“I wish God would do something about the state of the world”. I’ve heard this expressed many times to me and I’ve probably said it a few times myself. We know that things aren’t right. There’s poverty, there’s child abuse, there’s domestic abuse, there’s slavery, there’s hunger, there’s injustice. I could go on and on, but you know this already. But when we are asking when God will do something about all this, we are forgetting that God has. In the person of Jesus Christ, God came to show us how life is meant to be in the kingdom of God. Now we live in this time between the initial arrival of the kingdom and its culmination. During this time evil is still present as the kingdom of God grows and spreads across the world.
We are looking at the thorny issue of the presence of evil in the world in our reading today. Jesus is telling another parable, this time about a farmer who plants a crop in a field. During the night, his enemy sneaks in and plants weeds among the crop. The farm workers ask the farmer if they can go into the field and rip out the weeds. They are told not to, if they do so, they will damage the crop itself. Instead the farmer is prepared to wait and see what grows. If it is a good crop it will be harvested and kept, if it is a weed it will be destroyed. It is interesting that the farmer is prepared to exercise patience and to give the plant a chance to show its true nature. It is also interesting to note that at the end of it all, the weeds will be destroyed.
This parable teaches us the need to be patient in the face of evil. When we ask God to deal with the problem of evil, we are really asking God to deal with other people’s evil rather than our ours We want judgment for everyone else and grace for ourselves. If God acted immediately in the face of evil there wouldn’t be many of us around to complain about it! We need to use this time we have to make sure we are doing the right things ourselves. It also teaches us that judgment is not our job but God’s alone. We need to worry about ourselves more than we worry about others. And it also shows us that one day, the problem with evil will be dealt with once and for all. This is what gives us hope and allows us to bear the presence of evil around us with patience ourselves. We are not sitting in the dark wondering when God will turn on the light. God has brought us the light; we are just waiting for it to grow to full brightness.