Proper 11 Year A 2026: Matthew 13:24-30,36-43

In 2003, 27-year-old Army Private First Class Robert Shrode was gravely wounded when an Iraqi rocket propelled grenade struck his vehicle. The blast tore through his body, resulting in the amputation of most of his right arm just below the elbow. His face and body were extensively scarred and heavily embedded with shrapnel fragments. Like many blast survivors, Shrode returned home “honeycombed” with shrapnel. He faced ongoing health challenges from the RPG. Part of his treatment plan included periodic surgery to remove shrapnel that had worked its way to the surface through normal body movement and the passage of time. His choices were to live with the uncertainty of where that shrapnel might make its way to inside his body or the temporary pain to harvest the shrapnel and provide him relief and healing.

This week’s parable is similar in format to last week’s. You might notice that there are missing verses; this week we are missing five verses between the parable and Jesus’ explanation, last week we missed eight. Last week in those missing verses, Jesus comments on the purpose of parables before the lectionary picks back up with his explanation to the “great crowds” whom he was teaching. This week in the missing verses, Jesus tells two more short parables and comments on the use of parables before the lectionary picks back up, but he doesn’t explain to the crowds like he did last week. Rather, he goes into the house and the disciples ask him about the parable of the weeds of the field - not of the other two parables he told more recently. So Jesus is giving this explanation to the disciples in the house, not to everyone who had been listening to him when the crowds were so big that he went offshore and preached in a boat from the water.

The hardest part of Jesus’ explanation for us, as modern readers, to understand is the expression “weeping and gnashing of teeth”. Its use paints a vivid picture of unbearable sorrow mixed with furious remorse. The weeping expresses inconsolable grief while the gnashing reveals inner rage - either against God’s justice or against one’s own folly in rejecting His grace. Of the seven times this phrase appears in Scripture, six times in Matthew and once in Luke, it is always said by Jesus, and is always in the context of eschatological, or end times, settings, often coupled with “outer darkness” or “fiery furnace”. The phrase thus becomes a phrase of warning.

Although the exact word Matthew uses for “gnashing” doesn’t appear in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the act of gnashing the teeth is still familiar. Psalm 112, verse 10 reads, “The wicked will see (the righteous) and be angry; they will gnash their teeth and pine away”. Job laments that God “has gnashed his teeth at (him)” (16:9). Knowing this background helps us see that the use of gnashing of teeth as an expression of rage, misery, or both is well established, preparing the way for Jesus to employ it as a sign of final judgment.

I’m going to offer another interpretation of this parable. No offense, Jesus. And in my defense, it’s super Jewish to be like, “but what if the scripture meant this totally different thing too”. He’d be cool with it. But as I was living with this parable this week - reading, marking, learning, and inwardly digesting it - the image that kept returning to my mind was our bodies as the field. So the field is the body. And God sowed good seed in His field. 

But then that good seed got mixed in with the bad seed sowed by an “enemy” - the word does mean just “enemy”, it doesn’t necessarily imply the devil or anyone in particular. Just an enemy. So, particularly in this analogy, the enemy could be any of us. It could be another person, it could be an illness, it could be our own poor choices - after all, we are often our own worst enemies.

So we need to harvest every so often. If we never harvest, and just let everything, good and bad, continue to grow, then our field just becomes an overgrown mess. The good has no direction and the bad eats away at the good. To clean up our fields, we are called to do what folks in 12-step programs would call a “searching and fearless moral inventory” of ourselves.

Jesus ends his explanation in today’s text with “The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire.” That is where there will be the weeping and gnashing of teeth we talked about earlier. But biblical fire isn’t always as scary as we think. When we remember that fire was essentially the only source of heat at the time, it would have taken no deeper thought by Jesus' listeners to make the connection that fire isn’t only destructive. Of course it is destructive, but it is also purifying. So while some things will be destroyed by the fire, some will not be - some will be purified. But based on what we now know about weeping and gnashing of teeth, some of that weeping will be a remorse and repentance response to what is being purified. Healing the soul can hurt just like healing the body can hurt. My seven-year-old had a wart frozen off her foot this week and, good news, she’s keeping the foot, but it hurt. She could’ve taken it down a notch, but it did hurt. And in the grand scheme of medicine, it was relatively minor. So purifying oneself, taking a searching and fearless moral inventory - and then doing something about what we find - will hurt. But it shouldn’t just hurt. In the same way as an annual physical shouldn’t just hurt, neither should your findings of your soul. If all you find in yourself is fault, you’re wrong. Likewise, you shouldn’t just find great things - that would also make you wrong. Because none of us are solely defined by the single worst or best thing we’ve done.

Just this week, a judge in Iowa stopped fighting the release of records from her Operating While Intoxicated arrest. In her statement, she wrote, “Accountability requires facing the harm you caused directly and honestly. Over a few months, accountability gave way to something else: shame. I stopped seeing myself as a person who had made a terrible mistake and started believing I was nothing more than that mistake.”

In twelve-step programs, when you take that moral inventory of yourself, you are then to “admit to God, to yourself, and to another human being the exact nature of your wrongs”, and then make amends to people who have hurt, except when to do so will cause more damage. In the church, we also have a way to have support through our own moral inventory of the harvest - the sacramental rite of Reconciliation of a Penitent, sometimes called Confession. This is the rite in which those who repent of their sins may confess them to God in the presence of a priest, and receive the assurance of pardon and the grace of absolution. Just like seeing a doctor, it might hurt. But sometimes things have to hurt before they get better.

A colleague told me a story from when she was in seminary at Yale Divinity School. One of the retired priests who helped at daily Eucharist told a story from when he was a curate early in his ministry, which was long enough ago that priests were still taught to double as therapists - I’ve discarded several books I’ve found in parish libraries from that time, since we now know that actual therapy is outside of the priest’s scope of practice. I tell every couple I do premarital counseling with that I am not a licensed marriage and family therapist and you should definitely find one. But this curate was working at a time when he was expected to do that work. And he had a man come to him and confess an affair he was having. And the curate did some of the therapy stuff, the “how do you feel about this”, and so on. And after this meeting he went and told his rector about the meeting and his rector heard this and asked the curate…"did you tell him to stop having the affair?" ...He had not. The curate had been so busy being this man’s therapist - who is not supposed to tell you what to do - that he forgot that he was first and foremost his priest - who is supposed to give moral guidance, especially when that guidance is hard to hear and may lead to weeping and gnashing of teeth. 

Weeping and gnashing of teeth stand as a solemn signpost in the Gospels, reminding us of the consequences of rejecting Christ and neglecting faithful discipleship. Its goal is to magnify divine justice, to emphasize the urgency of repentance, and to motivate us toward holy living and evangelistic passion. We are called to “harvest” our hearts, storing those things that build up the Kingdom and disposing of those things that do not. Amen.