The Field Weighed

There is a harvest coming. That must be said of this field first of all, before a single stalk of tares comes up for discussion — for at the end of this field stands an ingathering that surpasses everything. "Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father" (Matthew 13:43). Shine like the sun. That is what the wheat runs out into: not the silent standing in the soil, but a radiance that lights the whole field, brought into the Husbandman's barn, forever. With that prospect you must walk into this part, for without that sun everything that now follows is read too dark.

But until that harvest the wheat does not stand alone. Among the grain tares have come up, sown in the night by a hand no one saw, and they look exactly like it until the ear forms. The net that is dragged through the sea brings up all kinds — edible and inedible, mingled. That is the field as it now is, and as it remains until the last day: mixed. No pure field, no holy remnant you can point out with the naked eye, but wheat and tares growing up together, good and spoiled fish in the same net. And precisely there lies the first lesson of this part, and it cuts two ways. Outward: it is not yours to weed the field — that work is reserved for the angels, on a day you do not set. And inward, much sharper: are you sure that you are wheat? For the tares of this parable are no thistle you recognize from afar. They are darnel, they stand among the grain, they look like the grain — and the difference shows only at the fruit.

That is the weighing. Two parables draw it: the tares among the wheat, and the dragnet that is hauled up. Both end at the same place — a separation at the end of the age, the angels who do the work, the furnace and the barn. But they point, as you will see, each to its own side of our heart: the one, our impatience, which wants to draw God's harvest forward and so would tear up the wheat; the other, our false rest, which supposes that being dragged along in the net is the same as being kept in the vessels. It is not so. To be in the net is not to come into the vessel. And that must be said, sharply and in time, as long as the separation has not yet fallen.

And then, when the field has been weighed, this part turns toward the most precious thing hidden in it. For that same field — the world, the field in which sowing and separating happen — contains a treasure. A man stumbles upon it, hides it again, and with joy sells all that he has to buy that one field. A merchant finds one pearl, and does the same. Here the tone changes from weighing to longing, and here lies the deepest glory of the whole part hidden — for the question of who, in those parables, sells everything opens a door that most readers have never dared to open. Is it the man who gives everything for the Kingdom? Or is it the King who gave everything for man? Both ways are taken honestly, and they turn out not to exclude one another but to fit into each other: because He first sold everything for you, you can with joy let go of everything for Him.

Three times the same field, then, and three times a different gaze: the field weighed, the field separated, the field as hidden treasure. First the seriousness of the separation — live as wheat, bear fruit, do not rest in the net. And then, as the crown of the part, the worth that is worth everything, and the Merchant who paid first.