Dear Friends,
Today, we read Jesus’s Parable of the Wheat and Weeds. This is the second parable recorded by Matthew in his Third Discourse of five such collections of Jesus’s sayings in this gospel. This parable is unique to Matthew’s gospel in the Biblical canon; it doesn’t appear in Mark, Luke, or John (though it is included in the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas).
The structure of the story is similar to the pattern we saw in last Sunday’s parable of the sower, seeds, and soils. Matthew begins by recounting the parable as Jesus would have shared it with the crowds that had gathered to hear him. (13:24-30) Then after an interruption, in this case of five verses, Matthew returns to the parable, offering more detail and a broader explanation. As in last week’s double telling of the Parable of the Sower, Jesus again leaves the crowds behind and retreats with the disciples into a dwelling. Here, the disciples implore him to “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the fields.” (13:36) Sounds familiar after last week, doesn’t it?
Before we join Jesus, the gathered crowds, his disciples, and Matthew, let us pray together this prayer of illumination:
O Great Storyteller, whose life of loving compassion filled all God's intentions for humanity, help us to see the potential and greatness in Jesus’s parables. Draw us out of our familiar routines so that we might recognize your presence and your call. Keep us from being weeds in your fields of life or from being so intent on pulling weeds that we hurt people along the way. Draw us now into these biblical images so that they will, we pray, touch our souls. Amen.
Perhaps intentionally, parables are always at least a little hard to grasp. They force us to think, but it’s hard to imagine even the basic set-up for this story. How nasty would you have to be to intentionally sow weeds on someone’s freshly tilled and planted soil? And these were likely not common, everyday weeds; they were probably bearded darnel, a noxious weed that, in the early stages of growth, mimics many of the characteristics of wheat. Until they mature, the two plants are almost identical, with the differences not apparent until they are nearly ripe. Darnel is poisonous, and in big enough doses, it could kill a person. So it’s definitely not something a farmer wants mixed into his fields. What a horrible thing to do!
But hard though it is to imagine, this set-up actually reflects ancient history. In the time of Jesus, life was harsh, and competition for scarce resources, including the harvest, was fierce. It wasn’t unheard of for a disgruntled neighbor to sabotage another’s farm and livelihood by sowing weeds into his newly planted fields. And that’s exactly the case in this parable.
Seeds, of course, are invisible until they sprout and grow, and in the parable, the farmer’s slaves don’t discover the sabotage until after the plants had come up and begun to bear grain. Confused, they go to the householder/farmer and ask, “Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?” (13:27) One can only imagine the slaves’ fear that they’d themselves be blamed, but the farmer is quick to realize that someone, an unknown enemy in this telling, had seeded the field with tares, with weeds.
But if, as the householder’s slaves were suggesting, the weeds were pulled before they could be distinguished from the wheat, there would have been no way to avoid damaging the still-fragile wheat, and the entire crop would likely be lost. As the farmer says, “for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.” (13:29) He has no choice but to tell his workers to wait for the harvest, when the reapers can identify the weeds so they can be set aside to be destroyed. Only then can the healthy wheat be harvested and stored in the farmer’s barn.
The parable ends rather abruptly here, and Jesus goes on to share two more very short parables in the next five verses. We’ll explore those next week.
When Jesus leaves the crowds with his disciples in verse 36, they ask for a private tutorial about his parable. This is Matthew inserting his explanation into the narrative, just as we saw last week when we read the Parable of the Sower. Matthew is evangelizing here. Through the device of having Jesus explain the story point by point to his disciples, he’s spreading the word to a broader audience. He’s sharing his post-Easter understanding of the story, and we, along with his readers and listeners, reap the benefit of his more detailed allegory.
Remember, Matthew was writing after Rome’s destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, including of the city itself. This new reality forced a recognition that God’s reign was not going to emerge in Jerusalem as anticipated, thus changing the expectation of Christ’s imminent second coming. By the time of Matthew’s gospel forty years after Christ’s death and resurrection and only a few years after the destruction of Jerusalem, the immediacy of Christ’s now unrealized second coming has passed and is being replaced with a new understanding of the “end time” or “the end of the age.” (13:39). It will happen, but in God’s time, not in our human time
With this new understanding came a recognition of the church’s mission: that it was to broaden and spread far beyond Jerusalem, now utterly destroyed; that it was not limited to the Jewish people; and that its charge was to seek justice and love one’s neighbor now and into the unknowable future. In effect, that mission is also to reach both the wheat and the tares sown on the fields of humankind.
In both the Old and New Testaments, the harvest is a biblical symbol for the final judgment, the final days. Some examples of this may be found in Jeremiah 51:33 and Hosea 6:11 in the Hebrew scriptures and Revelation 14:14-15 in the New Testament. The harvest will come, however long it will take and however fruitful the seeds will be; it is an authentic expectation. In this parable, and especially in Matthew’s more explicit retelling, the harvest includes all of humankind, with Matthew adding the involvement of angels and even God the Father.
In Jesus’s earlier recounting of the parable, we see that the harvest is what occurs once the mature crop is saved through the destruction of the tares, now revealed as the noxious weeds they are. In Matthew’s expanded retelling, the “harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels.” (13:39) “The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” (13:41-43)
Many of the allegorical symbols that Matthew outlines and explains – the sower of the good seed as the Son of Man, the field as the world, the good seeds as the children of the kingdom, the weeds as the children of the devil, to name but a few – have become, over the years, the standard interpretation of the broader scriptural meaning of the agrarian elements of Jesus’s times. It is Matthew who answers the question unaddressed in Jesus’s telling of the parable but obvious to many: who is it who sows the weeds? Matthew makes it clear that “the enemy who sowed them is the devil.” (13:39)
The devil, the incarnation of evil, is a very real presence at the time of Jesus and Matthew, just as it often is for us in these times of social unrest, racial reckoning, economic insecurity, and pandemic. As Jesus traveled through Galilee, preaching and teaching, we know that he was not universally accepted by all the people; indeed, the mixed response to Jesus’s words ultimately played a part in his execution by the Romans. This tension was evident to the disciples, and it’s a measure of how disconcerting it was to them that they so often encouraged Jesus to leave the crowds and go to quieter, likely safer, places with them.
The social and political environment of the community of believers for whom Matthew composed his gospel was possibly even more precarious than it was in Jesus’s time just four decades earlier. After destroying Jerusalem, Rome became even more powerful, and the Roman authorities were even more aggressive. The community in which Matthew lived was seething with both hope and despair. It included both Jews, who were threatened even more fiercely by the occupying Roman forces than they had been earlier, and the newly emerging group of Jewish Christians, also at great risk from Rome. Both groups were bound by their hatred of Rome, but each feared that the other would bring the full wrath of the Roman emperor on them all.
In such precarious circumstances, both Jesus and Matthew call for patience above all else. By acting too hastily and without enough information – by pulling weeds that could well be wheat or that could damage the wheat – the field workers would have risked ruining the entire harvest. We, too, are called to patiently assess where we are in a world of historical and current injustice, and how we will respond.
Jesus is also cautioning his followers against making the impossible choice between sustaining wheat and poisonous darnel. Making that decision is the reapers’ task, and only in good time. Jesus says, “Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.” (13:30) Matthew makes this even more explicit when he says, “the reapers are angels.” (13:39) The reapers are thus the agents of God. In both tellings, the parable makes it clear that the decision is not the workers’ to make, but God’s. The workers’ task – and ours – is simply to nurture growth, to be patient and to listen for God’s guidance.
The combination of the parables that Jesus shares with the crowd and later privately with his disciples underscores the basic similarities of focus in Jesus’s time and in Matthew’s forty years later. And our reality is actually not so very far from theirs. “Let anyone with ears listen!” (13:43)
In order to truly listen, we must be patient. We must banish all preconceptions, all assumptions from our minds. We must, in fact, press the mute button on all the voices and noise that so subtly invade our consciousness. Only then will we find the patience to discern God’s will and the perseverance to hear God’s voice among all the others that clamor for our attention.
Calling Christians to patience is an ongoing challenge. Augustine of Hippo wrote in 425 CE that “patience is the companion of wisdom,” and we are called to be as wise, and then as patient, as we can be. A thousand years later, Thomas à Kempis wrote in his classic, Imitation of Christ, that “all men commend patience, although few be willing to practice it.” Our understanding of this virtue continues to need our attention to this very day.
God’s patience is unending and infinitely greater than ours. If we remain impatient, we will be blind and deaf to God’s process and nurture. In our impatience, we may be unable to perceive the value of the wheat, and perhaps even of the weeds in our fields. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not been discovered.”
The situations of our lives that cause us frustration, fear, and impatience are real and painful. Yet as Christians, we are called to practice that virtue of patience that Jesus taught in this parable. To be patient is not to resign ourselves to the status quo, but to refrain from decisions and actions that are both premature and not ours to make. Trusting in God, we are to explore all the possibilities that God gives us, including even possibilities we can’t yet imagine.
Thanks be to God who is patient with us and who calls us to be patient with ourselves and our neighbors and strangers, and even with God’s sense of timing.
Joys and Concerns:
For the extraordinary lives of the Rev. C. T. Vivian, life-long civil rights activist and advocate for nonviolence, and Rep. John R. Lewis, the “conscience of Congress” and uncompromising advocate for social justice. Our nation was richer for their presence and will be poorer in their absence.
For ears to hear the wisdom of expert advice about the unrelenting assault we all continue to suffer from the corona virus, and for the patience to heed their words in order to help solve this terrible problem.
Let us pray together:
Lord of the Harvest, be with us now as we pray. May we sow good seed by the goodness of our lives, and may we look forward to your bountiful harvest.
We pray:
For eyes of faith to see both goodness and evil in the world. Lord, open our eyes.
For prayerful discernment in difficult circumstances. Lord, sensitize our minds.
For a focused commitment to your Word. Lord, center our hearts.
For patience and mercy as we trust in a future we cannot see. Lord, we surrender our lives.
With these prayers, O God, we seek your kingdom of heaven, your reign both on earth and eternally. We make them with confidence in Jesus’s name. Amen.