The Tares and the Wheat

“But he said, ‘Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest.’” — Matthew xiii. 29.

No parable of Jesus more than the Parable of the Tares gives us His general view of human life. In it the everlasting problems lie in the sunshine of His celestial wisdom. Just think what there is in it. First, the ownership of the field, that which lies behind and surrounds and pervades all of Christ’s thought and teaching, the fact that everything belongs to God, exists in Him, and nothing can take place outside of His Fatherhood. That is always the great elemental truth to Jesus. You lose the key and soul of all His teaching if you lose that. Then comes the sowing of the seed. Then the enemy’s interference, the sowing of the tares. The actual condition of the world is reached — evil and good, good and evil, mingled and confused together. And then the appeal of the servants to the master, “Wilt thou that we go and gather them up?” How natural that is! How instantly recognize this quick impatience to get rid of the evil of the world instantly. We cannot think that the master looked at his eager servants disapprovingly, although he could not let them do what they wanted to do. The man who never wanted it would be but a poor kind of man. He whose heart has never burned within him to do one great thing which should break the chain which binds the world’s sin to the world, and let the great black mass fall into the bottomless pit forever; he who has never longed for one sublime and final act of self-sacrifice which might unravel the twisted cords of evil in his own soul and set it free; he who has never known these great desires has lived but a meagre life. There are times when it all seems so possible, so easy. Wilt thou that we go and gather them up? We feel a certain chivalrous spirit in the words. It is the young knight’s confidence in his good cause and his strong arm. It is the grasp of the victory before the first sword-stroke has been given. Let us ride out this bright morning and settle this troublesome business once for all.

Christ loves that spirit we must certainly believe. When He puts out His hand in hindrance and says No! it is not that He is displeased. “Nay,” He says, “it may not be,” but yet He blesses and approves the men who want to do it. And then He proceeds to teach these men how much more difficult and deeper is the task than they thought, and to claim their enthusiasm for the harder duty of patience and delay.

How had Christ learned the world’s wickedness and the inveteracy of its sin? We talk about the need of experience. You shake your head over the innocent man, who has kept his life pure and bright, and you say, “O, if he knew as I know how bad life is, what men are doing in the vile places of the earth.” The eager revivalist, hungry for men’s souls, wanting to make men understand that he knows whereof he speaks, abounds in hints and suggestions of the depths of vileness out of which he has come to Christ and pardon. Where did Christ learn the awfulness of sin? It came to Him out of His knowledge of the human heart and out of His infinite pity for the men whom sin was cursing with its power. Can you not imagine that a thoughtful man looking at a steam-engine and seeing its enormous power might picture to himself, though he had never seen it, the fearful havoc which that strength must make when in the midst of storm and darkness it should go plunging from the track and hurl itself down the embankment? And can you not imagine that the very sense in which His own perfectness of what a perfect man might be must have made Jesus feel the dreadfulness of everything which hindered that perfection as no other human being ever has, because no other human being ever has been perfect? These are the elements of Christ’s knowledge of sin. This kind of knowledge of the world’s wickedness must be ever deeper and deeper in every Christ-like man, for it depends not on how wicked the man has been himself, but on how pure he is and how deeply he longs for the goodness of his fellow-man.

However it has come about there is in Christ the y deepest knowledge of the sin of man. I do not know that anybody ever doubted that. I do not know that among all the strange things which have been said and written about Christ, anybody has been ever moved to portray Him as an amiable optimist who thought the world was perfect and never caught sight of those abysses of iniquity with which the history of mankind and of the single soul is rent and torn. If that had been the impression which He made upon the world He never could have been the world’s Saviour. What would the souls of men have had to do with Him, if, when they came up to Him, they had seen nothing deeper in His face than mere complacency? How they would have turned away from Him. “Let easy innocence find comfort in His presence. He can be no Saviour for our souls,” men would have said. There would have been a strange feeling of respect which could hardly have kept clear of suspicion as they saw His unsympathetic presence move among them. Can you not almost see the scene in Jerusalem, when this man, perfectly sinless, and perfectly unaware of sin, walked through the crowds, in the temple, on the streets. I can see men rebuked by Him, hiding their faces from Him, I can almost picture a strong young man hurrying away from the sight of Him to suicide, smitten to the heart with the horror of his deed of sin. I can see pride paling before Him as it meets the fire of the absolute standard. All this I see, but not the picture which the Gospels show, not men and women in their sin crowding around Him, clutching at His garment, finding His face full of hope, seeing new life open before them as they gave themselves to His service. That sight — and that has been the sight not only of the Gospel pages, but of Christendom — could not be possible except under the power of the presence of one who the sinner was sure knew his sin more deeply and counted its awfulness more awful than the sinner did himself.

But we must go farther. It is not merely the sinfulness of man which is well known to Christ. It is also the mixture of man’s sinfulness with his goodness. That is what the parable of the tares deals with. And that any being must know who really knows man. Simply to know that man is wicked is not enough. That makes it very easy, to be sure, and simplifies the whole problem of man’s moral life. But to know that the world and man are both evil and good, and that their evil and their good are subtly mingled with each other, that is the really real knowledge which he must start with who would deal wisely with the world or man.

That mingling of the evil and the good deepens and grows more intimate the more we study it. First, it is merely that bad men and good men are living together side by side. There are no regions of saints and regions of sinners with great gulfs between them. You cannot judge any man by where you find him. The pure and vile, the brave and cowardly, the false and true are all confused and mixed together. But that is only the beginning. I Not merely every crowd but every man is all con- ’ fusion. No man can absolutely characterize his neighbor. No man can absolutely characterize him.

f self. Every man is good. Every man is bad. You think that you have found your field of wheat, your perfect man; but, lo, as soon as you have known him, or, still more, as soon as he has opened to you his knowledge of himself, — there are the tares, harsh, hard, unfruitful in the very midst of the golden plenty. You think that you have found your worthless field of weeds, your absolutely good-for-nothing man and, just as you are ready to give it to the fire, behold there comes the yellow wheat in the very heart of the green tares to startle you. Nor is this all. Not only in the same man but even in the same deed the good and evil are commingled. “At least this act,” you say, “is pure and simple.” But when you get below the form of the action to that which is really it, its spirit and its motive, behold there is the same confusion there. The act of benevolence flecked and stained with pride; the self-restraint which has some self-indulgence at its heart, truth told for false purposes, religion with some soul of selfishness. No smallest garden where the wheat and tares do not crowd and twist in with one another. No purification so complete that something does not linger to show that this special act is still a poor man’s act with all the mixture in it of his human infirmity and sin.

All this Christ knows. And then, besides His knowledge of it, the parable of the tares tells us something else — which is that He is hopeful about it, that He declares that this state of sin and confusion is not the final thing. We shall see in a few moments what is the prophecy which He makes with regard to the time and way of the solution; but now the point is that He makes a prophecy. He declares that the time is to come when the tares are to be plucked out and the wheat is to be left alone, when evil is to be extirpated and good remain. Is not this the first thing we wish to know about any man who undertakes to deal with the mixture of right and wrong? Does he believe in, is he sure of, the ultimate triumph of the right, the ultimate destruction of the wrong? If he does not, then how dreary grow his lamentations. Christ does! He is so sure of it; it is so utterly taken for granted in everything He says, that we cannot find a direct statement of it, but the whole parable glows with a certainty at the end — the certainty of the harvest gathered clean of tares, pure and precious into the great master’s barn, f With such a certainty as this filling His soul there can be no such thing as compromise with sin. Compromise comes from the belief that sin cannot be ’ conquered. A man who is convinced not merely that things are wrong but that they always must be wrong, is ready to make a bargain with the inevitable wickedness. “What is the use of standing out for an impossibility? Let us make the best terms we can. Let us fix a line of modified goodness, of mitigated wickedness, and live up to that.” But I he who hopes and believes in the ultimate conquest i and overthrow of all wickedness will have nothing j to do with such arrangements. He defies the yet unconquered sin and prophesies its downfall. He says to the towering, arrogant iniquity of the world about him, “You are weak, however strong you seem. I have no bargain to make with you. Sometime I shall see you perish.” He says to the sin in his own heart, “You are not I, some day you, the intruder, shall be cast out, and then the true I will appear.”

This was the uncompromising absoluteness of Jesus. It came from His certain foresight of the victory of goodness over wickedness. He knew that it would come. As certainly as if He saw it here already He knew that it would come. What use for Him to make treaties with a citadel which to-morrow was to surrender without conditions, and to be His to level with the dust.

My dear friend, get a certainty like Christ’s and you will have an uncompromising courage such as His. Thoroughly believe that the Church is certainly bound to be spiritual, and the state to be magnanimous, and society to be pure, and you are armed — or, what is better than being armed, you are inspired against the unspirituality of the Church and the sordidness of the state and the impurity of social life. This is salvation by faith. Thoroughly believe that the day shall come when these lusts and falsehoods and meannesses of yours shall be completely cast out and destroyed, and you cannot make any base treaty with them such as you are making now — that they shall have so much of your life to themselves if they will leave the rest untouched. You cannot sign a treaty of submission to your tyrant to-day if you believe that you are going to be free to-morrow.

“To-morrow!” you say; “yes, if it only were to-morrow — but it is so very far away. Even if I do believe that it is coming, it is so very far away. I must make my terms with the enemy meanwhile, while we must live together waiting for the end of things.” And then the parable of the tares comes in, and it appears as if that part of it which I have quoted for my text at first sight taught this very compromise which we reject. But it does not. The master of the field asserts the necessity of time. He says that the tares are not to be torn out at once, but (here is the point) he does not for an instant let the tares and wheat become confused with one another, and he makes the day of their certain separation shine just as clearly in his picture as the interval in which they are to go on growing side by side.

For every process must proceed according to the nature of the things which are involved in it. If I am going to drive a nail into a piece of wood, a single strong blow of the hammer drives it home, but if I am going to set a tree into the soil, I cannot do it in an instant. Only as the slow vital processes, the reactions between the root and the ground begin and advance, so only can the tree really occupy the ground and be taken possession of by it. If I am going to get a superficial habit of action out of a man’s life, a single strong blast of scorn or persuasion may blow it away, but if I am to set right the perversion of a man’s soul, to extract from a man’s soul the poison which has seated itself there, nothing but the long sunshine of the grace of God, bringing His healthiness with it, can do the work. In proportion to the seriousness and intricacy of the disorder must be the length and patience of the cure.

Here is the danger of all those prompt and furious attacks on sin which shake a great community, and eagerly demand the instant fulness of the new life in the converted soul. They are very captivating. They appeal to a noble impatience in us, we cannot - help knowing his simple faith, his passionate enthusiasm when the revival preacher stands with glowing face and cries out for the immediate purification of the world, the immediate perfect holiness of the soul. „ We gladly count him a thousand times more noble and more reasonable than the calm, sophistical philosopher who reconciles himself to sin as a necessity and only dreams of some far-off celestial revolution which on the fields of another life shall shake man and his sin asunder. But the danger of it all lies here. Lest men, full of the passion of immediateness, shall think not merely that the great blessed process is to be begun but that it also is to be fin- ished, here and now. The danger is that the converted man shall think the new life perfect in him — “’ and what then? By and by one or the other of two results is apt to come. Either, in order to keep his ’ belief that the new life is actually perfect in him, the man has to bring down his notion of the new life and make it match the thing he actually is, or else, finding, more honestly, how far he is from its perfection, how full he is of weakness and of sin, he thinks because it is not perfect that it is not there at all, and so gives up in hopelessness.

Far be it from me in any way to disparage the noble work of the revivalist. Great is the man who in entire freedom from self-assertion, stands up in the midst of a community like this, all saturated with self-conceit and satisfaction, and asserts the awful presence of sin and bids men, here, now, while he speaks, while the air thrills with repentance and petition, give themselves to God and begin another life. I cannot begin to say how sad, in one sense how contemptible, appears to me the criticism of such men glibly and flippantly bestowed by other men who never have known what it is to be bowed down, to sigh and cry for the iniquities and abominations and miseries of their own lives and their brethren’s; but just because I honor him, I long to see the people whom he touches feel what it is that must be done, what alone it is that can be done here in this intense and earnest meeting, or there in that still, solemn chamber whither the penitent goes to confess his sins and give his soul to God. Glorious, at first sight, it would seem to be if there the man could cast himself down just as he is, with all his sins upon him, before a present Saviour standing there with the very nail-prints in his hands and feet, and then rise up not only forgiven for his sin but absolutely stripped and freed of it forever. More glorious, as we know man’s nature better, does it come by and by to appear that out of those doors of blessing the man should come forgiven, hating his sin, full of hope, full of the certainty of the day when he shall be free of it forever; but, for the present, vowed and consecrated to a struggle with it which is to go on until he dies. Soberer is the face in which that resolution burns, not yet the angel’s face which shone on Stephen when the stones came crashing which were to break down the wall of time and open up the fields of the immortal life. More like the face of Paul as he went on into Damascus, blind, feeling his way, still. saying over and over, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” but yet calm and determined, past all chance of change, to live thenceforth the life by the faith of the Son of God. Sober and earnest and determined, rather than radiant and triumphant, is this new Christian’s faith. His fight is still before him. The fields of the great future are thick with struggle. But the power is within him and the hope before him. Old things are passed away: all things have become new.

Now, the parable of the tares goes farther than the statement of this fact — the fact that prolonged struggle is necessary for spiritual triumph, that the victory over sin cannot be an instantaneous thing. It tells us why. It gives us a reason for this necessity. Let us see whether we can understand the reason and recognize it in ourselves. Jesus says,

Lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them.” Behold, he says, if you were instantly to obliterate the chance of evil you would also injure the chance of good. Strange doctrine, so it seems at first, but not strange for more than the first moment to any one who really knows the nature and centralness of that great thing, the human will. The will is at the root of everything.

By the will alone is any action good or bad. An unwilled action has no moral character. No treatment of a man then must meddle with his will or do any mischief to that central seat of character. But the will changes not from without, save as it is touched by motives which enter into it and make part of itself. Its real motives and changes are from within. Any action from whatever source it came which did not act on man through his will, which treated him as a willess thing, would weaken his morality, would enfeeble it on every side, in its power of being good as well as in its power of being bad. And the desire to pluck out evil from a life by foreign force, without the life’s consent first, even — which is what every desire of instantaneous perfection ultimately comes to — is therefore an injury done to the whole will power of the life, making it less capable of goodness as it becomes less capable of sin.

Let me not state it too abstractly and philosoph-, ically. Here is your ghild. Wrong as all children are, just because they are human creatures, how shall you set him right? Is not the whole problem of your education this — to educate the will and not to break it. Perhaps it might be easy with all the tremendous purchase of your parental power to break your child’s will if you chose. But what have you got, then? A poor, spiritless, willess creature, incapable of good as he is incapable of evil, with nothing to contribute to either side of the great battle of humanity which is going on about him. A victim first and then a hindrance. That is not what you want. To keep the will, to fill it -vrith more and more life, but to make it so wise that it shall spend its strength in goodness — that is your true ambition as the trainer of your child. And when some friend, disheartened with your slowness comes to you and says, “Why do you not settle the whole matter once for all by breaking the child’s will to pieces, and compelling obedience whether he wants to obey you or not?” — and you reply, “I cannot do that — obedience won in that way would not be obedience. To prevent badness so, would be to prevent goodness also.” What is that conversation but the translation into household language of the old conversation of the farmer and his servants. “Wilt thou that we go and gather up the tares?” “Nay, lest while ye gather up the tares ye root up also the fruit with them.”

This is the danger of all systems of salvation which are repressive and protective, and not stimu-; lative and inspiring. They range all the way from ’ the mediaeval cloister to the most modern Protestant system of subduing the rebellious will under the terrors of the law of God. They all have this same fault. They all strive to make vice impossible by an expedient which, if it succeeded, would make virtue impossible as well. They all forget or ignore the truth that not to hinder wickedness but to create goodness is the real purpose of all moral culture — that the highest goodness in this state of existence necessarily includes the highest power of being bad. The most celestial existence stands in danger of the greatest fall. This is the meaning of the strange picture of Lucifer, son of the morning, flung from heaven into the depths of darkness.

Let both grow together.” Those words, then, tell the story of man’s present life. But they are not the last words of the parable. “Let both grow together until the harvest.” Are not these just the final words we need. They bring in just the intimation which the verse requires. For they declare that however impossible now may be the separation of the evil and the good, however necessary it may be that they should go on thus inextricable, mingled with each other, that is not an everlasting necessity. The time will come when the good may shake itself free from the evil and go its way, unhindered, unendangered, with no prospect save of ever-ripening and increasing goodness forever. What would life be without such a promise? With such a promise who can exaggerate, who can describe the richness and significance of living? Do you ask me what life is to mean for you, my friend? Can you tell me? “you say. And I answer that I think I can, because Christ has told us all in this great parable. Life is to mean for you one long struggle. You are to do right with the same powers with which you might do wrong. Never a holy deed that might not, if you chose that it should be so, be unholy. Your will is to be trained and strengthened by choosing to be good where it is perfectly possible for you to be bad. This is to go on year after year, year after year, till it has done in you a work which this, and nothing except this, can do, and then, not until then, shall come another condition, which then, and not until then, shall be possible, in which struggle shall be over, and without a danger of wickedness you shall go on ripening in holiness in the unhindered sunshine of God forever. That is the harvest, “When will it come; must I wait till I am dead? Can it come only in Heaven?” It must be like all Heaven, O my friend, fully to be realized only in the perfect world, but capable of indefinite anticipation and approximation here. It shall come gradually, and not by one sudden flash and shock. More and more as the wheat ripens it must separate itself from the tares. More and more as the man does right in danger, he grows out of the danger of doing wrong, until, beyond the mystery of death, that which began this side of it becomes complete, and, garnered into the barns of God, the wheat knows no more of the tares forever.

Struggle until, through struggle, struggle is outgrown. Is there any nobler picture of life which a brave, strong, patient man could ask than that. That is what Christ offers in His parable. May He help us all to feel the beauty and inspiration of that life, and to attempt it and live it by His grace.