Wheat and tares together sown (Matthew 13: 24-43)
TurquoiseTastic
Kerygmania Host
So we had this reading - the parable of the wheat and the tares/darnel at this Sunday's morning service.
The excellent sermon concentrated on the theme of judgment being above our pay grade - do not assume that someone is a "weed" because that is not our call to make. I also liked the preacher's image of how eventually the wheat becomes distinct from the darnel because its head is bowed down by the grain it yields - it is ultimately humble and fruitful.
The questions in my mind are:
1. Why is this parable so dualistic? Most of Scripture emphasises that everything comes from God. But when the farmer is asked where the weed seeds come from he says - "an enemy has done this". And Jesus reaffirms this in his explanation.
2. Why do the disciples require an explanation? The interpretation Jesus gives seems pretty straightforward. Is it because they are hoping for some different interpretation? Or are they just being slow, like in Mark 4:13?
The excellent sermon concentrated on the theme of judgment being above our pay grade - do not assume that someone is a "weed" because that is not our call to make. I also liked the preacher's image of how eventually the wheat becomes distinct from the darnel because its head is bowed down by the grain it yields - it is ultimately humble and fruitful.
The questions in my mind are:
1. Why is this parable so dualistic? Most of Scripture emphasises that everything comes from God. But when the farmer is asked where the weed seeds come from he says - "an enemy has done this". And Jesus reaffirms this in his explanation.
2. Why do the disciples require an explanation? The interpretation Jesus gives seems pretty straightforward. Is it because they are hoping for some different interpretation? Or are they just being slow, like in Mark 4:13?
Comments
but they do not have that knowledge here.
* or mysteries
And, generally, parables are understood to be stories that make clear, or focus on, a point, not mysteries that you will later come to decode. small sca
Perhaps the intended audience is not familiar with agricultural practices, just as most of us today are not familiar with small scale, sheepfold cooperative, shepherding practices.
If 'everything that causes sin' is dealt with at the final judgement then maybe the 'all who do evil' will be a very small or zero number because the cause of sin is ultimately dealt with. Cf in Revelation the devil is cast into a lake of fire I seem to recall.
I meant that their access to him (and resulting ability to ask “What the heck did that mean?” is in fact what Jesus is referring to when he says “To you it has been given.” Right now the crowds get the parables only, the disciples get those plus Jesus’ explanations (and it says somewhere “afterwards, when he was alone with his disciples, he explained everything”, sorry, don’t have the ref on my phone). It’s not some supernatural ability to understand (though that may come too after Pentecost with the coming of the Holy Spirit). It’s simply a different level of access right now—and not one intended to stay different forever. Because the very reason for the disciples’ better access is so that in the future, they will be able to pass all this along to the rest of the world via preaching and writing (the deposit of the faith). And they did.
It is strange because the vine is a perennial, not normally grown from seed today, and would require more than one year to fruit, I think. A quick search finds 3 years.
Also, the tares are not sewn by the owner. So I think the similarity is incidental.
Ahem ...
I agree with @Lamb Chopped on the 'to you it has been given' thing but she'd expect me to say that the apostolic deposit doesn't only consist of the apostolic writings.
Which isn't to knock them off their primary place of course.
I agree with @LatchKeyKid on the similarity with the Deuteronomic injunction against sowing two kinds of crops in the same field as probably coincidental, but perhaps the original audience may have seen a parallel there even if the specific agricultural detail doesn't quite match across.
We are talking about parables, of course, not an agricultural college textbook.
I really like this.
Going back to the original question about dualism, it's clear Jesus did believe in a devil, and is attributing the introduction of evil into the world to that individual's actions. I'm not at all sure that the enemy is the focus of this parable, though. I think the focus is on "What do we do now, in this messed-up situation?" and the answer of the landowner (God) is different from that of his eager helpers ("sort matters out right now"). I appreciate God's willingness to wait, because I've seen too much harm done by people who rush in and try to execute final judgement now, when things are still really murky and a lot of people end up hurt by it.
It seems to be promoting a cultural idea of singlemindedness, if I can put it that way. Which of course is ultimately intended to keep them from mixing religions.
I used to be involved in a 'restorationist' charismatic evangelical church which applied these verses to maintaining some kind of spiritual purity at a congregational level.
God didn't approve of 'mixture.'
He wanted a church where everyone was fervently firing on all cylinders all the time.
We never really knew how to interpret the parable of the wheat and the tares and jumped through all manner of hermeneutical hoops in order to make it fit our neat schema.
Life isn't like that. The Kingdom of God isn't like that, at least not this side of the Parousia.
@Lamb Chopped is right, any attempt to step in and straighten everything out in advance ultimately ends in pastoral disaster.
As the late, great Reformed missiologist Lesslie Newbiggin said, 'Any attempt to bring Heaven down from above invariably brings Hell up from below.'
Our lives are messy. We'll have 'tare' like characteristics as well (hopefully) as wheaty ones.
We are all work in progress.
We live between the now and the not yet.