Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
One of the hardest questions Christians ask is not whether evil exists. We know it does. We see it every day in the news, in our communities, in our families, and sometimes even in ourselves.
The harder question is this: If Jesus is Lord, why does evil still remain? If the kingdom of God has come near, why hasn't God cleaned up the field?
That is the question Jesus answers in today's Gospel.
He tells a story about a farmer who plants good seed in his field. He has done everything right. But while everyone is asleep, an enemy comes and sows weeds among the wheat. As the plants begin to grow, the servants notice the problem. They ask what most of us would ask.
"Do you want us to go and pull up the weeds?"
It sounds like common sense. If there are weeds, remove them. Solve the problem now.
But the farmer surprises them.
"No. If you pull up the weeds now, you may uproot the wheat too. Let them both grow together until the harvest."
That answer probably frustrates us as much as it frustrated the servants.
We want problems solved quickly. We want justice now. We want evil removed from our lives. We want God to act according to our timetable.
Instead, Jesus tells us something surprising about the kingdom of heaven.
God's kingdom grows in a world where wheat and weeds exist together.
That is not the world we wish for, but it is the world we know.
There is hatred, greed, violence, and injustice. There are broken relationships, abuse of power, and people who choose selfishness over love. Jesus is not pretending evil isn't real. He names it. He even tells us there is an enemy at work opposing God's purposes.
Jesus is clear that evil is not simply the result of human weakness. There is a real enemy who delights in sowing division, fear, hatred, and despair. The devil wants people to believe that evil will always have the final word or that the only way to deal with it is through more hatred and more division. But Jesus refuses to give the enemy that victory. The enemy may sow weeds, but he does not own the field. The field belongs to Christ.
But the surprise of the parable is not that weeds exist.
The surprise is God's patience.
The servants want to separate everything immediately.
The farmer says, "Wait."
Why?
Because the roots of the wheat and the weeds become tangled together. Pulling up one too soon may destroy the other. The farmer sees what the servants cannot see.
God sees the whole field and the whole story.
The servants assume they know exactly which plants belong and which ones do not.
Jesus says they don't.
That should make us stop and think.
We are very quick to sort people into categories. We decide who belongs and who does not. We write people off because of something they posted, a mistake they made, a political opinion, a failure in their past, or simply because they are different from us. Sometimes we even imagine that the church, our community, or our family would be better if certain people were simply gone.
That is exactly the temptation Jesus exposes.
We want to clean up the field ourselves. We want to decide who deserves another chance and who does not. We want to do the Lord's work of judgment before the Lord himself has come.
Jesus says that is not our job.
He is not telling us to ignore evil. Christians are called to resist evil, confront injustice, protect the vulnerable, and speak the truth. Jesus himself confronted sin wherever he found it.
But there is a difference between resisting evil and deciding who is beyond God's grace.
Judgment belongs to Christ.
Only Christ sees every heart and knows every story. And only Christ knows what His grace may still accomplish in someone's life.
Think about Peter.
On the night Jesus was arrested, Peter insisted he would never leave Jesus. Just a few hours later, he denied even knowing him three times. Imagine the shame Peter carried after hearing the rooster crow. If anyone looked like a failure, it was Peter.
If we had been standing there that night, we might have decided Peter was finished. A disciple who denied his Lord surely had no future.
But Jesus was not finished with Peter.
The risen Christ came looking for him. He forgave him. He restored him. Then he entrusted Peter with caring for His people.
That is what God's patience looks like.
The truth is, God is not finished with any of us.
That is why this parable speaks so deeply to us.
Sometimes we imagine the wheat and the weeds as two completely separate groups of people. The good people over here. The bad people over there.
Life is rarely that simple.
Martin Luther described the Christian life by saying that we are simultaneously saint and sinner. Through Christ we are forgiven, claimed, and made righteous before God. Yet every day we still struggle with sin.
Faith and fear often grow side by side.
There are days when generosity comes easily and days when selfishness wins.
There are moments when we trust God completely and moments when anxiety gets the better of us.
Every one of us depends on God's patience.
That is the Gospel in this parable. God is patient with us. He knows every place where fear still competes with faith. He knows every sin we continue to battle. He knows the work he has begun in us is not yet complete. Still, he does not abandon us. He continues tending his field with mercy.
In Baptism, God claimed us as his own. Before we ever produced any fruit, Christ planted his promise in our lives. Our identity is not built on our performance. It is built on God's grace.
From that gift, faith continues to grow.
Like wheat in the field, spiritual growth takes time. God continues shaping us through worship, Scripture, prayer, relationships, joys, disappointments, and even our failures. The Lord who planted us has not abandoned us. He continues his work in us day after day.
Week after week, the Lord continues tending his field by gathering us around his table.
We do not come because we have finally managed to separate ourselves from every weed. We come because we need Christ. At this table, the Lord feeds the people he has planted. He gives forgiveness to sinners, strength to weary disciples, and hope to those who are still growing.
Holy Communion is God's gift for people who know they need his mercy.
There is another part of this parable that gives me hope.
Jesus says the harvest belongs to him. That means I do not carry the burden of fixing everything that is wrong with the world.
I cannot remove every weed.
I cannot fix every broken relationship.
I cannot heal every wound.
I cannot change every heart.
Those things belong to Christ.
What I can do is be faithful where God has planted me.
I can love my neighbor.
I can forgive.
I can speak the truth with humility.
I can serve those who are hurting.
I can point people to Jesus.
That is how the kingdom grows. Not through fear or force, and not through our attempts to separate the wheat from the weeds before the time. The kingdom grows through the quiet and faithful work of Christ in the lives of ordinary people.
Jesus also reminds us that God's patience does not mean judgment will never come.
The harvest is real.
There will come a day when Christ returns, evil is finally defeated, justice is fully established, and every wrong is made right. The enemy who sowed weeds will not have the final word. The same Lord who is patient today will also be the righteous judge at the end of the age.
For those who long for justice, that is good news.
For those who trust in Christ, it is also a promise filled with hope.
Jesus says, "Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father."
That promise allows us to live with confidence today.
Every morning we wake up in the same field.
The weeds are still there.
The brokenness is still there.
The struggles are still there.
But Christ is still there too.
He has not abandoned his field.
He continues watering it with his mercy.
He continues feeding it with his Word.
He continues strengthening his people.
Because never forget whose field this is.
It does not belong to the enemy.
It belongs to Christ.
He planted it.
He redeemed it with his own blood.
He continues caring for it with patience and mercy.
One day he will gather every stalk of wheat into his kingdom.
On that day evil will be gone forever.
Death will be no more.
Every tear will be wiped away.
Everything sin has broken will finally be made new.
And we will rejoice forever in the kingdom of our Father.
Amen.
