Weeding Out the Evil

Over the past several years, we’ve been slowly expanding a vegetable garden in the strips of soil along the south side of church by the door closest to the church offices. The goal is to have fresh veggies for church folk or neighbors to grab on their way by. Last year we had tomatoes, green peppers, chili peppers, lettuce, beans, and broccoli. A number of the chili peppers made it into our homemade salsa for the year—a particularly good vintage, I must say. And it was a delight, on an almost daily basis, to watch a neighbor walk through the parking lot with her son and stop to pick tomatoes.

It was not all a success, however, as some items grew better than others (sorry, broccoli…). And it was particularly challenging to beat back the weeds. Indeed, by about midsummer, I gave up and let the veggies fend for themselves. That meant that when springtime rolled around and it was time to start anew, clearing out the soil was a particularly daunting task.

I recruited Peter as a helper and we set to it, trying our best to pull all the weeds out by the roots so they wouldn’t come back. As I dug through the soil, however, I was surprised to discover, hidden between the weeds, several red lettuce plants struggling to poke through. I hadn’t planted them there. They must have self-seeded from out-of-control plants from last year. And they brought me great delight.  

I cleared out the rest of the weeds, careful to leave the lettuce plants undisturbed, and smiled at the glimpse of goodness and order in the midst of the chaos. And I was reminded of Jesus’ parable of the weeds in Matthew 13 (also known as the parable of the wheat and the tares). In it Jesus describes a field of wheat that has also been overgrown with weeds. The temptation is to pull out all the weeds to let the wheat grow unencumbered, but the farmer decides against it, worried that pulling the weeds would also uproot the good wheat.

That concern didn’t stop me from pulling all the weeds around our struggling lettuce plants. But it did help me think about our world. There are times I wish God would just pull out all of the weeds. All of the chaos. All of the sin and the evil that threaten to choke out the good.

But then I get thinking. And I wonder if sometimes my life isn’t more weed than it is wheat. And I realize life is rarely black and white—and there’s a little bit of weed and a little bit of wheat in each of us. And maybe it’s a bit of grace that the weeds aren’t all just pulled out. And we, together, get a bit longer to figure out what living as wheat looks like in the kingdom of God.

Later in chapter 13 Jesus explains the parable of the weeds and describes the judgment day when all of the weeds are pulled out and thrown into a fire. Then, Jesus says, the wheat that is left will shine like the sun.

There are glimpses of that brightness already. Glimmers of the good that is to come. Sometimes it is struggling to poke out among the weeds. Sometimes we need to peal back the layers of chaos and evil to see it. But it is there. Just like the lettuce in the garden at church.