Good Seed, Bad Seed

July 18-19, 2020

Isaiah 44:6-8   Ps 86:11-17   Romans 8:12-25   Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

One of the most important revelations in the Bible are from this section of Isaiah where YHWH declares: “I am God. I am the only God. There is no other God. I alone am God.” I guess this raises the question, if there is only one God, what is the source of evil in the world?

The recurring theme of judgement comes through strongly in this parable. The simplistic and erroneous contrast of a NT God of Love and OT God of judgement could not be more wrong. The Kingdom of Heaven is a dividing process.

Jesus tell us about the Kingdom of Heaven over fifty times in Matthew’s Gospel. He tells us to pray “Father…your kingdom come, your will be done.” In today’s parable He says that an enemy’s hand is at work in our world. Right now, God is not ruling, His dominion is being opposed. In Mt 11:12, Jesus told us “that the violent take the kingdom by force”—probably a reference to worldly powers.  Jesus says that the Kingdom belongs to the weak and poor, to the simple believers and mere children; those are trampled by the powerful. The kingdom is found in the hearts of those who do God’s will and obey. We follow the Crucified, but other masters seek our allegiance.    

The parable begins with the simple words, “someone sowed seed in a field.” The word “fields” is connected to human troubles in the bible. Adam sins and the earth is cursed; human toil will produce thorns and thistles. The serpent is a symbol of the hand of the enemy sowing bad seeds.

Rabbi Friedman enumerates connection of fields to family conflicts. Cain slays Abel in a field. Jacob tricks his brother, when Esau comes in from a field. Joseph irritates his brothers with a dream that they were sheaves in a field which bow to him. In Judges 20, Israel slaughters the tribe of Benjamin, and the word field appears twice. A wise woman tells King David a parable about a man killing his brother in a field. Thorns and thistle in the fields is a metaphor for fratricide and violent conflict.

The greatest fruit of the Kingdom is the divine love humans have for one another, and Jesus’s parable reminds us that the failure to love is the work of an enemy’s hand. Injustice, cruelty, and war, racism, crime, and indifference are all the evil seed among us. Too many families are filled with suffering and pain, too often the weak suffer at the hands of those who oppose the Kingdom of Heaven.    

The world is filled with evil because the Kingdom of Heaven is not fully among us. God did not plant the bad seed, it is an enemy’s work. Sadly, sometimes the enemy’s hand is at the end of my arm, or yours. Sometimes, we are part of the problem. This is why we must repent, and why we cannot judge others.

We live in the troubled times, with the probability that more troubles lie ahead. Weed and wheat grow together, but God will not act until the harvest. We need not speculate on the source of evil, we need to trust Jesus and follow Him. Every day, all day.