The Devil's Harvest

Propers: The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 16), A.D. 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

If one lives and worships long enough as a Lutheran, one will sooner or later come across the phrase simul iustus et peccator—at once both sinner and saint. This means, quite simply, that on the one hand all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God; while on the other it is no longer we who live but Christ who lives in us. As with most things in Christianity, it’s not an either/or but a both/and.

We’re all sinners. We all have a darkness within. To one degree or another, every human being in enthralled to pride, avarice, envy, wrath, sloth, lust, and gluttony. Nobody’s perfect, after all—except for this one guy, and we killed Him. This is why we confess our sins before worship every Sunday, and are encouraged to confess them in prayer each night before bed, that we might daily die to sin.

The Church throughout the world is no gathering saintly sinless people. Quite the contrary. We are an assembly of sinners, and when we get together, we sin. Here, at least, we should be able to be honest about it, without judging one another, without being concerned with the speck in our neighbor’s eye before we take the beam out of our own. The Church is a hospital for the bleeding and the broken. Here we all die in Adam, that all may then live in Christ.

For if we are united with Christ in a death like His, we are surely united in a Resurrection like His. Here He meets us in the water, on the Altar, through the Word. Here Jesus takes all our sins and wounds and wickedness upon Himself, into Himself. He takes from us all that we are in our brokenness, and in a glorious exchange gives to us everything that He is: sinless, truthful, loving, selfless, the perfect union of Creator and Creation, Heaven and Earth, God and Man.

We are all equal in sin—and all equal in absolution. All equal in the love of Christ! For we are saints, every one of us. Not because we’ve never sinned. Not because we’re flawless, perfect people. But because we are all forgiven. We are all loved. We are all really and truly in need of forgiveness, and we are all really and truly forgiven. It is pure grace, pure mercy, pure joy, poured out by God for the world from the Cross. To quote an old Western, “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”

The essayist Montaigne wrote that the great paradox of humankind is that we are at once both gods and worms. We hold within us the Imago Dei, the Image of God. We were created good at the beginning, and will be remade good at the end. And no matter how bad things get in this meantime, this in-between time—in spite of wars, famine, poverty, pandemic, greed, violence, and despair—that divine image of human dignity can never fully be obscured. We are still, all of us, children of God. We are still, all of us, Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve, inheritors of the Kingdom and co-heirs with Christ.

Simul iustus et peccator, at once both saint and sinner. And so it will remain until the end of the age, when our union with God in Christ is complete, the great harvest of the Resurrection comes to full fruition, and God at the last shall be All in All. Then will all that is not properly us be burned up like dross in a furnace, and our true selves, the true Image of God, shall be refined like silver seven times in the fire.

Our parable this morning, of the Wheat and the Tares, is a dangerous one, should we not be careful. The story is simple enough, earthy enough. A sower sows his field with good seed, good grain. But by night, in the shadows, an enemy comes to sow weeds amongst the wheat, and thus spoil the crop. As the plants begin to germinate, it becomes obvious that something is wrong. Sabotage has polluted the field. And the servants of the household ask if they should try to uproot the unwanted interlopers. But the sower says no, let them grow together in one field for now. They shall all be sorted out at the harvest, at the last.

Now, one could see how this story might engender both pride and fear, a toxic combination under any circumstances. The good seed represents children of the Son of Man, that is, of the Messiah; while the weeds are the children of the evil one, the Satan. At the harvest, the wheat shall be gathered into the granary, and the weeds bundled up by the harvesters—who are angels—and thrown into the furnace of fire.

The notion that there are two sorts of people, one all good, the other all bad, is a pernicious sort of sin marbled throughout human history. It’s called dualism, or Manicheism. One group is better, smarter, wiser, kinder, Children of Light. The other is baser, cruder, stupid, crueler, Children of Darkness. This heresy has plagued every society from ancient Greece through the antebellum South to Nazi Germany. It is still the basis for racism, sexism, and antisemitism today. Different kinds of people—one superhuman, one subhuman. No-one actually human.

So is that what Jesus is saying? That there are good people and bad people, and you shouldn’t get terribly worked up about it because one day angels will come rip up the bad people and toss them into eternal conscious torment? I’m afraid that way lies madness—or at least Puritanism, always trying to prove that you’re the pure, always terrified that deep down you know you’re not.

No. No, I do not think so. It is true that the Bible consistently insists that vengeance is a power so potent, so dangerous and destructive, that it can only rightly be entrusted to God. And it is true that the words of the prophets ever remind us that justice denied eventually gives way to rage, which burns like a furnace of fire. But when it comes to this text, I think the authoritative interpretation has to be that of the great Christian Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

The Wheat and the Tares are not two sorts of people, one good, the other vile. Both of them are us. The Children of Darkness and the Children of Light, both of them are us, each one of us, simul iustus et peccator, at once both saint and sinner. There is darkness in every one of us, Satan in every one us. The law of sin dwells deep.

But Christ is in us as well. The seed of the Word is in us. The temple of the Spirit is in us. And He is our salvation. “Wretched man that I am, who will save me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Christ has invaded us, conquered us, as surely as He has conquered sin and death and hell. And for whatever reason—gentleness, kindness, wisdom—He has not as yet purged us of all darkness. He allows, for a time, both wheat and tares to grow together. To do otherwise, He tells us, would be to do more harm than good.

But the day will dawn when the harvest comes in full. And then the angels shall gather us from the field of this world. And all that is good and true and beautiful, all that is Christ within us, all that is our true identity in the Image of God, all of that will be saved and glorified and resurrected in pure, infinite, gracious, unmerited joy. And all that is not—all our wickedness, our sin, our brokenness, our cruelty—that will be pulled out of us, uprooted from our hearts like weeds from out a field. And all that darkness, that shadow, that nothingness, will be bathed in the fires of God’s love, burned away, purified, reified, miraculously into greater glory.

For the power of God is not to snap His fingers and make evil go away, beat it with a big stick. The power of God is to take what is evil, take what is broken, and redeem it, resurrect it, make it new, so that even our wounds become badges of honor. I don’t quite know why God allows us to live with such mixed hearts here below, with Christ’s victory already and not yet. I do know that since He allows it, it can only be to bring about a greater goodness, a greater glory, a greater joy at the last.

For as Satan twists God’s good gifts for evil, polluting the field, so God proves Himself infinitely wiser in redeeming us in our sins, using them to bring about a greater vision of glory. Thus even our weeds become a felix culpa, a happy fault. Weeping may stay the night, but joy comes in the morning. And our final state, by the grace of God, is even more blessed than our first.

So then do not fret about good people and bad, Children of Darkness and Children of Light. You hold both within your own heart, both the sinner and the saint. Look rather to Christ, the founder and champion of our faith, and know that from first to last—from the beginning of the world to the end of the age—everything He does is done purely out of mercy and love and forgiveness, for you.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.