A Heart Slow to Judge
We meet someone a few times and think we know who they are. “That’s just who they are.” Even when the person shows us another side, we continue to see them through the frame we have already made. We are quick to define people, and then we act according to that definition. Something similar happens in today’s Gospel. The servants find weeds growing among the wheat and come to the master. “Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?” The master tells them that an enemy has done this. They immediately ask, “Then do you want us to go and gather them?” But the master stops them. In pulling up the weeds, they may uproot the wheat as well.
The parable ends with words of judgment. At the harvest, the weeds will be burned, those who do evil will be judged, and the righteous will shine like the sun in their Father’s kingdom. Jesus does not erase the difference between good and evil. He does not say that wrong is no longer wrong. But the final judgment does not belong to the servants. It belongs to the master, and it will come at the harvest. The servants can see the weeds, but they cannot see the roots entangled beneath the ground. They think they know what must be removed, but they do not know what their hands may also damage. We face the same danger. We see the words people speak and the things they do. We can judge whether those words and actions are wrong, and sometimes we must. But those actions alone do not tell us everything about a person.
No one becomes the person they are in a single day. Every person standing before us carries a long history. Some of it comes from choices they made. Some of it comes from things they never chose. A wound from childhood may remain for many years. Words repeatedly spoken within a family, poverty, loneliness, failure, and humiliation may still shape the way a person speaks and acts today. There is a story about that person that we have not yet heard. There may have been years when no one saw what was happening and no one stepped in to protect them. None of this makes wrongdoing disappear. Being wounded does not give anyone the right to wound another person. Violent behavior must be stopped. Those who have been harmed must be protected first. And those who have done wrong must be held accountable.
But holding someone accountable and trying to understand their life are not opposing things. In fact, understanding more clearly helps us name responsibility more clearly. If we punish one person, push them away, and decide that the matter is finished, the relationships and conditions that allowed the harm to grow may remain unchanged. So we need to ask two questions: What has this person done wrong? And what must change so that the same harm does not happen again? We must look not only at the person’s actions, but also at the field in which those actions took root. The master says, “No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.” He does not say that the weeds are harmless. But he knows that the judgment and actions of the servants are not perfect.
We see one failure and let it define a person’s whole life, both past and future. Even when we do not drive them away openly, we may already have pulled them out in our hearts. When they try to begin again, we give them no opportunity. They remain trapped in one moment from the past, and our judgment makes it harder for them to move beyond it. God knows what we cannot see. God knows not only a person’s actions, but also the roots of those actions, the road they have traveled, the wounds they still carry, and who they may yet become. The final judgment belongs to God. When we cannot entrust that judgment to God, something else begins to grow within us: fear.
In Isaiah, God speaks to a people who have lost their land and are living under a foreign empire. “Do not fear, or be afraid.” And then God says, “Is there any god besides me? There is no other rock; I know not one.” Fear makes us hurry. When we feel threatened, we want to decide quickly what kind of person someone is: safe or dangerous, wheat or weed. Instead of taking time to discover what is true, we choose the judgment that settles our anxiety most quickly. It can feel easier to push someone far away than to look carefully at their life. But if God is our rock, we do not have to rush to judge and control everything ourselves. So we can slow down. We can listen once more, look a little longer, and admit that there are things we do not know.
The psalmist prays, “Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart to revere your name.” To ask for an undivided heart is to ask God to gather us when fear and anger pull us apart. We want to understand what another person has been through, but at the same time we are afraid that we may be hurt. The psalmist does not begin by asking God to change someone else. He asks that his own heart may first be turned toward the way of God. We can pray in the same way: God, before I judge another person, help me first to examine my own heart. Do not let me ignore what is wrong. But do not let me hate the whole person because of that one wrong. Do not let my fear keep me from seeing what is true.
The question asked by the servants is not directed only toward other people. “Where, then, did these weeds come from?” Where did the anger within me come from? Where did I learn the prejudices I carry? When I judge someone too quickly, what am I trying to protect myself from? These questions are not excuses for what is wrong. They help us find its roots, so that it does not continue to grow and so that we do not leave the same wound in another person’s life.
We need an eye that sees wrong clearly without reducing an entire person to that one wrong. We are not the ones entrusted with the final harvest. So before we pull anything up, we need to pause. We need to ask whether our judgment comes from truth or from fear, and whether our hands are stopping what is wrong or uprooting the wheat along with the weeds. But neither should we reduce a person to the worst thing they have done. We entrust the final judgment to God, and we do not give up too quickly on the people God has placed in our lives. This is the heart the master teaches us today: a heart slow to judge and slow to uproot.
Amen.