Why evil?
Readings: Matthew 13. 24-30, 36-43 & Romans 8. 12-25
Why does God allow bad things to happen? If he’s good, why is there evil in the world?
It’s one of the most common objections to the idea of God, a cry against organised religion. And it’s a really important question, one that comes very close to home, incredibly close for some of us.
It’s also a really big question, far bigger than I can cover fully in a short sermon, I’d need a series of 40 minute ones to do it justice. So why have I posed the question? Because it’s at the heart of this parable that Jesus tells.
I don’t know if you’ve ever attempted this in gardening, but perhaps you too can attest to the challenge of disentangling plants from one another. If you have a bed with various flowers and shrubs growing, the roots inevitably intersect, the plants getting tangled up together so that if you want to remove one item, you’ll either end up uprooting everything or have to dig out and around everything so much that you don’t so much have a flower bed as a crater with some flowers sat sadly in the centre.
That’s the core issue in this parable, everything is too tangled up with each other, uproot one and you’ll uproot the lot. But there’s a further layer to this parable that’s lost a little in our translation and that is that the weeds are identified as darnel.
Darnel looks pretty much identical to wheat, it grows the same, has the same life cycle, the difference is that its poisonous. It was so notorious that the Romans had strict laws about the stuff to try and regulate it, stop it becoming an issue. So this enemy in the parable has not just sown weeds, he’s sown weeds which look pretty much identical to the crop and are also poisonous rather than edible. What a wicked enemy.
And Jesus says that this is what the world is like. There are those who are children of his heavenly Father, and there are those who are the children of the evil one, the devil. And to all intents and purposes they look the same, moreover we’re all tangled up with each other.
Those two things seem pretty obvious don’t they upon reflection. Well of course we all look the same pretty much, there are those who are particularly good, and those we’d deem particularly evil but for the most part everyone seems like a decent sort of person.
And of course our lives are all tangled up together, it is what it is to be human. Our lives are endless webs of connections with others; family members, friends, neighbours, colleagues, those you encounter in daily life at the shops, in the street, on the bus.
There’s a theory on the internet that’s become a bit of a game called the Bacon Number. You pick an actor and the game will tell you how many degrees of separation (how many connections between people) there are between Kevin Bacon and that actor based on people he’s been in movies with, who that person has been in movies with etc until you reach that actor. It’s no more than 6, you can get from any actor to Kevin Bacon using that system, who has been in movies with who, in 6 moves or less. But actually this game is just a smaller scale model of the theory that you can get from any person on the planet to any other using through friends and acquaintances in 6 moves or less. We’re all far more connected and tangled up together than we can ever really understand.
Back to the parable and its explanation. The world is a field, and in it are those who are children of God, and those who are not, there is no middle ground. All these people are tangled up in each others lives and there’s no real way to tell who is a child of God and who isn’t.
Now, that last bit is a bit of a generalisation, there’s no external way of telling. If you’re following Jesus faithfully, if you’ve put you faith and trust and hope in him, you’re a child of God, as Paul reminds us this morning, if we are in Christ the Spirit of God testifies within us that we are God’s children, but that’s between you and God, there is no external announcement. I hope and pray all of us here fall into that category but there’s no guarantee, only you know that. Judas to all intents and purposes looked like any of the other disciples and yet he was not like them at all. We will likely find in the church those who appear good and upstanding members who don’t have a faith, they just like being here. We also find far too often those who appear good and righteous who are just the opposite, who abuse the trust put in them.
Now that’s just in church on a Sunday. Jesus doesn’t say the field is the church, he says it’s the world. Scattered throughout the world are God’s children, and they’re all at different levels of maturity, some are reaching maturity, others are simply shoots, others haven’t even broken the surface yet. If I challenged you to go out into the world, ok, this community, and choose for me who you think will put their faith in Jesus in their lifetime we’d be wildly off wouldn’t we. We might choose the good people, but they might be content with simply being good and hoping for the best. We might avoid those we think are more notorious, (those who damage the tiles on the roof here or smash bottles in the churchyard) but we know that God can work in anyone’s life. As we sing in that great hymn, the vilest offender who truly believes that moment from Jesus a pardon receives.
We can never truly know who will come to faith, and what path will lead them to Jesus, to sit at the foot of the cross and say, Ok Jesus, your way, not mine.
God knows who are his, but he allows the field to grow in its entirety, because in uprooting a weed, he will uproot a good seed who hasn’t yet come to faith, who hasn’t yet reached maturity, and then they are lost. The one we call Lord is the one who, in words from Exodus is ‘a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness’. God doesn’t sort it all out now because he is merciful and gracious, he’s giving it time, he longs that all should come to him in repentance and true faith, so he’s giving us time. Looking around we may not be able to tell, would write off some as beyond help whom God is drawing to himself little by little.
Here’s the thing about Darnel, it looks just like wheat right up until its fully mature, once its finished growing the two look slightly different, so God leaves the field grow, he knows which are his, and at last, in the end some will finally reach maturity and shine in his Kingdom, and others will be found so far from him that their own actions condemn them.
Much about this parable and this question I’ve posed may cause us to question, it may have unsettled us somewhat, but at its heart this parable that Jesus tells is good news. It’s wonderful news. Right now we live in a world where God’s Kingdom has broken in, where the Spirit is at work bringing healing and hope and new life, but we also live in a world where God’s Kingdom isn’t fully here yet, so there’s still a lot of pain and darkness and despair.
But a day is coming, Jesus assures us, when all of that will change, when sin and suffering and evil will be ended, when God will come at last and all will be put right, where all the causes of sin and pain and suffering will be destroyed, where all who do evil will be separated from those who have put their trust in Jesus, and at last all that is wrong with the world is dealt with and God makes all things new.
And in that world, how long do you think it will take for all the pain and suffering of this life to have been worth it, for his merciful patience with those slow to come to faith have been worth it? Two millennia? A thousand years? A hundred? I’d hazard a guess it will be instant. As Paul says, they’re not even comparable, the sufferings with the glory about to be revealed. When we finally see God face to face, in that moment, we will understand, in that moment it will all have been worth it and beyond. And in that world, and I love Jesus’ phrasing here, the righteous, those made right with God through the cross, will shine like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father. We will shine. Rejoicing before our Father in a world made new, we will shine forever, and ever, and ever.
Amen.