The Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat: Part 1, The Story

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The last two posts we looked at both the Parable of the Sower and its interpretation. We saw that Jesus took advantage of the ability of stories to carry multiple meanings, telling a story that could mean one thing in public, but another for his inner circle. The next parable in Matthew 13 is another that shifts in focus between the story and its eventual interpretation, so once again we’ll look at them separately. Today’s study will focus on the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat. Then next time, we’ll turn to Jesus’ interpretation of it.

(As always, you can skip to the bottom if you’d just like the summary.)

Text

This parable is found only in Matthew’s Gospel, and directly follows the Parable of the Sower in chapter 13:

[13.24] And he placed before them another parable, saying: “The kingdom of heaven is like a person who sows good seed in his field. [25] But while people were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds amidst the wheat and then went away. [26] When the plants grew up and began to bear fruit, the weeds also appeared. [27] The master’s slaves approached him and said to him: “Master, didn’t you plant good seed in your field? Why then does it have weeds? [28] And he said to them: “An enemy did this.” So the slaves said to him: “Do you want us to go and gather them?” [29] But he said, “No, lest in gathering up the weeds you uproot the wheat along with them. [30] Leave both to grow together until the harvest; then when the harvest season comes, I will tell the harvesters, ‘Collect first the weeds and bundle them up to be burned, then gather the wheat into my barn. (Matthew 13.24-30)

Experience

In this reading of the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat, I was struck by how it balances grace and judgment, and good an evil. Yes, there will be a final judgment and it won’t look pretty for everyone, but it’s not for us to worry about. The focus of the parable — and its surprise — is on leaving the weeds in with the wheat until the last possible moment.

Yet if I think about it, the situation described here sounds really strange and unlikely. I feel like I need more information to help me understand what’s happening.

Encounter

Here we have Jesus teaching, presumably to a public audience.

In the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat we encounter a number of characters: the master of the estate, his slaves, and the harvesters. Jesus goes into a lot of detail about these in his interpretation.

Explore

We’ve left the first two steps with some questions to guide the rest of our study:

  • Is there anything in the literary context that might help put this parable into perspective?
  • What details of the story might help us understand it better?
  • How does this parable engage with common ideas about the kingdom of God?

Literary Context

We’ve previously seen that the Matthew 13 parables discourse is the third of the five major teaching sections in that Gospel, and therefore central to the Gospel’s message. The discourse itself contains seven parables (seven being a symbolic number of perfection in the Biblical tradition). Of these, the Weeds and the Wheat is the second. Thematically, it is connected to the final parable of the discourse, the Parable of the Net. Together they can be thought of as the bookends of a chiastic (i.e., ‘symmetrical and with the most important part being in the middle’) structure centred on the interpretation of today’s parable (Scott 347).* We can visualize it like this:

Weeds and Wheat

Mustard Seed and Leaven

Explanation of Weeds and Wheat

Treasure in a Field and Pearl

Net

So this parable can be thought of as introducing the organizing theme of this section of the discourse.

It also should be noted that this parable traffics in apocalyptic language, and specifically imagery used by John the Baptist in Matthew 3: “Repent! For the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3.2); “Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees!” (3.10); “His winnowing fan is in his hand and he will clear our his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire” (3.12). So similar is the imagery that we might even think of the parable as Jesus’ critical response to John’s teaching (F Stern 46).*

Narrative Details

The Weeds

To our eyes, the premise of the parable — a farmer who finds that an enemy has laced his field laced with weeds — seems a bit outlandish. But a bit of digging suggests this was a very real and dangerous situation. The Greek word used here, zizania, is not a generic term, but refers to a specific type of grass, Lolium temulentum, commonly known as darnel (Walton & Keener; Capon; Nuechterlein; France 525; Thurman). It evolved not only for the same environments as wheat, but also to mimic wheat in its developmental stages (Capon; Walton & Keener). To make matters worse, darnel is poisonous to humans (Walton & Keener; Thurman). So great was the threat of darnel infesting a wheat crop that there was a Roman law that specifically made sowing it into a wheat field a criminal act (France 525; Walton & Keener). So not only is the situation Jesus describes here plausible, it was also very serious. It also makes the decision not to intervene all the more surprising.

The Characters

It’s interesting to note how Jesus expands the scale of the story in how he talks about the characters. The farmer is introduced simply as ‘a person’ who sows seed. This is reminiscent of the sower in the previous parable, and so our minds are cued to think of this as another small-scale operation. But suddenly he has (multiple) slaves who look after the day-to-day work, and he’s described as the master of an estate (oikodespotes). This jump in scale also shifts the connotations of what the ‘enemy’ is up to, as it transfers his actions from a neighbour with a petty vendetta to something more akin to industrial sabotage.

Harvest

The harvest was a common image for the apocalyptic judgment (see, for example, 2 Baruch 70). This is fourth time already in Matthew’s Gospel that the metaphor has been deployed (Case-Winters).

The Kingdom of Heaven is like …

This is the first parable to be introduced with the stock phrase, “The kingdom of heaven is like …” So it’s important to get our heads around common ideas in Jesus’ day about God’s Kingdom and how the analogy he makes here plays with them.

As Second Temple Judaism developed, the idea of the Kingdom of Reign of God was strongly associated with apocalypticism (Walton & Keener). This religious sensibility was strongly dualistic, with clear delineations of good and evil. While evil always seemed to be winning the day in the here and now, there would be a day of reckoning in which the wicked would be punished, the righteous dead raised, and justice established once and for all.

Jesus is clearly playing with this apocalyptic imagery in his teaching of the Kingdom of God. But, he’s also critiquing it and undermining its basic logic. The most shocking thing the parable teaches is that the Kingdom is already present, in this world with all its suffering and evil (Capon; Hagner 110). The Kingdom of Heaven is not to be found in some distant, future state, but “is at hand” (Matthew 3.2, 4.17, 10.7 (NIV)), “has come near” (Luke 10.9, 11) and “is among and within you” (Luke 17.21). This means that it is not some imagined pure spiritual state, but involves all the nitty-gritty of life. It’s “worldly,” and as much about this age as the next (Capon). And, it is active and at work in the here and now, in all places, in all people, and in all circumstances, without exception (Capon).

And this means that the Kingdom does not depend on apocalyptic judgment. There will be judgment to be sure (for there can be no justice without it), but until that time, the Kingdom does not discriminate between the unrighteous and righteous (Hagner 110; France 533).

This is the second major way this parable undermines the logic of apocalypticism. For the apocalyptic mentality requires clear boundaries of good and evil, of insiders and outsiders, in order to work. And this parable rejects that dualism (Hagner 109; Nuectherlein Proper 11A). Whether we conceive of the field as Israel, the Church, the whole world, or the individual human heart, the parable tells us it’s a mixed bag (Capon; Case-Winters): There are always weeds among the wheat, wolves among the sheep, outsiders among the insiders. And God is totally okay with this, since for God it’s a greater evil to have a righteous person unjustly uprooted than to have an unrighteous person thrive. And, more to the point, we are incapable of distinguishing between the two (Capon; Nuechterlein Proper 11A). So the attitude of “one bad apple spoils the bunch” is not, according to Jesus, the way of God’s Kingdom.

This means that it’s not up to us to try to sort out the good from the bad in the world. As Paul Nuectherlein summarizes it, “The central point of the Parable … would seem to be that we multiply the evil when we try to identify evil and weed it out;” and “trying to sort the good from the bad only adds to the suffering” (Nuechterlein Proper 11A).

This is a remarkable critique not just of apocalypticism but of the general way we order society as a whole:

We’ve bitten the apple of trying to sort the wheat from the weeds before the harvest of God’s love, and it destroys that which is good, too. What the enemy has sown is chiefly the desire to sort wheat and weeds that itself becomes the number one reason for suffering. (Nuechterlein Proper 11A)

In our current state, we are simply not capable of sorting out good from evil, wheat from darnel, and so any attempt, program, or pogrom designed to eliminate evil is doomed to create more evil than it prevents (Capon). The Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat is not, then, primarily about the “eschatological redress of wrongs, but present forbearance of them” (Capon; cf. France 533). As St. Jerome noted, this not only prevents us from making unjust judgments, but also opens the door for repentance (Jerome, Commentary on Matthew 2.13.29, cited in Simonetti 278).

Challenge

Subversion of First-Century Expectations

There’s no doubt that this parable would have blown a lot of minds in Jesus’ initial audience. As difficult as dealing with a darnel infestation would be, it would still be imperative to do it. The actions of the farmer would be neglectful and dangerous (Capon). So, the story subverts what would normally be done in order to make its point about just how unexpectedly lavish and gracious the Kingdom of God is.

And, as we saw earlier, the whole teaching here about the Kingdom used apocalyptic imagery to undermine apocalyptic logic. The Kingdom is already present, before any end-times sorting of good and evil, and moreover, we’re not to try to do any such sorting ourselves.

Contemporary Challenges

This is a big and beautiful teaching, but seems to do nothing about justice on this side of the Judgment. It’s safe to say that the New Testament offers a mixed bag when it comes to this issue. As with so many other of the big Gospel teachings, their very expansiveness makes them hard to operationalize. It’s easy for a prophet to speak bold truths, but prophets aren’t responsible for making society function in a reasonable way. And so, the application always tends to be narrower and more conservative than the principle. This is why, for example, Paul seems to walk back his wonderful teachings about how in Christ there is neither male nor female, neither slave nor free (Galatians 3.28), by commanding women to be silent (1 Corinthians 14.34) and submissive (Ephesians 5.21-24) and slaves to be obedient (Ephesians 6.5-9) and even to return to their master if they’ve run away (Philemon). He had to figure out how to be true to the revolutionary nature of the Gospel, while also avoiding any semblance of anarchy or social troublemaking. It’s entirely unsatisfying, but also very realistic.

So while I love the spirit of this parable and wish Christians would keep it top of mind in any discussion about justice in the world (instead of being like the well-meaning but wrong-minded slaves in the parable), I also understand that there are legitimate barriers to applying it literally in all circumstances.

Expand

How then does this interpretation fit our criteria under the ‘expand’ step? The Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat encourages us to grow in love by taking a nonjudgmental attitude to those around us. We simply are not in a position to judge good and evil and so would do well to step back from sitting in judgment at all. This bears good fruit because, as history sadly tells us, any attempt at ridding a group or society of evil ends up creating far greater evils. And so, following this parable prevents ‘good grain’ from being cut off from growing and bearing its good fruit. And it encourages growth and good fruit in us because it should inspire us to look within and recognize the weeds hiding among the wheat in our own life, our own heart. Moreover, from a shadow-work perspective, the nonjudgmental spirit it requires us to take in this process of self-examination would prevent us from being too quick to call certain pieces of us good and evil and not falsely root out some good in the name of goodness (Capon; Thurman; Marr).

Summary and Conclusions

With all this in mind, the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat offers a message of incredible grace and forbearance. The Kingdom of Heaven is here present, working among and within us. With all the good, some bad has been planted, but we are not to concern ourselves with differentiating between them, to say nothing of judging and taking action against what we perceive to be bad. That is God’s business and God’s business alone. And, so as Anna Case-Winters puts it:

It is best to let the mixture grow together until the harvest rather than making premature judgments. That way we do not mistakenly exclude any of God’s beloved. Nor do we give up on ourselves in the face of our own mixed response. Read in this way, the parable is a parable of grace—make no exclusions. This is God’s harvest. (Case-Winters)

But this is not the last we hear of this parable. For Jesus offers an interpretation of it, and as we saw with the Parable of the Sower, the interpretation has a different emphasis than the parable itself. And so the next post will look at that text and explore how we might manage these differences.

 

* For full references, please see the series bibliography.