose lives are good, you sigh and groan as being few among many, few among very many. The winter will pass away, the summer will come; lo! The harvest will soon be here. …

Let the good tolerate the bad; let the bad change themselves, and imitate the good. Let us all, if it may be so, attain to God.

Almost as if to summarize this parable, and certainly to address people who live in a day like Augustine’s and ours, James the brother of Jesus puts it this way: “the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God” (James 1:20).

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: "icon of the wheat and tares" by bobosh_t is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

*Augustine, Sermon 23 on the New Testament, accessed at http://newadvent.org/fathers/160323.htm