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Henry Dimbleby, the restauranteur, was responsible for the Government’s National Food Strategy in 2021.

He has written a brilliant book called, simply, Ravenous. It’s all about how we could reduce our commitment to foods that are harming the world by their production, free up land for CO2 capture, and work towards alternative foods that are both appealing and beneficial to health.

Now, what is your attitude to weeds? Do you love them, or do you hate them? Do you root them out, or let them be? Dimbleby has a view on weeds. He describes how engineers are developing robots that zap weeds with powerful electric currents. He advocates mixed crops, with particular peas, beans and wild flowers deliberately planted amidst grain crops to improve soil quality. And then he dwells on agricultural robots that work during the harvesting process to sort out different plants. So, on this basis, weeds can either be zapped to order, or else distinguished and sorted from the grain at harvest time.

Jesus’s story in today’s gospel is about weeds called darnel, referred to as tares in older Bibles.   An enemy had secretly sowed it in his neighbour’s newly planted wheat field. In the early stages, it was difficult to distinguish the darnel from the wheat, and the roots got so entangled with one another that attempts to root out the darnel would endanger the whole crop. But darnel was bad stuff, foul tasting and poisonous.  There were no electric zapping robots. So the owner ordered it to be left till harvest time, when it was more distinctive and could be sorted and burned as fuel.

Now Jesus was nothing if not realistic about human nature.  The darnel weeds in his story are symbolic of reality. The landowner says to his staff: ‘An enemy has done this’.  Who is the enemy? – the evil and selfish tendency in human nature, the cause of most suffering.  Even some of the disasters we think of as natural, we could prevent or mitigate, if it set our collective mind to it – like landslides from mining or flooding from global warming.

It’s the age-old question: why is there so much evil in the world, so much badness, so much suffering?  It’s particularly a problem for Christians and others who believe in a good and caring God.   Why does God allow natural disasters like earthquakes?  Why has God created people in such a way that we can be cruel and thoughtless, sometimes even criminally bad? And why are we so selfish that we keep on ruining the world we live in?

Henry Dimbleby, like us, is well aware of the horrors that will meet us if we carry on as we are, with people already being scorched, or flooded out of their homes and livelihoods. Like the infernal darnel, evil is surreptitious, insidious, dangerous.

Jesus didn’t usually unpack his parables, but left them to the imagination and insight of his hearers. So we can’t be sure whether Jesus’s later unpacking of this story for his disciples, which is also part of today’s gospel, is from the lips of Jesus himself or is Matthew’s interpretation.  But here, the harvest of the story turns out to be the end of time, and it’s not the darnel, but the perpetrators of evil who are consigned to the fire, with ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’. This is symbolic, representing the seriousness of evil-doing.

So, we’re left with the question: why does the world have to be like it is, and why are we people of the world as we are – and particularly men and women notorious for egregious crime and cruelty?

As Christians, we look for a theological answer.  Why does God allow all this? We will come back to that, but first a pragmatic answer. If the world were perfectly good, it wouldn’t be the world we know.  And if human nature were perfectly good, we wouldn’t be the people we are.  We wouldn’t live the lives of freewill and choice that we are familiar with.  There would be no moral choosing, no struggle with evil. There would be no suffering for us to contend with in other people and ourselves.  There would be no challenge in life, no difficulties to overcome. Would we like that? Life would not be life as we know it.

In Jesus’s story, the farmer tells his workforce to leave the darnel in the crop as it can’t be safely distinguished or disentangled.  This is no doubt because we human beings are all of us a mixture of good and bad. If we didn’t know already, recent times have shown us the dark side of people that can lie hidden in their tangled existence, until light is suddenly shone by victims or by journalists or the police. Prominent, popular and apparently virtuous characters can turn out to be more troubled than was apparent.

On a larger scale, the journalist Fergal Keane recently reminded us of the thousands of Tutsis murdered or raped in the 1994 Rwanda massacres ‘How can such cruelty come out of the hearts of men and women’, he wrote. We really don’t know or understand what motivates leaders in other countries, like Idi Amin, like Benjamin Netanyahu, like Vladimir Putin: what troubled personalities have led them to be what they are, with their personal greed and vicious nationalism.

But we are all mixtures of good and bad, with all manner of factors coming into play. So when someone’s been found guilty of a crime, the judge may call for a social report before sentence is passed, to help understand factors from past experiences and psychological states that may constitute mitigating circumstances. But no-one can really know another person, unless, in the American Indian saying, they have walked two moons in their moccasins.

So human being are definitely a mixture, but with goodness to be found in even the most troubled and troublesome character. But there is far more goodness in the world than bad, I’m sure of that. There are myriads of carers of all kinds: not just professional carers but everyone who puts himself or herself out for another person, often quietly but heroically. Professional carers bring all their innate and trained compassion and skills to the table.  There are some business men and women who are trying to do the best for people, conscientiously balancing the expectations of stakeholders and the needs of customers.  There are plenty of politicians and who genuinely want to make the world a better place.

Henry Dimbleby ends his splendid book, Ravenous with this:

We are at a fork in the road. The path to health, wealth and happiness – well into old age – is open to us. But to take it we must set aside tribalism and dogma, and make use of the political and scientific levers available. We must bring true variety – agricultural, commercial, ideological and nutritional – into food and farming. Only then can we make a real difference. Only then can we get ourselves and our planet into shape for the future.

Isn’t that something, in secular language, about contributing to building God’s kingdom on earth? We make our contributions to this each day, in our conversations, in our careful conservation of energy and resources, and in opportunities, great and small, to influence the affairs of the world.

And now, surprise, surprise, we have lighted upon the only possible and genuine Christian, theological answer to the problem of evil in the world. It’s the expectation that good will prevail in the end.  It’s the fact of the prevalence of good in the world that we believe God created and entrusted to humanity.  It’s the example of Jesus, with his care, and his integrity of purpose and message, despite the prospect of a cruel death. Jesus said that at the harvest, once the darnel weeds had been dealt with, the wheat was to be gathered into the barn.  And in the interpretation  passage, ‘Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father’.

May it be so.