Of this parable, the parable, namely, ‘of the tares of the
field,’ we have, no less than of that which went before, an authentic
interpretation from his lips who uttered it. And this is well:
for it is one on the interpretation of which very much has turned before
now. References or allusions to it occur at every turn of the controversy
which the Church had to maintain with the Donatists; and its whole exposition
will need to be carried out with an eye to questions which may seem out
of date, but which, in one shape or another, continually reappear, and
demand to receive some solution from us. –‘Another parable put
He forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man
which sowed good seed in his field: but while men slept, his enemy came
and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way.’ Our Lord
did not imagine here a form of malice without example, but adduced one
which may have been familiar enough to his hearers, one so easy of execution,
involving so little risk, and yet effecting so great and lasting a mischief,
that it is not strange, where cowardice and malice met, that this should
have been often the shape in which they displayed themselves. We
meet traces of it in many quarters. In Roman law the possibility
of this form of injury is contemplated; and a modern writer, illustrating
Scripture from the manners and habits of the East, with which he had become
familiar through a sojourn there, affirms the same to be now practiced
in India...
There can be no question which is the Sower of the good seed here.
From the Lord’s own lips we learn, ‘He that sowed the good seed is the
Son of man.’ This title, by which our Lord most often designates
Himself, is only in a single instance given to Him by another (Acts 7:56),
and then indicates no more than that the glorified Saviour appeared in
a bodily shape to the eyes of Stephen. To the Jews this name, though
drawn from the Old testament, from the great apocalyptic vision of Daniel
(7:13), was so strange, that when they heard it, they asked, ‘Who is this
Son of man?’ (John 12:34); not ‘Son of man,’ but ‘Son of David,’ being
the popular name for the expected Messiah (Matt. 9:27; 12:23; 15:22; 20:31,
&c.). He claimed by this title a true participation in our human
nature; this, and much more than this. He was ‘Son of man, as alone
realizing all which in the idea of man was contained, --as the second Adam,
the head and representative of the race, --the one true and perfect flower
which had ever unfolded itself out of the root and stalk of humanity.
Claiming this title for His own, He witnessed against opposite poles of
error concerning his person –the Ebionite, to which the exclusive use of
the title ‘Son of David’ might have led, and the Gnostic, which denied
the reality of the human nature that He bore.
But if Christ is the Sower in this, exactly in the same sense as in
the preceding, parable [The Sower], the seed here receives an interpretation
different from that which it there obtained. There ‘the seed is the
word of God’ (Luke 8:11), or ‘the word of the kingdom;’ here ‘the good
seed are the children of the kingdom. And yet there is no real
disagreement; only a progress from that parable to this. In
that, the word of God is the instrument by which men are born anew and
become children of the kingdom (Jam. 1:18; 1 Pet. 1:23); in this that word
has done its work; has been received into hearts; is incorporated with
living men; is so vitally united with them who through it have been made
children of the kingdom, that the two cannot any more be contemplated asunder
(cf. Jer. 31:27; Hos. 2:23; Zech. 10:9).
The next words, ‘the field is the world,’ at once bring us into
the heart of that controversy referred to already. Over these few
words, simple as they may seem, a battle has been fought, greater, perhaps,
than over any single phrase in the Scripture, if we except the consecrating
words at the Holy Eucharist. Apart from mere personal questions affecting
the regularity of certain ordinations, the grounds on which the Donatists
justified their separation from the Church Catholic were these: The
idea of the Church, they said, is that of a perfectly holy body; holiness
is not merely one of its essential predicates but the essential,
its exclusive note. They did not deny that hypocrites might possibly
lie concealed in its bosom; but where the evidently ungodly are suffering
to remain in communion with it, not separated off by the exercise of discipline,
there it forfeits the character of the true Church, and the faithful must
come out from it, if they would not, by contact with these unholy, themselves
be defiled. Such was their position, in support of which they urged
Isaiah 52:1, and all such Scriptures as spoke of the Church’s future freedom
from all evil. These were meant, they said, to apply to it in its
present condition; and consequently, where they failed to apply, there
could not be the Church.
On this, as on so many other points, the Church owes to Augustine, not
the forming of her doctrine, for that she can owe to no man, but the bringing
out into her own clear consciousness that which thereto she had implicitly
possessed, yet had not worked out into a perfect clearness even for herself.
He replied, not gainsaying the truth which the Donatists proclaimed, that
holiness is an essential note of the Church; but only refusing to accept
their definition of that holiness, and showing that in the Church which
they had forsaken this note was to be found, and combined with other as
essential ones—catholicity, for instance, to which they could make
no claim. The Church Catholic, he replied, despite all appearances
to the contrary, is a holy body, for they only are its members who
are in true and living fellowship with Christ, and therefore partakers
of his sanctifying Spirit. All others, however they may have the
outward marks of belonging to it, are in it, but not of it: they press
upon Christ, as the thronging multitude; they do not touch him,
as did that believing woman, on whom alone his virtue went forth (Luke
8:45). There are certain outward condition without which one cannot belong
to his Church, but with which one does not of necessity do so. And
they who are thus in it, but not of it, whether hypocrites lying hid, or
open offenders who from their numbers may not without worse inconveniences
ensuing be expelled, do not defile the true members, so long as these share
not in their spirit, nor communicate with their evil deeds. They
are like the unclean animals in the same ark as the clean (Gen. 7:2), goats
in the same pastures with the sheep (Matt. 25:32), chaff on the same barn
floor as the grain (Matt. 3:12), tares growing in the same field with the
wheat, vessels to dishonour in the same great house with the vessels to
be honoured (2 Tim. 2:20), endured for awhile, but in the end to be separated
from it, and for ever.
The Donatists wished to make the Church, in its visible form and historic
manifestation, identical and coextensive with the true Church which the
Lord knoweth and not man. Augustine also affirmed the identity
of the Church now existing with the final and glorious Church; but he denied
that the two were coextensive. For now the Church is clogged with
certain accretions, which shall hereafter be shown not to belong,
and never to have belonged, to it. He did not affirm, as his opponents
charged him, two Churches, but two conditions of one Church; the present,
in which evil is endured in it; the future, in which it shall be free from
all evil; --not two bodies of Christ; but one body, in which now are wicked
men, but only as evil humours in the natural body, which in the day of
perfect health will be expelled and rejected altogether, as never having
more than accidentally belonged to it; and he laid especial stress upon
this fact, that the Lord Himself had not contemplated His Church, in its
present state, as perfectly free from evil. At this point of the
controversy the present parable and that of the Draw-net came in.
From these he concluded that, as tares are mingled with wheat, and bad
fish with good, so the wicked shall be with the righteous, and shall remain
so mingled to the end of the present age; and this not merely as a historic
fact; but that all attempts to have it otherwise are, in this parable at
least, expressly forbidden (ver. 29). The Donatists were acting as
the servants would have done, if, notwithstanding the master’s distinct
prohibition, they had gone and sought forcibly to root out the tares.
The Donatists were put to hard shifts to escape these conclusions.
They did, however, make answer thus: ‘By Christ’s own showing, “the
field” is not the Church, but “the world” (ver. 38); the parable,
therefore, does not bear on the dispute betwixt us and you; for that is
not whether ungodly men should be endured in the world (which we
all allow), but whether they should be suffered in the Church.
It must, however, be evident to every one not warped by a previous dogmatic
interest, that the parable is, as the Lord announces, concerning the ‘kingdom
of heaven,’ or the Church. It required no special teaching to acquaint
the disciples that in the world there would ever be a mixture of
good and bad; while they could have so little expected the same in the
Church, that it behoved to warn them beforehand, both that they might not
be offended, counting that the promises of God had failed, and also that
they might know how to behave themselves, when that mystery of iniquity,
now foretold, should begin manifestly to work. Nor need the term
'world' here used perplex us in the least. No narrower term
would have sufficed for Him, in whose prophetic eye the word of the Gospel
was contemplated as going forth into all lands, as seed scattered in every
part of the great outfield of the nation.
It was ‘while men slept’ that the enemy sowed his tares among
the wheat. Many have found this statement significant, have understood
it to suggest negligence and lack of watchfulness on the part of the Rulers
in the Church, whereby ungodly men creep into it unawares, introducing
errors in doctrine and in practice (Acts 20:29, 30; Jude 4; 2 Pet. 2:1,
2, 19). There is, alas! always more or less of this negligence;
yet I cannot think that it was meant to be noted here. If any should
have watched, it is ‘the servants;’ but they first appeared at a
later period in the story; nor is any want of due vigilance laid to their
charge. The men, therefore, who slept are not, as I take it, those
who should or could have done otherwise, but the phrase is equivalent to
‘at night,’ and must not be further urged (Job 33:13; Mark 4:27).
This enemy seized his opportunity, when all eyes were closed in sleep,
and wrought the secret mischief upon which he was intent, and having wrought
it undetected, withdrew.
‘The enemy that sowed them is the devil.’ We behold Satan
here, not as he works beyond the limits of the Church, deceiving the world,
but in his far deeper malignity, as he at once mimics and counterworks
the works of Christ: in the words of Chysostom, ‘after the prophets, the
false prophets; after the Apostles, the false apostles; after Christ, Antichrist.’
Most worthy of notice is the plainness with which the doctrine concerning
Satan and his agency, his active hostility to the blessedness of man, of
which there is so little in the old Testament, comes out in the New; as
in the parable of the Sower, and again in this. As the lights become
brighter the shadows become deeper. Not till the mightier power of
good had been revealed, were men suffered to know how mighty was the power
of evil; and even in these cases it is only to the innermost circle of
disciples that the explanation concerning Satan is given. Nor is
it less observable that Satan is spoken of as His enemy, the enemy
of the Son of man; for here, as so often, the great conflict is set forth
as rather between Satan and the Son of man, than between Satan and God.
It was essential to the scheme of redemption that the victory over evil
should be a moral triumph, not one obtained by a mere putting forth
of superior strength. For this end it was most important that man,
who lost the battle, should also win it (1 Cor. 15:21); and therefore as
by and through man the kingdom of darkness was to be overthrown, so the
enmity of the Serpent was specially directed against the seed of the woman,
the Son of man. In the title ‘the wicked one,’ which he bears,
the article is emphatic and points him out as the absolutely evil, the
very ground of whose being is evil. For as God is light, and
in Him is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5; James 1:17), so Satan is darkness,
and in him is no light at all; ‘there is no truth in him’ (John 8:44).
Man is in a middle position; he detains the truth in unrighteousness (Rom.
1:18); light and darkness in him are struggling; but still with the possibility
of manifesting itself. And thus a redemption is possible for man,
for his will is only perverted, but Satan’s is inverted.
He has said what no man could ever fully say, or, at least, act on to the
full: ‘Evil, be thou my good;’ and therefore, so far as we can see,
a redemption and restoration are impossible for him.
The mischief done, the enemy ‘went his way;’ and thus the work
did not evidently and at once appear to be his. How often, in the
Church, the beginnings of evil have been scarcely discernible; how often
has that which bore the worst fruit in the end appeared at first like a
higher form of good. St. Paul, indeed, could detect the punctum
saliens out of which it would unfold itself; but to many, evil would
not appear as evil till it had grown to more ungodliness. ‘But
when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the
tares also; appeared, that is, for what they were, showed themselves
in their true nature. Many have noted the remarkable similarity which
exists between the wheat and this lolium or tare as long as they
are yet in the blade. Being only distinguishable when the ear is
formed, they fulfil literally the Lord’s words, ‘by their fruits
ye shall know them,’ Augustine upon this that, only when the blade
began to ripen and bring forth fruit, the tares showed themselves as such
indeed, most truly remarks, that it is the opposition of good which first
makes evil to appear; ‘None appear evil in the Church, except to him who
is good;’ and again, ‘When any shall have begun to be a spiritual man,
judging all things, then error begins to appear unto him; and elsewhere,
drawing from the depths of his Christian experience: ‘It is a great labour
of the good to bear the contrary manners of the wicked; by which he who
is not offended has profited little; for the righteous, in proportion as
he recedes from his own wickedness, is grieved at that of others.’
As there must be light with which to contrast the darkness, height wherewith
to measure depth, so there must be holiness to be grieved at unholiness;
only the new man in us is grieved at the old either in ourselves or in
others.
‘So the servants of the householder came, and said unto him, ‘Sir,
didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence then hath it tares?’
These servants are not, as Theophylact suggests, the angels (they are ‘the
reapers;’ ver. 30, 41); but rather men, zealous for the Lord’s honour,
but not knowing what spirit they are of, any more than James and John,
who would fain have called fire from heaven on the inhospitable Samaritan
village (luke 9:54). The question which they ask, ‘Didst not thou
sow good seed in thy field?’ expresses well the perplexity, the surprise,
the inward questioning which must often be felt, which in the first ages,
before long custom had too much reconciled to the mournful fact, must have
been felt very strongly by all who were zealous for God, at the woful and
unlooked-for spectacle which the visible Church presented. Where
was the ‘glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle, or any such thing?’
Well, indeed, might the faithful have questioned their own spirits, have
poured out their hearts in prayer, of which the burden should have been
exactly this, ‘Didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence
then hath it tares? –didst not Thou constitute thy Church to be a pure
and holy communion? –is not the doctrine such as should only produce fruits
of righteousness? –whence then is it that even within the holy precincts
themselves there should be so many who themselves openly sin and cause
others to sin?’ In the householder’s reply, ‘An enemy hath done
this,’ the mischief is traced up to its source; and that not the imperfection,
ignorance, weakness, which cling to everything human, and which would prevent
even a Divine idea from being more than very inadequately realized by men;
but the distinct counterworking of the great spiritual enemy; ‘the tares
are the children of the Wicked One; the enemy that sowed them is the devil.’
In the question which follows, ‘Wilt thou then that we go and gather
them up? ‘the temptation to use violent means for the suppression
of error, a temptation which the Church itself has sometimes failed to
resist, finds its voice and utterance. But they who thus speak are
unfit to be trusted in this matter. They have often no better than
a Jehu’s ‘zeal for the Lord’ (2 Kings 10:16); it is but an Elias-zeal at
the best (Luke 4:54). And therefore ‘he said, Nay.’
By this prohibition are forbidden all such measures for the excision of
heretics, as shall leave them no room for after repentance or amendment;
indeed the prohibition is so clear, so express, that whenever we meet in
Church history with ought which looks like a carrying out of this proposal,
we may be tolerably sure that it is not wheat making war on tares, but
tares seeking to root out wheat. The reason of the prohibition is
given: ‘Lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat
with them.’ This might be, either by rooting up what were now
tares, but hereafter should become wheat—‘children of the Wicked One,'
who, by faith and repentance, should become 'children of the kingdom;’
or through the servants’ error, who, with the best intentions, should
fail to distinguish between these and those, and involve good and bad in
a common doom; or perhaps leaving tares, might pluck up wheat. It
is only the Lord Himself, the Searcher of hearts, who with absolute certainty
‘knoweth them that are his.’ The later Roman Catholic expositors,
and as many as in the Middle Ages wrote in the interests of Rome, in these
words, ‘lest ye root up also the wheat with them,’ find a loophole
whereby they may escape binding, when this danger exists of plucking up
the wheat together with the tares. To which Maldonatus adds, that
in each particular case the householder is to judge whether there be such
danger or not; the Pope being now the representative of the householder,
to him the question should be put, ‘Wilt thou that we go and gather
up the tares?’ and he concludes his exposition with an exhortation
to all Catholic princes, that they imitate the zeal of these servants,
and rather, like them, need to have their eagerness restrained, than require,
as did so many, to be stimulated to the task of rooting out heresies and
heretics.
At the same time this ‘Nay’ does not imply that the tares shall
never be plucked up, but only that this is not the time, nor they the doers;
for the householder adds, ‘Let both grow together until the harvest.’
Pregnant words, which tell us that evil is not, as so many dream, gradually
to wane and disappear before good, the world to find itself in the Church,
but each to unfold itself more fully, out of its own root, after its own
kind: till at last they stand face to face, each in its highest manifestation,
in the persons of Christ and of Antichrist; on the one hand, an incarnate
God, on the other, the man in whom the fulness of all Satanic power will
dwell bodily. Both are to grow ‘until the harvest,’ till they
are ripe, one for destruction, and the other for full salvation.
And they are to grow ‘together;’ the visible Church is to have
its intermixture of good and bad until the end of time; and, by consequence,
the fact of bad being found mingled with good will in nowise justify a
separation from it, or an attempt to set up a little Church of our own.
Where men will attempt this, besides the guilt of transgressing a plain
command, it is not difficult to see what darkness it must bring upon them,
into what a snare of pride it must cast them. For while, even in
the best of men, there is the same intermixture of good and evil as in
the visible Church, such a course will infallibly lead a man to the wilful
shutting of his eyes alike to the evil in himself, and in that little schismatical
body which he will then call the Church, since only so the attempt will
even seem to be attended with success. Thus Augustine often appeals
to the fact that the Donatists had not succeeded—they would not themselves
dare to assert that they had succeeded—in forming what should even externally
appear a pure communion: and since by their own acknowledgement there might
be, and probably were, hypocrites and undetected ungodly livers among them,
this of itself rendered all such passages as Isaiah 52:1, as inapplicable
to them as to the Catholic Church in its present condition: while yet,
on the strength of this spirit of intolerable pride and presumptuous uncharitableness
towards the Church from which they had separated. And the same sins
cleave more or less to all schismatic bodies, which, under plea of a smallest
of these, from its very smallness persuading itself that it is the most
select and purest, being generally the guiltiest here. None will
deny that the temptation to this lies very close to us all. Every
young Christian, in the time of his first zeal, is tempted to be somewhat
of a Donatist in spirit. It would argue little love or holy earnestness
in him, if he had not this longing to see the Church of his Saviour a glorious
Church without spot or wrinkle. But he must learn that the desire,
righteous and holy as in itself it is, yet is not to find its fulfilment
in this present evil time; that, on the contrary, the suffering from false
brethren is one of the pressures upon him, which shall wring out from him
a more earnest prayer that the kingdom of God may appear. He must
learn that all self-willed and impatient attempts, such as have been repeated
again and again, to anticipate that perfect communion of saints, are works
of the flesh; that however fairly they may promise, no blessing will rest
upon them, nor will they for long even appear to be crowned with
success.
Some in modern times, fearing lest arguments should be drawn from this
parable to the prejudice of attempts to revive stricter discipline in the
Church, have sought to escape the dangers which they feared, by urging
that in our Lord’s explanation no notice is taken of the proposal made
by the servants (ver. 28), nor yet of the house holder’s reply to that
proposal (ver. 29). They conclude from this that the parable is not
to teach us what the conduct of the servants of a heavenly Lord ought
to be, but merely prophetic of what generally it will be, --that
this proposal of the servants is merely brought in to afford an opportunity
for the master’s reply, and that of this reply the latter is the only significant
portion. But, assuredly, when Christ asserts that it is His purpose
to make a complete and solemn separation at the end, He implicitly forbids,
--not the exercise in the meantime of a godly discipline, not, where that
has become necessary, absolute exclusion from Church-fellowship,--but any
attempts to anticipate the final irrevocable separation, of which He has
reserved the execution to Himself. ‘In the time of harvest I will
say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in
bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.’ Not
now, but ‘in the time of harvest,’ shall this separation find place;
and even then, not they, but ‘the reapers,’ shall carry it through.
This ‘time of harvest,’ as the Lord presently explains, is ‘the
end of the world,’ and ‘the reapers are the angels;’ who are
here, as everywhere else, set forth as accompanying their Lord and ours
at His coming again to judgment (Matt. 16:27; 24:31; 2 Thess. 1:7; Rev.
19:14), and fulfilling his will both in respect of those who have served
(Matt. 24:31), and those who have served Him not (Matt. 13:47; 22:13).
‘As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, so shall
it be in the end of this world; the Son of man shall send forth His angels,
and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and them
which do iniquity;’ in the words of Zephaniah, ‘the stumbling-blocks
with the wicked’ (1:3). The setting forth of the terrible doom of
ungodly men under the image of the burning with fire of thorns, briers,
weeds, offal, chaff, barren branches, dead trees, is frequent in Scripture;
thus see 2 Sam. 23:6, 7; Matt. 3:10, 12; 7:19; John 15:6; Heb. 6:8; 10:26,
27; Isaiah 5:24; 9:18, 19; 10:16, 17; 33:11, 12; 66:24; Esd. 16:77, 78.
But dare we speak of it as an image merely? The fire reappears in
the interpretation of the parable; the angels ‘shall cast them,’
those, namely, ‘which do iniquity,’ ‘into a furnace of fire.’
Fearful words indeed! and the image, if it be an image, at all events borrowed
from the most dreadful and painful form of death in use among men.
Something we read of it is in Scripture. Judah would have fain made
his daughter-in-law (Gen 38:24), and David alas! did make the children
of Ammon (2 Sam. 12:31) taste the dreadfulness of it. It was in use
among the Chaldeans (Jer. 29:22; Dan. 3:6); and in the Jewish tradition,
which is probably of great antiquity, Nimrod cast Abraham into a furnace
of fire for refusing to worship his false gods. It was one of the
forms of cruel death with which Antiochus sought to overcome the heroic
constancy of the Jewish confessors in the time of the Maccabees (2 Macc.
7; Dan 11:33; 1 Cor 13:3). In modern times Chardin makes mention
of penal furnaces in Persia. Whatever the ‘furnace of fire’
may mean here, or ‘the lake of fire’ (Rev. 19:20; 21:8), ‘the fire
that is not quenched’ (Mark 9:44), ‘the everlasting fire’ (Matt. 25:41;
cf. Luke 16:24; Mal. 4:1), elsewhere, this at all events is certain; that
they point to some doom so intolerable that the Son of God came down from
heaven and tasted all the bitterness of death, that He might deliver us
from ever knowing the secrets of anguish which, unless God be mocking men
with empty threats, are shut up in these terrible words, --‘There shall
be wailing and gnashing of teeth’ (Matt. 22:13). All which has
just gone before makes very unlikely their explanation of the ‘gnashing
of teeth,’ who take it as chattering from excessive cold; who, in fact,
imagine here a kind of Dantean hell, with alternations of heat and cold,
alike unendurable. We take these rather as the utterances generally
of rage and impatience (acts 7:54), under the sense of intolerable pain
and unutterable loss.
‘Then,’ after it has been thus done with the wicked, ‘shall
the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father.’
As fire was the element of the dark and cruel kingdom of hell, so
is light of the pure heavenly kingdom. ‘Then,’ when
the dark hindering element has been removed, shall this element of light,
which was before struggling with and obstructed by it, come forth in its
full brightness (see Col. 3:3; Rom. 8:18; Prov. 25:4, 5). A glory
shall be revealed in the saints; not merely brought to them,
and added from without; but rather a glory which they before had, but which
did not before evidently appear, shall burst forth and show itself openly,
as once in the days of His flesh, at the moment of His Transfiguration,
did the hidden glory of our Lord (Matt. 17:2). That shall be the
day of ‘the manifestation of the sons of God;’ they ‘shall shine forth
as the sun,’ when the clouds are rolled away (Dan. 12:3); they shall
evidently appear, and be acknowledged by all, as ‘the children of light;
of that God who is ‘the Father of Lights’ (James 1:17); who is Light, and
in whom is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5). And then, but not till
then, shall be accomplished those glorious prophecies so often repeated
in the Old Testament; ‘Henceforth there shall be no more come into thee
the uncircumcised and the unclean’ (Isaiah 52:1); ‘In that day there shall
be no more the Canaanite in the house of the Lord of hosts’ (Zech. 14:21);
‘Thy people also shall be all righteous’ (Isaiah 60:21; cf. Isaiah 35:8;
Joel 3:17; Ezek. 37:21-27; Zeph. 3:13).
