Seeds and Weeds

1. John’s Unanswered Question

I heard the bells on Christmas day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace of earth, good will to men.

I thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along th'unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And in despair I bowed my head:
"There is no peace on earth," I said,
"For hate is strong, and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men."

Have you ever been in that spot of Henry Longfellow who wrote that song? Maybe especially at this time of year? So many wonderful things we sing about and celebrate. And so many hard things going on in the world—or maybe just your own life.

Maybe you’re stuck in the disconnect between what was promised and what was delivered. Maybe like John the Baptist.

Remember John? This section on Matthew 11-13 opened up with John in prison, sending messengers to ask Jesus if He really was the Messiah or if they should be waiting for another.

He had to send messengers because he couldn’t get a day pass from Herod’s jail. Assumedly they came back and told him what Jesus told them to say: “the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me” (Matthew 11:5-6).

In other words, I’m doing things that only the Messiah can do. Don’t get tripped up by the fact that I’m not doing some of the other things you thought I would do.

And that’s it. What happens to John after this? Nothing. He stays there. As Jesus continues to interact with the crowds and the Pharisees, John is just there in prison, day after day.

And it could be argued that one of John’s major questions has basically remained unanswered. You’ll remember that, back when John first introduced Jesus, he spoke of Him in some literally fiery language.

“Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. ‘I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire’” (Matthew 3:10–12).

That’s the Messiah John foretold. A judge who would deal with the wicked in the fires of judgement.

And that’s most likely the main source of John’s questions back in chapter 11. If you’re the Messiah, why haven’t you judged Herod yet? Why am I sitting in His prison? Where is the unquenchable fire I told people about?

If this was John’s basic question—which it almost certainly was—it did not receive a direct answer from Jesus. At least not yet. At least not until here in chapter 13 when He puts another parable before the people. I want to suggest that this parable and especially its explanation is the clear and decisive answer to John’s question. And not just John’s question, but no doubt the question we’ve all asked at one time or another.

If God is God, and Jesus is the saviour, why so much evil in the world? Why do bad people keep on doing bad things? How can we sing “peace on earth, good will to men” when bombs are falling and awful things are happening everywhere we look?

Jesus invites us into the answer today by giving us a whole new way of looking at the world. And He does it through a parable. And just like last week, we’re going to move between the parable and the explanation of the parable offered by Jesus so that we can truly understand what’s being said. So that we can truly hear this parable.

2. The Sower

Verse 24 tells us, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field” (Matthew 13:24). This is a very similar idea to the parable of the sower from last week. There are some major differences, but there are some big similarities between these two parables.

They are both drawing on that big idea from the prophets we saw last week, of God rescuing His people from exile by planting them. The parable of the sower from last week emphasized the role of the word of God in sowing the people of God. This parable draws on the same imagery but goes right for the big idea that the thing being sowed is the people of God.

Jesus explains this first verse in verses 37-38. Don’t miss verse 36, where His disciples needed to ask for clarification. They didn’t get this without his explanation. And to he tells them: “He answered, ‘The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man. The field is the world, and the good seed is the sons of the kingdom’” (Matthew 13:37–38).

So the picture here is of the prophet’s hope, the people of God being sowed, and the one doing it is the Son of Man.

Remember that “Son of Man” is a phrase from Daniel’s vision of one who comes on the cloud of heaven and receives an eternal kingdom from the Ancient of Days, and it’s a title that Jesus applied to Himself as the fulfillment of that vision.

Jesus Himself is the royal one who receives a kingdom from His father, the worship of the world, and who is accomplishing these ancient promises of the rescue from exile.

3. The Field

He is the one sowing in the field which Jesus says is the world. The identity of the field is actually a very important point in this parable. See, sometimes people misinterpret this parable and apply it to the church. “Good and bad are going to grow up together in the church, so we shouldn’t try too hard to remove evil from the church.” That is not what this parable is about. The field is not the church but the world. This parable is not an excuse to ignore Matthew 18 or 1 Corinthians 5 or any other passage that urges us to maintain the purity of the church.

The field is the world. But think of what that meant for the Jewish disciples listening to Jesus. The son of Man is sowing His good seed in the world. Not just in the land of Israel. That’s a big point.

In many of those prophecies we read last week, when God speaks about planting His people, He speaks about planting them in the land.

“Behold, I will gather them from all the countries to which I drove them in my anger and my wrath and in great indignation. I will bring them back to this place, and I will make them dwell in safety… I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul” (Jeremiah 32:37, 41).

What’s that sound like? That sounds like bringing the people back from the countries to the promised land, to the land of Israel, and planting them there.

And initially, this was the first phase of the rescue from exile. They were brought back from the nations to the land of Israel. But like we’ve seen, there was nothing magical about being in that land. They kept on rebelling, kept on fighting. They were basically still in exile no matter where they were.

The return from exile had to be about more than just where they were. It had to be about God’s presence with them and God’s king ruling over them more than just their location.

A second understanding we need to bring into this is that, even in the Old Testament, the land of Israel was pictured as the starting place but not the ending place of God’s dominion over His people. Think of these words from Psalm 72: “May he have dominion from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth! May desert tribes bow down before him, and his enemies lick the dust! May the kings of Tarshish and of the coastlands render him tribute; may the kings of Sheba and Seba bring gifts! May all kings fall down before him, all nations serve him!” (Psalm 72:8–11).

The New Testament picks up on this language when, in Romans 4 it describes Abraham not just as heir to that piece of land along the mediterranean Coast but rather as “heir of the world” (Romans 4:13). And the book of Hebrews picks this up even further by showing that Abraham hoped for “a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Hebrews 11:16).

This is important, because to this day there continues to be such strife over that particular piece of land in the Middle East. And sadly a lot of Christians only read a handful of verses in the Bible about the land, and come to conclusions that the Bible itself does not come to.

Jesus shows us in this parable that, with the arrival of His kingdom, the horizons of His kingdom have expanded in line with Psalm 72. It is not just that ancestral land He’s interested in. He is sowing the sons of the kingdom all over the world. And it’s no surprise that, when the book of Matthew ends, He’s going to tell His disciples to go and make disciples of all nations. It’s about the world.

4. The Seeds

And that brings us back to Jesus’ continued explanation where he shares that “the good seed is the sons of the kingdom.” In this parable, the idea of the word being the seed goes into the background, just like we saw last week, He is planting His people in fulfillment of the prophetic promises.

This is about Jesus giving spiritual life to His people. And we should note how this picture emphasizes the initiative of Jesus in giving that eternal life. Like the idea of being “born again.” We don’t make ourselves get born. It happens to us. A seed doesn’t make itself be planted. Someone else plants it.

This picture emphasizes the sovereign work of Christ in giving spiritual life to those whom He chooses to give it, as we’ve heard Jesus describe before in recent weeks.

5. The Weeds

Next, the parable talks about the weeds. Verse 25: “but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also” (Matthew 13:25–26).

This would actually be a pretty nasty thing to do to your enemy: maliciously seed weeds in and among their crops. Jesus explains in verse 38 & 39 that “the weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil.”

We remember from Genesis 3:15 that God promised enmity between the woman’s offspring and the offspring of the serpent. We remember how when John and Jesus called the Pharisees a “brood of vipers,” they were saying that they are the offspring of the ancient serpent. And Jesus points to that same idea here by speaking of the “sons of the evil one.”

The idea is that to be a “son” of someone meant that you were like them. Because sons are, or should be, like their fathers. And Satan does have an influence on people to make them like him.

Ephesians 2:2 calls Satan the “spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.” Even though Satan doesn’t create like God does, he is working hard to propagate his children—people who are like him, who follow him and do what he wants—all over the world.

And this parable pictures that process as him sowing weeds in the field of the world.

A mistake we can press with the parables is pressing the details too far, trying to squeeze meaning out of every word instead of getting the main idea. This picture of Satan planting his weeds is not meant to communicate that he creates his people in the same way that God makes His people.

It’s also not meant to suggest that there’s going to be an equal amount of good plants and weeds at the end of the age, or even more Christians than non-Christians.

It’s also not meant to communicate that once you’ve been sown as a weed, there’s no hope to ever change. That would be asking this parable to say more than it means to say.

This picture of Satan sowing seed is meant to communicate one big idea so far: that as God is planting His people, rescuing them from exile and giving them life in His presence under the rule of king Jesus, He’s not the only one at work. Satan is also hard at work, just like he’s been from the beginning, to undo the work of God by establishing wickedness and wicked people throughout the world.

In other words, the return from exile isn’t the only thing going on. There is a battle still raging between the ancient serpent and the king of kings. “‘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” (v. 27-28).

That means something important, so important yet so obvious that we might miss it: it means that the end of exile that the prophets looked forward to was not the same thing as the end of history.

That’s a really big point. See, the prophets were hoping for God to rescue His people from exile, and to punish wickedness and bring about the new heavens and the new earth, and sometimes they talked about the first using language that sounded like the second. You could get the idea, just from reading Isaiah’s prophecies, that it was all going to happen together.

And Jesus has been introducing the very important idea that it doesn’t happen all at once. Think of Luke chapter 4:19, where He reads from the prophet Isaiah, and he stops his quotation mid-way through a sentence. He reads that it’s “the year of the Lord’s favor,” and stops short without reading “and the day of vengeance of our God.”

There is a gap between the year of God’s favour and His vengeance on His enemies, and you wouldn’t have guessed it just from reading Isaiah 61:1.

Or think of John the Baptist’s words about Jesus baptizing us with the Spirit and burning up the wicked with fire. Everybody would have thought they’d occur together. The Messiah is going to come and wrap the whole thing up.

It’s like when you’re driving through the mountains, and from a distance it looks like there’s one mountain peak right behind another. But as you get closer, you realize there’s a gap between them. There’s a whole valley that will take you some time to get through.

Jesus is introducing us to this valley, this space between the mountain peaks that you couldn’t see from the distance. We’ve seen clues in Matthew, especially with John the Baptist. The lame walk and the blind see, but John’s still waiting on liberty to the captives. Herod still hasn’t gotten his justice. Satan has been bound in one sense, but in another sense he’s also free to be spreading weeds everywhere.

And in this parable, Jesus makes this explicit. The end of exile is not the end of time. God is planting His people, and so is Satan. There is a delay between the beginning of the kingdom and it’s fulfillment.

And the fact that there’s a delay is made clear when Jesus explains, in the end of verse 39, that “the harvest is the end of the age.” The end of exile is not the end of the age. There is a gap, like the gap between planting and harvesting.

Of course, we can go back and read the prophets and see this now. We can go back to John and say, “If he’s going to clear his threshing floor, if he’s going to harvest, he needs to plant first, and there’s some time before that can grow.”

But this was a major revelation to Jesus’ hearers. The kingdom of God was upon them, but the end of the age was still some time off. They didn’t expect that. They weren’t expecting the kingdom to be already, but not yet. Inaugurated, but not yet consummated. Planted, but not yet harvested.

6. The Harvest

That’s one of the big points of this parable. That the harvest is not here. At the same time, the parable does stress that the harvest is coming. Jesus does describe this harvest in verse 40, both as a picture of judgement: “Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers, and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 13:40–42).

The judgement that John hoped for is coming. The wicked will be removed and destroyed. Don’t move past this too quickly. We’re so used to telling people that Jesus loves them and has a wonderful plan for their life. But the truth is that, if people do not repent of their sin, Jesus has a fearsome plan for their life.

He’s coming back to judge, and that doesn’t just mean sitting behind a bench handing out judgements. He will execute judgement on all the wicked. His robes will be stained with the blood of His enemies, like we see in Revelation 19.

Here in Matthew 13, the picture of judgement is of a consuming fire. And not a fire that consumes with nothing left behind, but a fire of ongoing punishment. Verse 42: “In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 13:42).

Hell is real, and Jesus is going to send the wicked there. The harvest of judgement is coming.

And not just a harvest of judgement, but also the harvest of salvation. “Gather the wheat into my barn.” Jesus explains this in verse 43: “Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”

That’s the future waiting for us, brothers and sisters! Transformation, glory. Shining like the sun with the glory that will be given to us. Daniel 12:3 spoke of this when it said that “those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.”

And we got a glimpse of this in the transfiguration, when Jesus went up the mountain with the three disciples, “And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light” (Matthew 17:2).

And you might think, “Wait, that’s about Jesus, not us.” But can you forget the words of John, who saw Him on the mountain and said “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).

Can we forget how much Peter told us last year about the glory coming to us when Jesus returns and we are given glory along with Him?

Brothers and sisters, never forget this. Look around this room and know that you do not see the final forms of the children of God. You see seeds, shadows. These faces that you look on now, so often turned down in sorrow, so often stained with tears, are one day going to shine with a glory that would blind you now if you could see it.

And this very creation in which we live is on the edge of its seat, waiting for that day when it will see us for who we really are. “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God”, waiting for the day when “creation itself” will share in the “freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:19, 21).

Every once in a while we see glimpses of this glory. We see glimpses of who we will be, like the corona around the edge of an eclipse. But a far greater glory is coming. Jesus, shining like the sun, surrounded by His children who will shine like burning stars with Him, illuminating the New Creation forever.

7. Patiently Waiting

This is our destiny, and it’s coming. But not yet. It’s coming at the end of the age, after both weeds and seeds have had a season of growth. That’s explained back in verse 30. The servants of the master, who are not identified, as Him if He wants them to pluck up the weeds then. And He says no. “Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, ‘Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn’” (Matthew 13:30).

Do you see the big idea here? Not only is there a gap between the already and the not-yet, between the end of exile and the end of the age, between the planting and the harvest, but Jesus has made a conscious decision to allow both evil and good to grow up together during this time.

His reasons are very briefly mentioned in verse 29: that if the weeds are pulled up, the wheat will be harmed in the process. I’ll be honest that this part of the parable doesn’t totally make sense to me, perhaps because Jesus doesn’t explain it. It makes sense why you wouldn’t want to do this with plants, but what does this mean in regards to the wicked and the righteous? How would it harm the righteous to pull up the wicked today?

I don’t totally understand. The best explanation I can give is that, during this season, God is still in the business of using for good what Satan means for evil. The wicked people in Jesus day played a crucial role in Jesus dying for our sins. If they had been destroyed the way John hoped for, there’d be no cross and no forgiveness.

On a much smaller scale, I think of my own life—how there is some real wickedness in my family tree, and how even the circumstances surrounding my own birth should never have happened. And if God had pulled up every weed as soon as it showed its head, I wouldn’t be here.

Maybe that’s what’s going on here. It’s hard to know for sure, because Jesus doesn’t explain it. What we can rest assured of is that God has good plans for leaving the weeds for now. He knows what He’s up to and we can trust Him as we endure evil and wait.

And that is the biggest point of this parable. Patience, John, as you waste away in prison. Patience, disciples, as you suffer persecution and ridicule for the sake of His name. Patience, suffering believer, as your dreams are dashed and the wicked seem to prosper and you wonder how you could have gotten things so wrong to have had your life turn out so hard.

The kingdom is here, but it’s hidden. Seeds have been sown. Harvest is coming. Blazing fire, shining suns. But not yet. So hold on, in patience. Expect opposition. Expect wickedness. Expect to suffer. And expect a harvest that will make all things right in a far greater way than you or I could fathom

The song I quoted at the beginning ends with the words, “God is not dead, nor doth He sleep; The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, With peace on earth, good will to men.”

Those words are true but barely get at the glory we’ve heard about in our passage today. Not only will the wrong fail—it will be consumed and destroyed forever. And not only will the right prevail—the righteous will shine like the son in the kingdom of their Father.

And so we end our service today like we do so many times, being reminded of His death which made all the difference for us and gave us this hope. If Jesus hadn’t died in our place on the cross, we’d all be in the status of “wicked.” We’d all be weeds, with no hope ahead of us except a fearsome judgement of fire.

But Jesus took that judgement upon Himself on the cross so that we can have this hope given to us. He’s given us the status of “righteous,” and He’s working by His Spirit to make us more and more righteous.

And so we proclaim His death until He comes, with our eyes on the horizon, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ.

If you don’t know the Lord this morning, that hope could be yours. Salvation is not given to the good, but to those who know that they are not good and who need a saviour. Come to Jesus this morning for forgiveness, and find rest for your souls.