“The farmhands asked, ‘Should we weed out the thistles?’ The farmer said, ‘No, if you weed the thistles, you’ll pull up the wheat, too. Let them grow together until harvest time.”

- Matthew 13:29

We really like dichotomies, don’t we? It’s helpful for us to split things in two: good/bad, right/wrong, healthy/unhealthy. We especially like to do this in the church: this is sinful, that’s not; the mind is good, the body is not; faith is good, science is not; this is sacred, that’s profane.

Unfortunately, this world of dichotomies often leads to an us versus them world. It leads to finger pointing and judgment.

This isn’t to say rules aren’t good. Jesus was clear that he came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. But he also said, “Don’t judge so that you won’t be judged….Don’t be so quick to point out the speck in your neighbor’s eye while you have a log in your own.” (Matthew 7:3)

When we decide we get to be the judge - the ultimate authority on good and evil - what happens? When humans decide it is their job to be the judge and that it’s their job - on behalf of God - to weed out the bad, what happens?

Efforts of purification happen: the inquisition, the crusades, the holocaust, white nationalism, Jim Crow laws, lynching, colonialism, witch hunts and trials… the list could go one.

This is what happens when we decide it’s up to us: we do far more harm than good.

We become like the servants in this parable trying to weed out the bad. The farmer tells them - if you do this, there will be nothing left.

In this parable, the Greek word for weed refers to darnel, which is a particularly noxious weed that is abundant in the Holy Land that looks JUST like wheat. Only once wheat and darnel grow full until harvest can you really tell them apart because the wheat stock will droop while the darnel will stick straight up.

So Jesus is telling his followers that the Kingdom of God is like a big field with both wheat and weeds; with both good and bad; and he is saying that we cannot tell the difference between the wheat and the weed. It is impossible to tell who is wheat in this world, and who is weed. Only God can do that at harvest time. Because God knows our neighbor's heart better than we do. God knows our heart better than we do. And truthfully, I think each of us has a little bit of wheat and a little bit of weed in us.

Our job is not to judge our neighbor, says Jesus, our job is to love our neighbor.

When we let go of our innate desire to judge one another, and ourselves, we are freed to love one another more deeply and completely. When we can allow ourselves to stop figuring out who is weed and who is wheat, we can honor that we all have a little bit of both in ourselves and thus focus more of our attention on becoming wheat; because there is a lot more grace in becoming wheat than there is in pulling weeds.*

Jesus said, "I did not come to condemn the world but to save the world." He knew that the way we save the world is not by pulling weeds, but by becoming wheat.

*adapted quote from Michael Flynn's Eifelheim