In his monumental study of the Soviet prison system, The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn recounts a revelation that came to him during his long years of captivity. ‘Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.’

The profound nature of this insight can easily be missed. We may read it and say almost automatically, ‘oh yes, that’s right, we all have good and bad in us, how true.’ But most of us live and behave as though the opposite were true. Most of us go through life unconsciously assuming that there are good people and bad people, and that we are the former. Our persistent need to sniff out the guilty among us reveals that we ever see evil as something ‘out there’, not within. We fool ourselves into thinking that we only need to root out the wrong people in our society, in our world, to arrive at perfection.

Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds makes it clear that this is an illusion, and a destructive one at that. In attempting to remove evil by force we inevitably destroy the good as well, because in all people, both are present. And more than this, when we employ violent means the same evil finds fertile soil to grow within us. If we are to follow Christ, we must cultivate the good in others, first and foremost through forgiveness, rather than seeking to cut down the evil. We must leave the reaping to the One who judges both justly and mercifully, praying that the line through our own hearts will at last find healing in the great harvest.

By Chad Hargrave