Weeds
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My father was a very tolerant man. As a traveling salesman, he found it professionally necessary to get along with everybody he met, and he was really good at it. He believed that every person, no matter how mean, nasty or despicable, was put here by Almighty God for a specific purpose. "Sometimes," he said, "that purpose is to serve as a horrible example!"
Such is the theme in the Parable of the Tares (or Weeds). Although the weeds are sown by an enemy, they are left by the farmer, the owner of the field, to grow along with the wheat until the harvest. Only then are they separated to be burned.
Historically, the evolution of wheat (genus Triticum) parallels the evolution of agriculture, which in turn enabled the rise of civilization. Not only is wheat the source of the first high-tech food (bread), it is also the first major symbiotic food crop. Its ease of cultivation and dietary significance enabled the development of cities, industry and commerce. As a result of being modified by man to improve its nutritional value and ease of cultivation and harvesting, wheat has become dependent on man; it cannot grow wild because its seeds are not dispersed except by threshing. Thus, humans and wheat have come to depend on each other.
This dependence is very fragile; any reduction in the wheat crop, by pestilence, for example, produced the environmental catastrophe called a "famine" 99 times in the King James Version of the Bible. Any decrease in cultivation efficiency of an established wheat crop resulted in a reduction in the yield, which in turn produced a famine. The resulting impact on public health caused by poor nutrition often resulted in the spread of various diseases known as a "plague." One such situation was caused by farmers going off to war. War, Famine, Pestilence and Plague were thus intimately related; they are attributes of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation, the harbingers of the End of the World.
Today, large-scale weed and pest control are mainly carried out by technology, including the application of organophosphate-based pesticides which are also the bases for chemical warfare agents. In small farms and gardens, hoeing or weeding may be effective. So weeds today are not the scourge they were in Jesus' time, as indicated by the absence of emotional reaction from modern hearers of this story, like us, for example.
In desperate times, a certain sized crop represented the nutritional requirement of a certain number of people. For a reduction in one percent of the yield, ten out of every one thousand people depending on it would starve to death, as they do in third world countries today. According to the World Population Review, the average recent estimate of fertility in Ukraine, Moldova, Bosnia And Herzegovina, Cyprus, Andorra, Macau, Malta, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea, where the average life expectancy is about 80 years, is 1.12 children per woman. In Niger, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Chad, Angola, Nigeria, Burundi, Burkina Faso, Gambia and Uganda, where people live an average of 69 years, it is 5.61. In poor countries, people have to have lots of children to maintain the population because they tend to die a lot, often from nutritional deficiency. In Jesus' time, things were even worse. Life expectancy was probably less than 40. Jesus himself, at age 32, died tragically, but not remarkably young.
The word "tares" used in the King James and seven other English translations of the Bible likely refers to vetch, genus Vicia, which was widely used in King James' time as a feed crop for cattle. But vetch is a legume, not a grass, and would not have been anything more than a nuisance in a wheatfield. We can probably forgive the King James Commission translators for being historians, linguists and theologians, rather than agricultural botanists. The New American Bible, Revised Edition, avoids controversy about the precise plant by using the term "weeds," as do eleven other popular English translations. (Also encountered are "cockles" [2], "darnel" [6], "evil seeds" [1] and "thistles"[1].) The plant that Jesus was referring to was almost certainly bearded darnel, Lolium temulentum, also called "bastard" or "false" wheat, "poison darnel," or "cockle." Unlike vetch, it looks like wheat, grows where wheat does, and is easily sown. Moreover, unlike wheat, it is self-propagating, so that once a wheat field is infested with darnel, it will continue to sprout forever, even after the field is harvested or burned. Left to itself, darnel will completely destroy a wheat field.
Worse yet, darnel is poisonous to humans, it causes symptoms similar to drunkenness (hence the species name "temulentum" - "drunken"), which can be fatal. Just a few pounds of darnel seeds can ruin tons of wheat flour!
So Jesus wasn't talking about an annoying act of petty vandalism here. The sowing of weeds in the wheat field was an act of biological terrorism akin to dispersing weaponized anthrax in Chicago!
The problem wouldn't have even become apparent until both the weeds and wheat were firmly established, when the wheat turned golden and began to droop, while the hardier weeds were turning dark and standing straight up. The slaves understood that if they didn't get rid of the weeds before they began losing their seeds (unlike the wheat, which had to be resown every year), they would have a devil of a time (a little eschatological humor there) getting rid of the stuff. They were clearly ready to rush out into the field and pull up the weeds before they took over the entire landscape. They might have been worried that the landowner could have suspected that they had sown the field with low quality seed, which would have made him angry indeed!
The landowner in the story recognized immediately that this was an act of bioterrorism, and that there was no real solution. The damage was already done. His reassurance to the slaves may or may not have been significant, but his decision was perhaps motivated by the fact that there was precious little time to do anything at all with the manpower available. He would have had to use all his slaves to pull up the weeds, but he wisely chose instead to put them to work in the most efficient manner by using the strongest to cut down all the crop and the weakest (children and pregnant women) to separate the weeds from the wheat. It was a reasonable response to what was basically a catastrophe!
The hearers of this story might well have been furious! Sowing weeds in a neighbor's field was likely to be fatal, but it was such a common method of biological warfare and revenge that there was actually a Roman law against it. Thus, the sower of the weeds was clearly a potential murderer as well as a lawbreaker. In the several historical paintings on the subject, he is clearly shown as the devil, which Jesus probably intended.
The moral of the story is clear: God allows the weeds, sown by "the enemy" to grow along with the wheat, sown by the servants of "the landowner" until the end, when they will be separated and the weeds burned up. It does not seem possible to interpret this story to which "the kingdom of heaven can be compared" any other way than that God permits the bad to be associated with the good, or, in my father's words, "to serve as a horrible example!"
Today, an "imposter Christianity" is threatening American democracy. The attack on the the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, marked a burgeoning white "Christian" nationalist movement that used Christian language to cloak sexism and hostility to Jewish, Muslim, black and gay people and non-white immigrants in its quest to create a "white Christian America."
Beliefs often tied to straight white Christian nationalism are growing among Christians, according to a survey last year by the Barna Group, a company that conducts surveys about faith and culture for communities of faith and nonprofits. The group found that an "increasing number of American Christians believe strongly" that the US is a Christian nation, has not oppressed minorities, and has been chosen by God to lead the world.
One of the most popular beliefs among these people is that the US was founded as a Christian nation; the Founding Fathers were all orthodox, evangelical Christians; and God has chosen the US for a special role in history. Many want to reduce or erase the separation of church and state.
The fact is, the Constitution of the United States says nothing about God, the Bible or the Ten Commandments (which, by the way, are from Hebrew law, not Christian, and are not found as such in anybody's Scripture). The claim that the US was founded as a Christian nation ignores the fact that much of its initial wealth was derived from slave labor and land stolen from Native Americans.
As proof that the United States does not favor any religion, Article VI of the US Constitution states: "... no religious Test shall ever be Required as a Qualification To any Office or public Trust under the United States. In addition, the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, adopted in 1791, states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
Additional evidence that the United States was founded as a secular nation can be found in a 1797 agreement the US negotiated with a country in present-day Libya to end the practice of pirates attacking American ships. It was ratified unanimously by a Senate still half-filled with signers of the Constitution and declared, "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on Christian religion." The point of all this is that our society today is contaminated by people who claim to be patriotic Christians, but are dedicated to destroying one of our most fundamental freedoms and elements of American identity. They are like the weeds among the wheat in the parable.
I would be a whole lot happier if these "weeds" would move to Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or wherever else they like where religious bigotry and racism trumps the rights of citizens under the law. They're interfering with the administration of justice, leaving those who hunger and thirst for righteousness to go hungry, giving Christianity a bad name. If this is what Christians are all about, why would any sane person want to be one?
My father could probably have gotten along with the white Christian nationalists. He used to remind my brother and me that, "Every person is an amalgam of good and evil. In the best of us there is some evil, and in the worst of us there is some good. Therefore, we should not be too quick to judge or condemn another human being just because he happens to be a thoroughly rotten, conniving, detestable, contemptible, son of a bitch!"
But then, my father was a very tolerant man!