SERMON FOR JULY 19, 2020.        TEXT: MATTHEW 13:24-30, 36-43
          Jesus, as we encounter him in the Gospel of Matthew, comes across at times as fierce and unyielding. His threat or promise, depending on your perspective, that there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth appears seven times in the Gospels. Six of them are in Matthew. You have to ask yourself, who is Jesus trying to scare and who is he trying to comfort by this promise of judgment and dire consequences?
          The New Testament scholar Matt Skinner describes the evangelist as a writer trying to do pastoral work in a contentious setting. Matthew makes the case for his understanding of authentic Christian faith over against other groups with conflicting teachings. This is for him no mere difference of opinion; he regards their positions as misleading and dangerous. His situation is much like the one Jesus faced in his own ministry. No wonder Matthew pays close attention to the Lord’s parables and the grim warnings they carry. 
          Professor Skinner acknowledges his discomfort with the stark dualism that sharply divides “all causes of sin and all evildoers” from “the righteous,” the former to be cast into the furnace of fire or the outer darkness, the latter destined to “shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” And yet, he concedes, it has been getting easier for him to understand Matthew’s perspective and pain. Skinner rightly states that “[t]here is no Christian gospel that exists in isolation from public life; the kingdom of God imagines an alternate social existence.” And people claiming to speak for God in our time, as in Matthew’s and in Jesus’, say a lot of different things. Some have gotten the Word dangerously wrong. Then error and hypocrisy easily take root. They spread and choke healthy growth like the thorns in last Sunday’s parable. They allow injustice to run rampant. They crowd out the fruits of the Spirit. Can we afford to take a “let’s wait-and-see what happens” attitude?
          Professor Skinner writes, “Even though the parable of the weeds and wheat . . . urges readers to leave judgment up to God, still that message is too easily overlooked by believers who get fed up . . . . Matthew’s stringent us-not-them attitude has been too easily exploited throughout history to magnify and excuse all sort of hostilities by Christians toward other groups. Let’s not add to that ugly history. But let’s also not pretend that Jesus’ parable calls for passivity as the hallmark of discipleship. And let’s remember that some weeds are easy to spot as soon as they poke out of the ground.” 
          These last several months you can’t miss the weeds of injustice, indifference and selfishness infecting our common life. In many cases it’s clear who is sowing them and who reaps the ugly harvest. Now is the time to take action; some weeds have to go. It’s part of preparing for the end of the age, when the angels will come and settle the account once and for all. Get rid of those easy-to-spot weeds, the ones Jesus clearly identifies in his teaching, and you make more room for the good seed. You clear the ground so that others can see and hear and change. So that when the angels come, they won’t find an abundance of weeds to burn.
          Yet we must also acknowledge that not all weeds are readily identified as soon as they poke out of the ground. Anyone who has worked in a garden has experienced cases of mistaken identity and uprooted the wrong plants. Or maybe you inadvertently destroyed seedlings entwined among the vigorous weeds against which you made a preemptive strike. Today’s parable is not calling us to be passive, but it does require of us that we be patient. 
          It is tempting to take our best guess at the identity of “the children of the evil one.” Jesus himself assures us that we will be able to identify some enemies, despite their deceptive appearance. Near the end of the Sermon on the Mount he tells his listeners, “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit” (Matthew 7:15-17). But shortly before giving this warning Jesus also admonishes the crowd, “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get . . . . How can you say to your neighbor ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye” (Matthew 7:1-5). He follows this up seven verses later with the golden rule: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets” (Matthew 7:12). 
        As Christians we have to be discerning and deliberate. It is easy to hide behind a pious “Who am I to judge?” rather than call out clear and present evil and face the consequences. And it is also easy to move from the struggle for righteousness to the ease of self-righteousness, which is unlikely to win your estranged brother or sister to the cause (Matthew 18:15). God’s promise is that justice will ultimately prevail. The prospect of God’s clear-eyed judgment should give us hope and cause us grave concern. The choices we make, the company we keep, the sins we commit, the repentance we embrace — these things matter; God will value the harvest of our lives. The noxious weeds will be gathered up; the rotten trees will be cut down; they will be thrown into the fire. But neither now nor at the end of time are we the Lord’s appointed reapers. 
Amen.