"`Do you want us to go and pull them up?' `No,' he answered, `because while you are pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest.'" (Matthew 13:28-30).The lesson is explicit for us: we cannot possibly know who are the wheat and who are the tares. If ever there was a tare that tore mankind, it was Judas.

Yet Jesus washed his feet and showed him every courtesy in a supreme and final effort to save Judas from himself. We are not weedless ourselves, so we cannot sift through or extract from another's garden or field."Have I not chosen you, the Twelve? Yet one of you is a devil!" (John 6:70). The tare among the wheat.! What possible reason could Jesus have to choose His very betrayer as one of His inner circle? Was Jesus using Judas to teach us all one of His great lessons? Judas left all to become a follower, only to finally become the greatest blot on humanity. Yet Jesus even washed his feet! Surely Judas was given every opportunity to repent.

One wonders how Judas' heart could have been so dark and hard as to not melt at Jesus' continued love and concern for him. We ask, why did Jesus choose such a tare as Judas? Why did He choose us?.Human weeders cannot be trusted to discern between good and evil. Good and bad are intermingled, just as it rains on the just and the unjust. We cannot destroy the evil of ourselves (we have a difficult enough time destroying the evil IN ourselves!) without ripping up some good with it.

We are arrogant if we think we can gather up what we feel is wrong with the world and thereby set the world right. If everyone felt they could do that, then none of us would be left, for we are all tares to someone else. We would be assigning each other to our particular hells. God will take care of the tares on the day of harvest; until then, we don't need to worry about wheat and tares.

By: Patricia Nordman