Sermon Audio: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ministrybymail

Grace and peace be to you from God our Father and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Our meditation is based on the parable of the wheat and the tares. You will see that the sinner’s attempt to clean up the evil in life rips up the good along with the bad, but that faith in Jesus allows you to leave whatever distresses your heart in His wise and perfect hands. Again, the servants express their zeal to clean up the master’s field:

“Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up?” But he said, “Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them.”

Lord Jesus, bless Thy Word that we may trust in Thee. Amen.

“Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field: ²⁵ But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way. ²⁶ But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also. ²⁷ So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence then hath it tares? ²⁸ He said unto them, An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up? ²⁹ But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. ³⁰ Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.”

The parable we consider this morning should drive any good home gardener up the wall. A visibly weed-infested field, yet the landowner advises his servants to leave the mess alone—to let the tares grow rampant all around the wheat for the entire season. Like fingernails scratching across a chalkboard, this would be intolerable to any respectable farmer who prides himself on keeping his acres neat and in order, especially when they are visible to neighbors passing by. Our instinct, after all, is to pluck out each and every weed at first sight. Let it linger, and your plot will be overrun in no time.

“No, let it be,” says the landowner, “lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat.” In other words, He tells you, “Keep your hands out of it—because you cannot be trusted to tell the difference.” Is Jesus really saying that you don’t know how to take good care of what’s yours? That would be the parable’s main point.

Of course, Jesus isn’t talking about gardening. He’s talking about the evil with which this world is infested—the sin that takes little self-reflection to find within yourself. And the heavenly wisdom He offers is to resist your first instinct to clean it up yourself.

You see, when it comes to the troubles in life, just like any good home gardener, the temptation to get your hands dirty can be overwhelming. Consider when you can’t keep your mouth from digging into a situation you can no longer let linger—only to find yourself uprooting far more than you intended. Or a simple conversation, where your best efforts at being polite turn ugly in an instant. Once caught up in an argument, you fall into the trap of exaggeration and an escalating tone to drive home your point—no longer plucking with delicate care but sowing words you later regret.

In the process, what good was there is unintentionally trampled underfoot, crushed before it even has a chance to take root.

The impulse to correct your spouse, to assert yourself over your parents, to outdo your neighbor—all in the name of cleaning up the field—was the enemy’s goal from the start. Mission accomplished on his part. For the real crop he desires, the reason he sowed his bad seed in the first place, is not merely the weed itself, but to see your hands dirtied and soiled in the process.

Thus, Jesus gives a stern warning: “Keep your hands out of it. Let the tares grow up with the wheat until the end, because you cannot be trusted to tell the difference.” What makes us unfit for this fieldwork of rooting out sin and evil is the sinner’s delusion—the blurred line between wanting to right a wrong and simply wanting to be right. The zeal to tear out what seems wrong in our eyes often only sows more of the very thing we seek to uproot.

This is why, by divine design, every detail of this parable—so contrary to sound gardening advice—is meant to impress upon you that this is a problem beyond your understanding. Who would come and deliberately sow weeds throughout someone’s crops? No neighboring farmer would do such a thing—nor would they have the time. And what are these tares? A weed so indistinguishable from the wheat that you couldn’t possibly tell the difference? The parable makes about as much sense as all the hurt and harm we do to one another—which, again, is the point.

So, learn from the parable the Savior’s counsel: that evil is so far beyond your comprehension and outside your control that sin and everything sinners sow are truly best left to Him. When Jesus says, “Leave it be,” it is because this is something only He can clean up.

When Jesus first spoke the parable of the wheat and the tares, these details made as little sense to His disciples as they do to any good home gardener. So they turned to Him and asked, “Explain the parable of the tares to us.”

More than happy to, He clarified that this is no mere garden but a spiritual battle far above the pay grade of man: “The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels.”

It is a spiritual battle for which you have no tools, no strength, and no ability to win—but one that He alone will carry through to victory: “The Son of man [I Myself] shall send forth [My] angels, and they shall gather out of [My] kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; and shall cast them into a furnace of fire. There shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.”

Here Jesus declares that He alone has the authority to gather the harvest. The reapers, who stand ready and equipped to clean it up in one swift stroke, are waiting on His command. As He told His disciples from the very beginning: “Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.”

These are heavenly things you and I cannot peer into or comprehend—just as surely as we can never know with certainty whether what we seek to pluck from the hearts and minds of one another is wheat or tare.

Thus, the part of the parable that most troubles the human mind—why a good God would allow the enemy to run about wild—is silenced solely by what Jesus came to make plain: “He that soweth the good seed is the Son of man.”

A good seed your God has been committed to sow from the very day the enemy cast his first wicked seed with a hiss in the Garden of Eden. The good seed God sowed is the promise of a Seed from which all good would sprout forth—by crushing the enemy’s head and taking all his bad seed upon Himself.

And when, in another garden called Gethsemane, Jesus—the sinless Son of God—became infested and overrun with our sin, He did not resist.

Since Jesus bears an authority far exceeding that of the servants in the parable, He could have stopped His suffering and death at any moment. He could have called upon twelve legions of angels to scour the world clean. But, listening to His own advice, Jesus let it go. He let the venom flow through His veins, choosing instead to bear the full consequence of every one of your sins. He allowed that sin to fester within His body and soul until it consumed Him in death.

Jesus bore the Father’s wrath in your place upon the cross so that you would see all your iniquity purged away. It was burned up in His boundless love for you. In His resurrection, behold His commitment to gather you as His blood-bought own—into a righteous harvest of His own making, free from sorrow, free from sin, to live forever with Him.

By sowing the good seed of the good news of the forgiveness of sins, He has made a harvest that includes you. He has sown this good seed with perfect patience from one generation to the next, from one heart to another. And He will continue to sow it—until the very last believer has sprouted forth in faith. Then, and only then, with the harvest complete and the appointed time come, He will send forth His angels to gather us all.

So wait on Him. Wait on Him to clean it up—all of it. Knowing that harvest time is coming, and coming soon.

Now, waiting on the Lord does not mean sitting idly by, allowing the tares to overrun your life. No, the servants in our parable are still put to wholesome work throughout the season. They are simply forbidden from one task: digging in and tearing up that which may or may not be bad seed, according to their personal judgment.

But, as with everything else in this parable, even this goes against our natural instincts. As the Apostle Paul exhorts: “Recompense to no man evil for evil… Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath.” Leave final judgment to God. “If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men… Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.”

Oh, some days, this might drive you up the wall—to be left looking the fool, like fingernails on a chalkboard. But by folding your hands in prayer and confessing that this life is a mess far beyond your ability to fix, faith in Jesus—buried and risen again to eternal life—allows you to trust all things into His wise and perfect hands.

When He returns and uproots every weed tare with precision, what will remain will be the fruit of every good seed He has sown through it all, revealed in an instant before your eyes: “Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts.”

So refraining from our picking and pulling, turn to Him in the midst of all which weighs your heart down. Have His Word first work on your soul, where He tills and sows patience and confidence, and strengthens your faith to believe that He will gather you in the final harvest with mercy and love.

Now the peace that passeth all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

—Pastor Timothy T. Daub

Prince of Peace Lutheran Church
Hecla, SD

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Ministry by Mail is a weekly publication of the Church of the Lutheran Confession. Subscription and staff information may be found online at www.clclutheran.org/ministrybymail.

All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the King James Version.