The Counterfeit and the Communion

Have you ever bitten into a piece of fruit at the grocery store that looked perfect on the outside—glossy, plump, the very picture of an apple in a child's storybook—only to find it mealy, tasteless, and disappointing? The wax that gave it its shine was not the same as ripeness. The color that drew your eye was not the same as flavor. It looked like fruit. It even felt like fruit in the hand. But it could not deliver what fruit is supposed to give: nourishment, sweetness, life.

This experience, small as it is, points to something the enemy of our souls has been doing since the beginning. He is, above all, an imitator. He cannot create; he can only counterfeit. And his counterfeits are most dangerous precisely when they are young, unripe, indistinguishable from the real thing.

Jesus knew this. And so He told a parable.

 

The Field and the Foe

"The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well" (Matthew 13:24-26).

The Greek word translated "weeds" is zizania, almost certainly referring to darnel (Lolium temulentum), a poisonous grass that, in its early stages, is virtually indistinguishable from wheat. Farmers in first-century Palestine knew this plant well. Only at maturity, when the heads formed, could one tell them apart. The wheat would bow under the weight of its grain; the darnel would stand upright, empty, and proud.

Notice what Jesus says about timing: "Let both of them grow together until the harvest" (Matthew 13:30). The master will not allow the servants to uproot the weeds prematurely, because in their immaturity, they are too easily mistaken for wheat. Pull them now, and you risk pulling the wheat with them.

This is a parable about patience, yes, but it is also a parable about discernment, and about the strange fact that God permits imitation to grow alongside truth, sometimes for a very long time.

 

The Serpent's Oldest Trick

The enemy's chief weapon has always been imitation. Look back to the garden. The serpent did not approach Eve and say, "Reject God." That would have been too obvious, too easily refused. Instead, he whispered, "You will be like God, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:5).

Like God. Imitators of God. But not in the way God had already made them—made in His image, in communion with Him, walking with Him in the cool of the day. That communion was the real thing. What the serpent offered was a counterfeit, a shortcut, a seizing rather than a receiving. He offered the appearance of likeness without the substance of relationship.

And here is the heart of it: God did not create humanity to imitate Him from a distance. He created humanity for communion with Him. He created man and woman for a communion of persons that would itself be an icon of His own inner life—the eternal self-giving love of the Trinity. "So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:27).

The fall, in some sense, was the trading of communion for imitation. And the enemy has been working that same con ever since.

 

Our Age of Imitation

It would be hard to find an age more saturated with imitation than our own. We have, quite literally, built machines to imitate us. Artificial intelligence can now compose poetry, paint pictures, hold conversations, and simulate empathy. The technology is genuinely remarkable, and used wisely it can serve real human goods. But there is a darker drift happening, and it deserves naming.

People are turning to AI for companionship. For intimacy. For the experience of being heard, being known, being loved. There are now applications that promise a "girlfriend" or "boyfriend" who will never grow tired of you, never disappoint you, never demand anything you cannot give. And in the immaturity of the experience, it can feel like the real thing. It can entertain. It can soothe loneliness with the semblance of presence. It can produce in the user something that resembles the chemistry of love.

But what fruit will it bear?

A human being cannot bear a child with an algorithm. A human being cannot weep with a chatbot at the grave of a parent. A human being cannot grow old beside a line of code, cannot kneel beside it in prayer, cannot be sanctified through the daily friction of forgiving and being forgiven by it. The relationship is, by its very nature, sterile. It is a darnel in the field of human love, indistinguishable from wheat in the early days, but bearing no grain when the harvest comes.

And the cruelty of the counterfeit is this: when at last the soul realizes that what it embraced was only imitation, the loneliness will be more profound than before. The person who turned to the imitation to escape isolation will find that isolation has only deepened, because now even the capacity to receive real love has been atrophied by the practice of receiving its shadow.

This is true not only of AI. The same dynamic plays out in pornography, which imitates intimacy while destroying the capacity for it. It plays out in social media friendships that imitate community while leaving us more alone. It plays out in a culture that scorns the covenant of marriage while becoming obsessed with its imitations: the wedding without the vow, the cohabitation without the commitment, the romance without the cross.

The enemy has not changed his strategy since the garden. He still offers likeness without communion. And we still, so often, take the bait.

 

The Virtue That Bears No Fruit

There is another form of imitation worth naming, and Jesus speaks of it elsewhere. There are those who appear, by every external measure, to be virtuous. Their lives look orderly. Their words are kind. Their deeds are admirable. And yet, in the immaturity of the soul, the fruit is missing. The interior life that produces real holiness, the slow growth of charity rooted in communion with Christ, is absent.

This is not to say we should be quick to judge such people. The whole point of the parable is that we cannot always tell, and we should not try. "Let both of them grow together until the harvest" (Matthew 13:30). God Himself defers the judgment, not because He cannot see the difference, but because the difference is not yet manifest. Mercy makes room for maturation. The wheat that looks like darnel today may, by the patient work of grace, come to bear a hundredfold tomorrow.

And the darnel that prides itself on looking like wheat? That, too, will be revealed in due time, but not by us, and not yet.

 

Who Was Sown First

There is a small detail in the parable that I find immensely consoling. "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat" (Matthew 13:24-25).

The good seed was sown first. The imitation came after.

This is the order of things. Communion preceded the counterfeit. Marriage preceded its parodies. Real love preceded its simulations. The image of God in humanity preceded every imitation. The wheat is original. The darnel is sown later.

If you are wheat, you do not need to spend your days anxiously inspecting yourself to make sure you are not darnel. You do not need to be paralyzed by the proliferation of imitations around you. You were sown first. You know what you are. The enemy's many counterfeits cannot change the fact of your origin in the hand of the Sower.

The temptation, when surrounded by imitation, is to become anxious about our own authenticity. Am I real? Am I really following Christ? Or am I just imitating the externals of faith? These are good questions to ask, occasionally, in the quiet of prayer. But they should not become the soundtrack of our spiritual life. The wheat does not strain to be wheat. It simply receives sun and rain and grows.

 

How Then Shall We Live

So what do we do, surrounded as we are by darnel that looks like wheat?

First, be who God created you to be, and do not be anxious about the tares. Anxiety about counterfeits will not make us more authentic. Communion with God will. Spend more time in prayer than in worry. Spend more time communing with God than diagnosing the failures of others. The wheat grows by drawing nourishment from the soil and the sun, not by glaring at the weeds.

Second, choose communion over imitation, deliberately, daily. This will look different for each of us, but the principle is the same: prefer the real to the simulated, even when the real is harder. Prefer the friend who can hurt you to the algorithm that cannot. Prefer the spouse with whom you must die a thousand small deaths to the fantasy that demands nothing. Prefer the parish full of imperfect saints to the curated online community. Prefer the slow, embodied life of grace to the quick fix of digital affirmation.

Third, examine where imitation has crept into your own spiritual life. Are there areas where you have settled for the appearance of holiness without its substance? Where you have performed virtue without practicing it? Where you have spoken about prayer more than you have actually prayed? Bring these honestly to the Lord. He is not looking for darnel that calls itself wheat. He is looking for wheat that knows its own poverty and trusts the Sower.

Fourth, trust the harvest. You will not, in this life, see all the imitations exposed and all the authentic souls vindicated. The judgment is deferred for a reason. Mercy is at work in that delay—mercy for them, and mercy for you. Let God be God. Let the field be the field. Let the harvest be the harvest.

And in the meantime, grow. Grow in communion. Grow in love that bears real fruit. Grow in the patient, unspectacular faithfulness that, when at last the heads of grain are full, will bow under their own weight before the Master of the harvest.

The wheat was sown first. You know what you are. Grow on.

 

God Bless,

Judah

 

P.S. AI has been on my mind lately, and if you'd like to delve into that topic more, I just released a book: (DIS)EMBODIED: AI AND A THEOLOGY OF THE BODY.