I looked up tares once. I believe it said that they are a crop grown for livestock feed. Kind of like a vine. Tares have a weak stalk. They will intertwine with another plant and use it for support. Tares don't kill the other plant. But they will stunt it.
In the story, a landowner has his hired hands plant wheat. The guy's neighbor comes with a gang of miscreants and throws out tare seeds in the same field. Tares aren't weeds. They had real use as fodder. It just wasn't what this guy wanted in that field.
Farmers are pretty picky about what they plant where. You rotate crops to keep the soil from depleting. Those tares messed up this guys rotation and made a lot of extra work for harvesting. Instead of grabbing huge handfuls, knowing it was all wheat. He would now need to individually sift each every plant. Very time consuming, I imagine.
So a few weeks pass. As the plants start to grow, the hired hands notice that some of them don't look like wheat. A little more time passes, and these guys are definitely sure some of that stuff isn't wheat. So the foreman goes to the landowner.
"Didn't we plant wheat in the south field?" he asks. "Yes," says the owner. The foreman continues, "Well, there are tares mixed in with the wheat. Someone sabotaged us. What do we do?"
The owner looks over the field. He can see the tares and the wheat. The men sigh, realizing that they're going to be pulling tares out of the ground for the next few days. "Want us to pull them up?" asks the foreman.
"No", says the owner. "If you pull up the tares, you'll also damage some of the wheat. I'm not willing to lose any of the wheat. Not one grain. Wait until they both finish growing. When we harvest, we'll pull them apart. The wheat goes to the sellers. The tares you can burn for a bonfire."
"The tares make good feed for the livestock," says the foreman. The owner looks at him and says, "Yes, but it's not what I wanted. And I'm ticked off. Burn it. Burn it all."
Jesus finishes the story saying, "This is what it will be like at the end of the age."
The point?
After a month like this, I start to question where God is. How can evil always seem to win out? Bad things happen, and there is no choice but to accept it. The voice inside says that there is no hope. There is no salvation. It is this way, just live with it.
I feel naive, Pollyanna if you will, But I can't. I can't accept that. I may endure it. I may have to go through it. But I cannot believe that this how it's supposed to be.
Why is there evil? Because someone planted something He never intended. God looked over the world, time, and space. He saw what the landowner saw. If He pulls up the tares now, He'll lose some of the wheat too. It's just too intertwined.
Evil is ingrained in us. It's in our histories, our upbringing, our past, our future - like tares climbing wheat stalks. It wraps around and uses the good to spread, grow, and even flourish.
But God decided that He isn't willing to lose any of the wheat. He isn't willing to accept any losses. Every last grain, every last person that He planted, will be His. No one will be lost. Not one. And He will wait. He will wait until He knows that He can gather them, pull them apart, and burn the rest of it.
That doesn't make the evil any easier to endure. Well, not for me anyway. It doesn't take away the hurt. And it doesn't bring back what was lost. But I still believe. It's all I have left.
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