St. Luke's Episcopal Church
Cleveland, Tennessee

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
July 20, 2008
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

This past Friday morning at the Men’s Prayer Breakfast, we talked about how similar in tone this passage today is to last week’s Gospel passage. Last week we heard about the parable of the sower. The men at Prayer Breakfast were quite right to point out that there is a similarity here. There is an earthiness to these stories that Jesus tells. Some of us may remember being taught in Sunday school that a parable is an earthly story with a heavenly meaning. That is what we have here. We have a parable that uses very simple, straightforward language. And yet there are so many points that we can draw from this story. Let’s look at just a part of this story for just a minute.

I think the instinct of most of us is to wonder whether we are the weeds or the wheat in this parable. That is a perfectly normal instinct. When we first hear this story, we want to know where we fit in. We could look at that in great detail, but today I want to focus for just a couple of minutes on another aspect of this story. Look down about 4 or 5 verses, there is just a little piece of the story I want us to focus on today.

Once they discover that there are weeds among the good seeds, the slaves go to the landowner, and say, “Then do you want us to go and gather them?” In other words, the slaves are pictured as saying, “Do you want us to pull up the weeds?” The landowner says, “No, for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at the harvest time I will tell the reapers, ‘Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn’”

What we have here tucked into a much larger parable with other points to be made, is this very clear teaching about being non-judgmental. That is what Jesus is warning us about here. Let’s look for just a minute at what is going on here. These servants are not bad people. They are loyal servants of the landowner, so, in the parable, these are people of faith. They go to the landowner, and say, “Would you not like for us to pull up the weeds?” The landowner says, unambiguously, “No, because in pulling up some of the weeds, you may accidentally pull up some wheat as well.” What’s being taught here by Jesus is to not be judgmental, to not put ourselves in the place of God. Jesus makes it absolutely clear later on in the parable that the angels will help God do the judging. The servants unwittingly are offering to put themselves into the place of the angels. “Lord, do you not want us to help you?” The landowner, representing Jesus in the parable, says, “No. The angels at the end of time will help God do the judging.”

What we have here is a very clear teaching warning us, as we are warned so many other times throughout Scripture, not to be judgmental, not to put ourselves into the place of God. When we see a crime being committed, of course, we take action. When we learn of someone being abused, we, of course, take action as people of love. But, in general, when it comes to judging others, we have to be so very careful not to put ourselves into the place of God.