The Mixed Body

Today's Reading

Read Matthew 13:24-30 — the parable of the wheat and the tares. A man sows good seed; an enemy sows weeds among the wheat. The servants ask if they should pull up the weeds. The master says no: "Let both grow together until the harvest." Then read Jesus's own interpretation in 13:36-43, where he tells us the field is the world, the good seed are the children of the kingdom, the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the harvest is the end of the age.

Then read 2 Timothy 2:19-21: "But God's firm foundation stands, bearing this seal: 'The Lord knows those who are his,' and, 'Let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity.'" And Romans 14:4 — "Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls."

Reflection

Some time around the year 311, in the Roman province of Africa, a bishop named Caecilian was consecrated by another bishop named Felix who had — under the pressure of the recent imperial persecution — handed over Scriptures to the authorities to be burned. A faction of African Christians refused to recognize Caecilian's ordination. They argued that a bishop tainted by collaboration could not validly transmit holy office, and that a church that tolerated such bishops was no longer the true church. They formed their own communion, named after their bishop Donatus, and for the next century the Donatist church and the Catholic church in Africa lived side by side — competing congregations, competing baptisms, competing claims to be the true bride of Christ.

The Donatists were not stupid people. They were rigorous, disciplined, courageous. They had, often, paid in blood for not handing over the Scriptures themselves. Their argument was not absurd. They asked: how can a holy church be administered by unholy men? How can the body of Christ contain, at its visible center, those who have betrayed him? Their conclusion was that purity required separation, that the true church was the small, faithful, uncompromised remnant, and that everyone else had forfeited the name.

Augustine, by then bishop of Hippo, spent decades arguing with them.

His argument is one of the great theological achievements of the early church, and it rests on the parable you just read. Jesus, Augustine reminded the Donatists, told us in advance that the visible church in this age would be a mixed field. There would be wheat and weeds growing together, indistinguishable to our eyes for much of the season, and the master's instruction was not "purify the field" but "let both grow together until the harvest." The harvest is at the end of the age. It is performed by angels. It is decided by the master, not by the servants. Any human attempt to pull up every weed before that day will, Jesus said plainly, also pull up the wheat.

That is not a counsel of indifference to sin. Augustine did not believe the church should tolerate false teaching, sexual immorality, or unrepentant scandal at its leadership table; he wrote at length about discipline. What he refused was the deeper move — the assumption that we, the servants, can build a church here in time so pure that no weeds remain in it, and that any church not so purified must be left for a smaller, holier one elsewhere.

The Donatist instinct is, in every generation, the perfectionist instinct. It says: the real church is the pure church; the visible church has been corrupted; therefore I must separate to the pure remnant. Every century supplies its own version. There were Donatists in fourth-century Africa, Cathars in twelfth-century France, radical Anabaptists in sixteenth-century Germany, twentieth-century separatist movements that left otherwise sound denominations to find a yet purer one, and there are quietly Donatist Christians today who keep moving from church to church, each time convinced that the new one is the truer one until its compromises also become visible. Augustine's point is that this movement has no terminus this side of the harvest. Wherever you go, the field is mixed. The only church without weeds is the church triumphant. Until then, every assembly of Christ's people on earth contains, by his own prediction, both wheat and tares.

This pastoral wisdom has at least three implications.

First, it relieves us of an impossible burden. We are not responsible to identify, with infallible accuracy, who in our church is truly converted and who is not. The Lord knows those who are his (2 Timothy 2:19). We do not. We are responsible to teach the truth, administer the sacraments faithfully, exercise discipline against open and unrepented sin, and love everyone in the field. We are not responsible to be the angels at the harvest. Augustine's relief is, in part, the relief of a finite church being told it does not have to do God's job.

Second, it gives us patience with imperfection without giving us tolerance for false teaching. Augustine did not say therefore everything in the church is fine. He said therefore the church's holiness in this age is real but mixed, and our response to that mixture is not separation but charity, discipline, and patience until the master's day. He still fought for orthodoxy with his pen. He still excommunicated the unrepentant. But he refused to accept that a few weeds in the field meant the field was not the Lord's.

Third, it deflates a particular kind of spiritual pride that grows wherever Donatist instincts grow. The Donatist always positions himself as the pure one. The act of leaving the impure church is also the act of declaring oneself unimpaired. Augustine's reply is, in effect: have you considered that you may be a weed yourself? "The Lord knows those who are his." Not, you know who's who. The same parable that makes you suspicious of the field should make you humble about your own status within it. This is why Romans 14:4 is so jarring after Matthew 13. Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? The servants in the parable are not the angels.

None of this is an argument for indifference, and it is not an argument against the kinds of faithful departures Day 3 described. Augustine was capable of distinguishing — and so must we be. There is a difference between a field with weeds in it and a field that has been replanted with a different crop. The Donatist mistake was to treat the first kind of situation as if it were the second. Many modern Christians make the same mistake.

The mixed body is not the church's failure. It is, according to Jesus's own parable, the church's interim form. Faithful Christians have always had to learn the strange discipline of belonging to a body whose final composition is not yet revealed — to share communion with weeds we cannot see, and to receive grace from a wheat-grain we cannot always recognize, including the wheat-grain we ourselves may, by mercy, turn out to have been.

Going Deeper

Augustine's City of God, written as Rome was sacked and the empire shaken, returns again and again to the image of two cities — the earthly city built on the love of self to the contempt of God, and the heavenly city built on the love of God to the contempt of self — interwoven in this age and separated only at the end. The visible church on earth is not yet the city of God in its full purity. It is a community in pilgrimage, traveling toward a holiness it has not yet attained, recognizable not by perfect membership rolls but by faith working through love.

If you have been waiting to find a church without weeds before you commit, Augustine has a hard word for you: that church does not exist. The harvest is not yet. The most you can find is a field with the right Master, sown with the right seed, tended by the right Spirit. Belong there.