Matthew 13 24-30 2005
Pentecost 9
Matthew 13:24-30
July 17,2005
Willy Wonka’s Weeds
After Homiletic’s
Introduction: Charlie Bucket and Veruca Salt. A good seed, and a bad weed. Charlie’s honest, kind, brave and true. Veruca is a spoiled-rotten brat.
Both get a chance to enter the mysterious chocolate factory of Willy Wonka, a place that has been sealed up tight and closed to the public for a decade. Charlie and Veruca have found Golden Tickets in their Wonka chocolate bars — Charlie’s ticket was in a Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight, to be exact — and because of this they get to go on a tour of the chocolate factory, along with three other lucky children.
Their tour guide is none other than the reclusive and eccentric Willy Wonka himself. When the children walk through the factory doors, they enter an amazing world known only to Willy and his staff of Oompa-Loompas.
The tour is a dream come true for Charlie, a child born into poverty, but it turns into a nightmare for the other members of the group. Willy Wonka is beset with problems: There’s Augustus Gloop, whose hobby is eating; Violet Beauregarde, a dim-witted gum chewer; and Mike Teavee, a gangster-wannabe who is obsessed with television.
As for Veruca Salt, let’s just say that Willy is not amused when she demands of her father, “Daddy, I want a boat like this! ... And I want lots of Oompa-Loompas to row me about, and I want a chocolate river and I want ... I want ...”
As they tour the chocolate factory, a number of the children get in trouble when they disobey Willy’s orders. One by one, the nasty are punished and the good are rewarded, in some spectacular and disturbing ways.
That’s what we love about this story: The good kids get rewarded, and the bad kids get what’s coming to them. It’s a replay of good vs. evil, light vs. dark, and in the end goodness and light triumph. And we love this because in real life, it doesn’t always work this way. The psalmist paints a far more accurate picture when he complains about the wicked prospering while the righteous suffer. For the Old Testament prophet, Habakkuk, it was a faith-threatening reality: “The wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted” (Habakkuk 1:4 NIV).
So we love it when the wicked are punished, when the unrighteous are mowed down, when the weeds are uprooted in the garden.
This is the subject of the gospel text. Jesus tells the parable of the weeds and the wheat, and concludes his story with the command to “collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn” (Matthew 13:30 NIV).
But there is more to this parable than its crisp and clear conclusion about judgment day, when the evildoers of this world will burn and the righteous will “shine like the sun” (13:43). While we certainly have to take seriously this prediction of God’s final judgment, we also need to listen to what Jesus says about the danger of making judgments of our own along the way.
In a way, Jesus says, Leave the weeds to me. This is hard for us to do because we live in a culture where everyone seems to be judging each other. Each group looks at the other as the weeds that need to be uprooted. It’s the attitude of I’m right and you are wrong. You’re a lefty or you’re a right wing Bushy. I’m good and your bad. It’s my way or the highway and there is no middle ground. We live in a culture of shouting and name-calling. One person’s weed is another person’s flower.
And it’s not just in the world. The church has caught this infection as well. Christians, right and left, are strutting around these days in the garments of self-righteousness suggesting that those who disagree with them are the weeds in the garden of life, while they themselves are the beauty and flower of the garden.
It’s a rush-to-judgment world we live in. Some are judged harshly for being too radical, others for not being radical enough. Some are judged for embracing doctrinal errors, others for appearing not to have any doctrine at all. Some are condemned for not caring for the poor, others for caring only for the poor. And so it goes. While we must preserve doctrinal purity, we must not judge too quickly and without Christian love. Sometimes there is no black and white and therefore we must wait for Jesus Christ to come and harvest the crop that he has planted and then he will separate the weeds from the wheat.
No wonder, then, that Jesus counsels us to hold off on the weed-pulling “for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them” (13:29).
The parable goes like this: a householder sows good seed in his field, and then an enemy comes and sows weeds among the wheat. It’s a nasty little case of agricultural terrorism.
When the plants come up and bear grain, the weeds appear as well. And the slaves of the householder come to him and say, “Master, we’ve got a problem. Weeds among the wheat. Do you want us to go out and pull up the weeds?”
This seems like a logical response, but the householder gives them a very different command. “No,” he says; “for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest” (13:29-30). The weed that is described in this parable is darnel. It is a weed that looks exactly like the wheat but it bears no seed. To pull it out wood mean the inevitable possibility of pulling the good out with the bad. The master senses that a full-scale attack on the weeds would disturb and possibly even destroy the good wheat, so he instructs his slaves to do nothing about the bad seeds now. At harvest time the householder plans to tell the reapers, “Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn” (13:30).
Jesus takes a different approach then WillyWonka in rooting out evil. Whereas Willy doesn’t bat an eye as Augustus plunges into a chocolate river, Violet turns into a blueberry, Mike disappears into a transporter beam, and Veruca slides down a garbage chute into a furnace, Jesus is committed to preserving the weeds until the wheat is fully developed. He doesn’t have any desire to rush to judgment, preferring instead for nature to take its course.
The point of this parable is not that Jesus is going to go easy on the weeds. No, he fully intends to put evildoers into the furnace of fire, “where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (13:42).
What Jesus is trying to teach us is to leave the judgments to him. He knows that we are consistently off the mark when we try to make an accurate assessment of the moral character or the faith of a friend or a neighbor, and so he orders us to put our energy elsewhere.
Here’s an example: A seminar leader recently showed a class of government workers a series of pictures. The pictures began with a view of a person’s face, and then broadened the view to reveal the person’s entire body. It was only when the entire picture was seen that the class could make anything approaching an accurate judgment.
The first picture showed the face of a grizzled man, scowling and straining. He looked to be a member of a motorcycle gang, perhaps gripping the handlebar of a chopper. But when the entire picture was revealed, it became clear that he was a maker of customized wheelchairs for the handicapped, and he was pushing one of his creations.
Picture two showed the face of a lovely woman with a beautiful smile. She appeared to be a flight attendant or a hostess at an upscale restaurant. But when the view was expanded, what the class saw was an exotic dancer, ready to do a pole dance. We just don’t always see the whole picture.
The challenge for us is to put our energy into being what we are, good wheat, instead of trashing the weeds around us. Rather than erecting walls, building boundaries and trying to purify our church from the bad people, our job is to grow up healthy and strong, bearing the gifts and fruit of the Holy Spirit, love, peace, joy, being patient, kind, not envious, not boastful, not seeking our own way, not keeping a record of wrongs, not delighting in evil, but rejoicing in the truth. We are to focus on the greatest truth, that God sent our Savior Jesus Christ into this world to die on a cross to deliver us from our sin, and to rejoice in the forgiveness that we are given through God’s Word and the sacraments of Holy Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. We are to leave the judging to Jesus. The problem with trying to pull up weeds is that we might grab some wheat by mistake, and hurt ourselves and others who are good seed.
When I think about weeds I think about Larry Giese. He is the Terminator in the weed world. No weed is safe from him. He hunts his quart around the church and its various buildings armed with a poison thrower. As a great white weed hunter he is beyond compare. But as he sprays, wherever he spays, it is both weeds and grass that die. In the end it seems like only the weeds comeback, like a movie monster that refuses to die.
Our Lord does things a little differently. Jesus says, let the weeds grow up with the wheat. It will get sorted out in the end. It may be a little unsightly, and as a church we might not like it, but it is best for the wheat, to let the weeds grow for a little while.
We are also reminded that in this world Jesus died for both the wheat and the weeds. Who are we to know the power of God to change a person from weed to wheat by the power of His Holy Word…..
In the end, it’s enough to know that we are “seeds” who have been planted by the “Son of Man,” and that we’re part of a healthy harvest that will someday be reaped by the angels of God. We have been planted in the garden of this world to bear fruit – a hundred, sixty, or thirty fold. Through us our Lord multiplies his crop of wheat in this world.
It is also important to remember that we have been saved by God’s grace. Even in the story of Willy Wonka, Charlie gets in trouble and makes some mistakes. He even goes against the direct orders of Willy himself. But Charlie is favored by Willy Wonka and in the end rewards him anyway. God favors us also and he will give us heavenly reward. But God does this not by simply turning of a blind eye towards our sin. He takes away our sin and places it on His son Jesus Christ, and for his sake gives us the treasures of heaven.
For now, we coexist in the world. The good and the bad, the wheat and the weeds, living side by side, so that God can fulfill His purpose of saving the world. Amen