There’s a famous but possibly apocryphal story about the Chinese Communist leader Zhou En Lai being asked in 1968 about the impact of the French Revolution which had begun 179 esrlier and replying: “It’s too early to tell.” A perceptive answer and also a clue to what informed the thinking of the landowner in Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds. His slaves asked whether they should go into the field and uproot the weeds and he told them not to because it was too early to tell for sure what was a weed and what was wheat. If they intervened now they would uproot some of the wheat along with the weeds.
I’ve done a little agricultural research on the internet and discovered that what the enemy in Jesus’ story sowed was a plant called darnel whose Latin name is Lolium Temulentum. In the early stages of its growth, it looks very like wheat. It is only as it approaches maturity that it becomes obvious that it isn’t. A wheat plant produces a crop of edible grain and, as the grain swells and ripens, its weight causes the wheat stalk to bend over. Lolium Temulentum produces small, bitter-tasting seeds. They are so light that the plant continues to remain upright, so that just before harvest time the weeds stick out from among the wheat and are easily identified. The seeds are mildly poisonous – and if you eat them you end up with symptoms very like a hangover. Hence the Latin name for this plant, because Temulentum means “drunk”.
So the farmer in the parable understands the need to wait until it becomes clear which plants are wheat and which plants are weeds. This is a story which reminds us that if we make premature judgements about who or what is good or bad, we are likely to get it wrong and to injure and destroy the good as well as the bad. Ultimate judgement should be based on results, based on the fruits of each person’s life and the long-term consequences of their actions – and that this is a judgement which has to be left to God because it is beyond the moral and intellectual scope of human beings to make it and because, for us, it will always be too early to tell. And that applies to judgements about our own lives as well as judgements about the lives of others.
The parable is also reminding us that the pursuit of human justice (which is so often mixed up with the human desire for revenge) can have dangerous side effects, with the innocent suffering as well as the guilty. The French Revolution, on whose long-term impact Zhou En Lai refused to comment, offers an example of what happens when people think that they have a secure knowledge of who is virtuous and who is evil and believe that they can ensure the triumph of virtue by eradicating those whom they deem to be evil. The innocent suffering caused by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia or by extreme right-wing regimes in Germany, Italy and Spain also shows that this kind of Utopianism leads to appalling cruelty. We still live with the consequences of those upheavals.
As Christians we should be very wary of this kind of judgmental certainty precisely because we understand that we ourselves are a mixture of the good and the bad, the wheat and the weeds. We understand also that God loves us and seeks to bring us to fruition. If that’s true of us, it is also true of the politician whose policies and actions we most deplore. If we’re tempted to think that the world would be a better place without…and I’ll leave you to choose your personal bête noire…we need to remember that our belief that God’s love for us is unconditional and that God’s grace can transform us applies also and equally to them and to the whole of humanity. At a time when our elected representatives experience frequent abuse and death threats and a few days after the tragic and violent death of Ann Widdecombe that is a perspective which we need to cultivate and to share.
When the landowner in Jesus’ parable tells his slaves: “Let both of them grow together” the Greek word that is translated as “let” can also mean forgive. It is as though the landowner is telling his slaves to reprieve the weeds. We are all in need of forgiveness. The thrust of this sermon was pithily expressed by the theologian Miroslav Volf when he wrote these words:
“Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans and myself from the community of sinners.”