The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
In the 12th and 13th centuries in Spain and France, a spiritual movement arose within the Christian church. The movement was called the Cathars, and the Cathars were deeply influenced by Gnostic heresies. They were in essence, fundamentally, undeniably Gnostics. They weren’t true Christians in any sense of the word, though they thought themselves to be. Cathar cosmology taught that there were two opposing deities, a kind of dualism of equals. The good god of the New Testament was the creator of spirit; that made him good. The second god was the god of evil, of the Old Testament, creator of matter and of the physical world. In Gnosticism, the physical world, your body, is evil and corrupt, and its sole function is to ultimately corrupt the spirit.
The Cathar heretical doctrine grew in influence and confused and led many Christian people astray. In 1147 A.D., the bishops and even the pope tried to call these false teachers back to right Christian doctrine, but those efforts failed. After a few decades with no real success, the king of France decided to send an army to rid his land of the weeds of the Gnostic heresy. He sent French crusaders to the town of Béziers in southern France, which was a Cathar stronghold. They attacked the town on July 22, 1209 A.D., and they defeated the town’s defenders. But many ordinary Christians also lived in the town, and when they saw that their hometown was about to be besieged and leveled to the ground, they joined the Cathars in defending the city. But they lost. When the city fell, the commander of the French crusaders, himself a Roman Catholic monk, gave the order, and it’s been crudely translated but has passed down through the centuries. Realizing that there were both faithful Christians and heretics among the captured citizens, the commander reportedly said in Latin, “Kill them all, and let God sort them out.” As a result, the Cathars and the orthodox Christians alike, men, women, and children, were slaughtered, perhaps as many as seven thousand in one day, in an effort to rid the church of the weeds of the Gnostic heresy.
But to tear up the weeds is to tear up the wheat. And that’s the lesson of the parable this morning, the parable of the wheat and the tares. It was told by Jesus as a continuation of the sermon, conversation, and conflict that began in chapter 12. In chapters 12 and 13, crowds had gathered to hear the teaching of Jesus, to see what He was all about, what He had to say for Himself. As I pointed out last week, it was a picture of the true visible church on earth, that is, the one that we see with our eyes: the real church that has both saints and unbelievers alike. It’s mixed with wheat and with tares. It consists of both believers and hypocrites. This particular crowd had a significant number of people who were not fans of Jesus; they were people who were committed to works’ righteousness and believed that their Hebrew bloodline was all they needed to claim the promise of a new kingdom.
Jesus spoke to both groups throughout a series of parables and sayings recorded in chapters 12 and 13. The parable of the wheat and the tares is one of those parables in which Jesus actually offers an explanation. He wants to make it abundantly clear to His disciples what the parable means; He wants no misunderstanding. So He begins by likening the parable to the kingdom of heaven, and in this case the kingdom of heaven is the visible church on earth, the one that the Augsburg Confession rightly identified: “Although the church properly is the congregation of saints and true believers, nevertheless, since in this life many hypocrites and evil persons are mingled therewith, it is lawful to use the sacraments administered by evil men.”
So Jesus begins the parable by saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away.” First, a little important grammatical note: Jesus begins the parable by using an aorist passive indicative for the word that’s translated “compared” or “likened to.” The grammatical construct is used to place the description of the kingdom of heaven in the past tense. That is, Jesus is actually referring to the people who stand in front of Him in chapter 12; He’s referring to the events and the conflicts that are happening right then and there.
In both the parable of the sower from last week and the parable of the wheat and the tares, Jesus is invoking an image from Isaiah 61:3, which says that the Christian church and Christians are “the planting of the Lord.” The visible church is likened to the field. The Son of Man is the sower, in both last week’s parable and the parable before us this week. Jesus Himself says in the explanation, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man.” So the sower who sows the good seed is the Son of Man, the good seed of Genesis 3:15. “But while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away.”
The sower has an enemy. People often forget that Jesus has enemies. Yes, He does. He has an enemy in the devil and the demons. He has an enemy in our old sinful nature. He has an enemy in everyone who opposes the gospel and the words of God recorded in the sacred Scriptures. This enemy intends to sabotage the whole operation. The sabotage is a personal attack upon the soul, and he intends to do all he can to blunt or to wipe out any good seed planted by the sower. The enemy comes to oversow with the weeds, so that the weeds take over the wheat, and thus he seeks to strangle out the good seed, leaving only the tares. The weeds are in direct competition for the water and the nutrients in the soil of the soul. The weeds are those who oppose, distort, and violate the work of the kingdom, and those who twist and corrupt the preaching of the Word of God. And there are many of those these days. 2 Timothy 4:3 said there would be: they want to have their ears tickled; they want to accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance with their own desires, and they will turn their ears away from the truth and will turn aside to myths. That’s the kind of thing that the evil one hopes the tares will accomplish.
There are a great number of people who think of themselves as Christians, and some even go to church, but whose faith and life have absolutely nothing to do with the call of God to repentance, with the law and the gospel, the Word and the sacramental ministry. They are in fact hostile to the Bible’s genuine teachings and the people who speak and live according to the words of God in the Scriptures.
In verse 26: “So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also.” Weeds and wheat look an awful lot alike as they grow. It takes a man of the vocation, an expert, to be able to see the difference between a tare and wheat from the beginning; otherwise they look pretty much alike. The weeds, which were not so visible at the beginning, all of a sudden appeared. The grain ripening is compromised by the competition of these weeds. It’s not just the fact that wheat bears good fruit and tares bear bad; the weeds hinder the production of the grain. They take away the resources that the church needs to proclaim the law and gospel and minister the sacraments to the four corners of the earth. It’s a competition, and Satan entered it.
Verse 27: “And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.'” Here the landowner confirms that he in fact has sown good seed; by the way, that’s you, that he has planted good seed and it is yielding good fruit. There’s no defect in the seed. In His explanation in verse 37 He says, “The one who sows good seed is the Son of Man, and the field is the world, and the good seed is the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels.” So the weeds are the people who came into being by virtue of the devil’s work, and the sons of the kingdom are the product of the sower of the seed, who is Jesus Christ.
What Jesus is describing here is the visible church, and He’s describing it in terms of a battlefield. There’s a war between the good and the evil, though many people wish to deny it. The Son of Man and the devil, they are at odds. The children of God and the children of the devil, they are naturally opposed one to the other. That’s why we not only have sections in our hymnals titled “Communion of Saints” or “The Ministry” or “The Mission Church,” but we also have “Christian Warfare,” where we sing hymns like “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” There’s a battle waging in the wheat field, in the visible church, in the world.
Verse 28: “He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them.'” It’s a fundamental fact: servants of the church in the parable, they want a quick, easy fix for the problem. Every time a new pastor arrives, there will certainly be those who want the church to be torn apart in the process. God cursed the ground in Genesis 3, so that man would have to work by the sweat of his brow, and the ground would yield thorns and thistles. It’s part of the curse. God places thorns and thistles in congregations. The only explanation we have is the one Peter offers in his first epistle, namely that through suffering our faith is made pure, like gold purified by fire.
Many pastors and faithful laymen would love to have a painless and immediate end to the problem of tares in the congregation. But there is no immediate and viable strategy for eradicating the infection of false belief and works-righteousness. We’re not able to effectively get rid of the enemies of the gospel who make our lives and our ministries difficult at times. The church has attempted many times over the centuries to weed out false teachers and troublers of the church. The faithful should confront and try to correct false teachers; we ought not just shrug it off. We ought to point out mistakes when mistakes are made. We are to point out false doctrine when false doctrine is taught. Luther makes a helpful distinction: he points out that in tolerating the presence of false and evil teachers, we in no way approve of them, but we must resist them, try to correct them, warn others about false teachings. We may even prevent them from spreading false teachings or misleading people, in certain times and in certain places and under certain conditions. But we cannot eradicate them completely, nor are we to try. We cannot, nor are we to try, to purge them from our congregations. We are to be patient, constantly correcting them, marking them as false teachers, encouraging people not to listen to what they have to say. We will not be able to eradicate them completely or purge them from the church as we wish we could. We could not do that without falling into fanaticism, injustice, or even violence.
Jesus’ teaching in verse 30: “Let both grow together until the harvest.” Endure them. Belong, suffer. Do not wish that you were without evil men and heretics; you will not be able to change this. There’s no sense in trying to rid a church body of false teachers, for they will always be with us. Jesus tells us the weeds will always be where the wheat is, and that’s how the devil works.
Again, just as was true for the parable of the soils, the thing that catches our attention at first might not be the main point of the parable. In the parable of the soils, our primary focus should always be upon the sower of the seed, who sows His Word freely on every kind of ground conceivable. He withholds nothing from the world. He proclaims His law and His gospel through the ministry of the church. We’re always tempted to focus on the wrong thing: on the soils rather than the sower. In the parable of the wheat and the tares, we’re tempted to focus on the servants and the enemy and the intermingling of the roots. But the parable ultimately finishes, and is fundamentally about, the harvest: bringing in the sons of the kingdom of God into the heavenly realm, while casting out the weeds. It’s another version of the parable of the sheep and the goats.
The owner of the land in the parable says, “Let both grow together until the harvest.” The harvest is where the victory is finally, ultimately won. The visible church in this world consists of good and bad. We’ve seen that in our ministry together for the past 30-plus years, and it’s often difficult to determine friend and foe, wheat and tare, sheep and goat. That’s why confessional seminaries and congregations value biblical languages, a course of study, Bible-based dogma, that is, doctrine, historical training for pastors, so that they understand that what we have has come to us from century after century, and it’s not ours to play with, to change willy-nilly to make us feel better or to try to appeal to the marketplace. Pastors more than any other should be able to tell the differences in doctrine and practice, and know what is of the wheat and what is of the tares, what is in good soil and what is in bad soil.
See, God is at work in the church, so we need to let Him work. And He works, believe it or not, even through the weeds. God’s life-giving Word is being sown. God is feeding and nourishing the seed that is you with the blessed spring of everlasting water, Holy Baptism. He nourishes His field with the words of absolution, with the words of institution at the Lord’s Supper. God is growing up and raising a faithful, blessed, bountiful harvest, even in the midst of overwhelming weeds. As Luther reminds us in that great Reformation hymn, Christ holds His field forever, and you are in His field. Amen.
May the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.