Zen and the Art of Weeding the Garden

One day the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came with them. Job 1:6

Jesus gives us the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. It isn't an intricately detailed story. There is a field plowed, prepared and sown with good wheat seed. For a time nothing but wheat is seen. The plants begin to mature, and, to the distress of those who will harvest, the field is seen bringing forth a great many noxious and worthless weeds along with the stalks of wheat. The servants ask the master what they should do. He replies that all should be left to grow until the harvest, at which time the weeds can be separated from the wheat without loss.

What Jesus isn't doing in this parable is justifying the presence of the apparently unredeemable in the world. He isn't explaining to us in any comprehensive sense the why of evil. Instead, He says, the nature of a thing will be revealed in its time, and it will be dealt with in its time. God does not label every seed that comes into the world that we might know its true nature from the start. He does not automatically yank someone out when they go bad, even when they are beyond the point of no return.

To uproot a weed — whether it is an individual, an institution, or a nation — means the destruction of much that surrounds it. It means the loss of souls, who, for various reasons, have had their lives become entangled with the roots of the tare in their midst. The very fabric of reality is light woven over a background of darkness; it is pools and eddies of order amidst chaos and destruction. It is wheat among the weeds.

With any event or circumstance, it is hard to determine its true nature. Whose son is it? Does it have the nature of the Good? Even if it has walked in the presence of God, we cannot know into what it might mature or what motivates it.

I understand the people who want to see a utopia, a heaven on earth — all that we-are-the-world-and-I'd-like-to-teach-it-to-sing-jeremiah-was-a-bullfrog stuff sounds pretty good. But we are not going to get rid of the agents of evil. We could kill them all off, but that's been tried before, and a good number of the people you get to do the killing are just as evil in some ways as the ones they kill off. The Revolution always looks great on paper, but uprooting tares is a nasty, bloodly business, and, in the end, most of the wheat is lost. The field is barren. The weeds always come back.

Can weeds be turned into wheat? I don't know. I do know if the wheat keeps turned to the sun and grows, it may well overshadow and stunt the invaders. It becomes an internal battle — to overcome evil with good, to be completely focused on the Son and filled with His light, to grow in grace and goodness. When we, as the sons of God, reach our fullness and maturity then begins the harvest and the separation.

I do not know whose son it is. It might appear to have been before God. (Tao Te Ching)