Tares, Not Just Weeds

Resumed Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Words matter.  The right words can convey more details than the wrong words, which can lack the force or complexity of an idea.  For example, the classic response to the parental question, “How was school today?” often gets answered, “Good,” or “Fine.”  When, in fact, the seemingly stuporous teenager may have had numerous exciting, humiliating, depressing, or enjoyable moments.  But all mom or dad gets is, “Good.”  Or a person who is a novice when it comes to bourbon, when asked, “What do you smell when you nose the bourbon?” may respond, honestly enough, “Bourbon.”  But a person who had learned to carefully investigate the aromas might respond, “oak, caramel, hints of citrus, allspice,” or other scents.  

Darnel

    I bring this up because today’s parable is often called the parable of the weeds among the wheat.  But the Greek word, which Latin simply transliterates, is 𝜁𝜄𝜁𝛼𝜈𝜄𝛼, which refers to darnel, a poisonous weed that, when it first starts to grow, looks exactly like wheat.  Yes, one can get part of the message of the parable if one hears that there are weeds growing among the wheat, which cannot be pulled without possibly killing the wheat.  But the depth of the parable increases greatly when one considers that the two plants are, from sight, nearly indistinguishable, though one is poisonous.  We used to utilize the word, “tare,” which is a type of darnel, but probably someone decided that no one knew what tares were, and so decided to change the translation simply to weeds and let preachers, like me, explain the complexity of the parable.
    So, as we hear this parable, one of the points simply from the text is that good and bad can sometimes seem indistinguishable.  Our Lord explains the parable seven verses later, telling the disciples:
 

He who sows good seed is the Son of Man, the field is the world, the good seed the children of the kingdom.  The tares [my translation] are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sows them is the devil.  The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels.  Just as weeds are collected and burned [up] with fire, so will it be at the end of the age.  The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all who cause others to sin and all evildoers.  They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.  Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.

The mature darnel or tares looks very different than wheat, and then the harvesters keep the good wheat and burn up the tares, which can now be distinguished for the harm they would cause if consumed.  

    How often does evil disguise itself as good.  We might see this in a simple way again with speech.  We know that we should not speak uncharitably about another person, and though we want to say, “that boy is as dumb as a box of rocks,” we don’t want to get in trouble or offend.  So we might say, “Bless his heart.”  We mean the first thing, we just don’t want to get caught saying it out loud.  Or a person might quote saints or Scripture to try to support their bad actions or bad understanding of God’s will.  Even the devil quoted Scripture, but he did so without trying to communicate the grace that the Scriptures are meant to convey.
    But, of course, it can have weightier applications as well.  All too often what looks good ends up showing the evil contained therein.  And part of this lies in the fact that any good action has three parts: the act itself; the intention; and the circumstances.  And all three have to be good in order for us to consider an act morally good.  We can tell when an act is intrinsically evil, like abortion, euthanasia, stealing, misuse of our sexual faculties, just to name a few.  We don’t have to go any further than that in our moral evaluation.  But so many actions are morally good or morally neutral.  Let’s use the example of driving a car.  The action itself is morally neutral.  But the circumstances can change that action dramatically: let’s say the car is not yours and you don’t have permission to use it.  That changes a neutral act to a morally bad act, even though, from afar, it looks the same.  Or the intention can change the moral act, too.  Let’s say you’re driving a car (neutral), you own the car (neutral), and you are driving the car to get groceries for dinner so that your family can eat (good).  The entire act is good.  But if you change even just the intention, say, driving the car so that you friends who just robbed a bank can get away, that changes the entire moral act to bad, even though the action and the circumstances were neutral.
    Or, people often think that if you have good intentions, that’s all that matters.  But, as the cliché phrase goes, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”  You cannot achieve good by doing evil.  It’s like trying to get to Detroit driving north on I-75.  It’s not gonna happen.  When evil enters into an act, no matter what good goal you want to reach, it taints the entire act, just like a drop of bleach can ruin an entire glass of pure, pristine water.  
    What do we do, if evil is sometimes so hard to distinguish from good?  We strive to do good ourselves, with good intentions, and under good or neutral circumstances.  We strive to accept the good seed that God wants to sow by His grace, and keep away from cross-germination with tares.  We choose to do the right thing for the right reasons, no matter what others do, or what it might cost us.  
    Whether we use the word weed, or tares, or darnel, Christ reminds us today that evil can often disguise itself as good.  Stay close to Christ and His angels, who know the difference between good and evil.  Choose to do good for good reasons.  And, by the grace of God and with His mercy and patience, we will be found righteous and “shine like the sun in the kingdom of” the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.