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‘An enemy hath done this.’
Mat_13:28
I. The field is the Church.—It is the Kingdom of Heaven which is itself the field, and if our Lord adds also that the field is the world it is only because His Divine confidence was looking forward to that day when His Church should be universal. It is then inside and not outside the Church that this confusion is to be looked for. It is within the society of the baptized that the tares and the wheat are to be found side by side. And often the tares look so like the wheat that it is only in the fruit, not in the early growth, that the difference can be found out at all. In very early days in the Church’s history Christians began to see in this parable a counsel of warning and one of encouragement.
II. A counsel of warning.—It forewarned them against that kind of disappointment which arises from a confusion of ideas—the confusion of failure with imperfection. The results of the Gospel are real even when they are not complete. It is not the less true that Christ is the Saviour because all men will not come to Him. It is no argument against grace that men who seek it not do not receive it. It is no defect of the Gospel that that should come to pass which its Founder foretold—that amongst the children of the kingdom there should be a plentiful growth of spurious plants, whether they take the form of unbelief or ungodliness or hypocrisy. On the contrary, this has to be expected as a fact which Christ foretold, and dealt with in the light of the Master’s teaching. All attempts to narrow down the family of Christians so that it shall contain none but the good have been failures.
III. A counsel of encouragement.—Not that this maxim is meant to forbid the proper exercise of discipline. It was not so that our Lord’s Apostles understood it. It is not so that our own Church interprets it. But it does mean to tell us that discipline has for its object the restoration, not the condemnation of the offender. Has not every man a right to be taken on his own profession—a right to pass through life unchallenged as to his claim to be a follower of Christ?
IV. The enemy in the field.—There is an enemy in God’s field. Nowhere does the good sower carry his basket but a watchful foe follows in the night. That staggering question often suggests itself—how can this be? The parable gives us the answer, still leaving it all in deep mystery. An enemy hath done this. But it is chiefly in one broad direction that the parable sets before us the danger of this hostile sowing. It is the danger to the good of the presence with them—at their very side—of the evil. The tares look like the wheat; it is often impossible to discriminate between them. But in these words our Lord teaches us decisively to disconnect all evil from the hand of God. Evil, He teaches us, is God’s absence, and we need never be away from God.
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The Rev. Lewis Gilbertson.
Illustration‘Do what we will to purify a Church, we shall never succeed in obtaining a perfectly pure communion: tares will be found among the wheat; hypocrites and deceivers will creep in; and, worst of all, if we are extreme in our efforts to obtain purity, we do more harm than good: we run the risk of encouraging many a Judas Iscariot, and breaking many a bruised reed. In our zeal to “gather up the tares,” we are in danger of “rooting up the wheat with them”: such zeal is not according to knowledge, and has often done much harm. Those who care not what happens to the wheat, provided they can root up the tares, show little of the mind of Christ: and after all, there is deep truth in the charitable saying of Augustine, “Those who are tares to-day, may be wheat tomorrow.” ’