Have you ever thought or said about someone else: “They are one of those people”? We usually mean this in a derogatory way, such as “Bob is one of those people who eats food with a strong odor on an airplane.” “Susan is one of those people who correct other people’s grammar in mid-sentence.” We tend to have a lot of disdain for those people. We might even be one of those people.
As long as we are categorizing people, I have to admit that I wouldn’t mind being one of those people Jesus refers to as “wheat,” even if I get an occasional stink eye from someone Jesus refers to as a “weed.”
In the parable we just heard from Matthew 13, Jesus describes people as either “wheat” or “weeds.” This is, admittedly, an overly simplistic way of looking at people. The “wheat,” in this parable, are the so-called children of the kingdom, as Matthew calls them, and the “weeds” are the children of the evil one.
People are good or bad, in other words. This is black and white categorical thinking at its finest. Perhaps Jesus was one of those people who liked to divide the world into two kinds of people, like “sheep” and goats” and “wheat” and “weeds.”
In reality, we know that most people are much more complex than that. As I like to say, we all have a little “wheat” in us and we all have a little “weed” in us. And I’m not just talking about pot smokers. But I get why Jesus does this. It’s easier to divide people into clearly defined categories, especially if one wants to make a larger point, which he does.
Jesus is saying that it is impossible to categorize people so easily in real time—in the moment. Only at the “harvest,” that is, at some future “end of the age,” can the wheat and weeds be correctly separated. And we aren’t the ones to do the separating or reaping. The reapers are angels, Jesus says, which clearly puts God in charge of this painstakingly ginormous task.
You and I, on the other hand, should shy away from categorizing people so easily, and yet this parable does suggest that there are two distinct types of people: people who put their faith and trust in God and people who do not.
Sometimes—actually all the time—it is extremely difficult to tell them apart. Some people try to make it easy to tell them apart: Religious people will claim they have faith and trust in Almighty God, while atheists claim they have no faith or trust in God.
But then we hear things like, “There are no atheists in foxholes,” suggesting that times of extreme stress or fear can prompt belief in a higher power, such as someone experiencing fierce warfare while hunkered down in a foxhole. We also hear about “practical atheism,” which can refer to people who claim they believe in God, yet who live as if God does not exist.
Getting back to Jesus’ parable, it is next to impossible for you and me to determine who the wheat are and who the weeds are. So, yes, we should leave the sorting out to God.
Still, I would like to know if I am counted among the wheat rather than the weeds. Wouldn’t you like to know? What we need is a test case, which I think I have found: How do we respond to the reality of evil and suffering in the world?
Do we point to the suffering of humanity and creation as a reason not to put one’s faith and trust in the Creator, or do weput our faith and trust in the Creator despite the suffering of humanity and creation? In other words, are we one of those people? The kind of person that hangs on to God whiledrowning in quicksand rather than blame God for the quicksand?
Are we one of those people, those who bear good fruit or grain even as the weeds of the world are trying to choke us out? Are we one of those people who return kindness for meanness, who interpret all of scripture through the lens of love, who want the weeds to be harvested and gathered in the barn rather than bundled and burned?
Are we one of those people, those who see the kingdom of God in the tiniest of things: a baby sleeping in a manger who becomes the world’s savior, women with no status or wealth who become the mother of the Christ and the apostle to the apostles, men who make their living fishing become fishers of people, mustard seeds that grow into a home for giant flocks ofbirds.
Are we one of those people?
