Last time, we looked at Jesus’ Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat. We saw how it offers a profound and surprising message of forbearance and lack of judgmentalism, insisting that it is better in God’s Kingdom to let a ‘bad seed’ thrive in the here and now than to risk uprooting one of the good ones in a vain attempt to root out evil. Judgment is coming, it tells us, but that is God’s business, not ours. But, as was the case with the Parable of the Sower, Jesus himself offers an interpretation of the Parable of the Weeds and and the Wheat, and again he places a different emphasis on it from what the parable itself might suggest. So today we’ll look at how Jesus interpreted it and what we might make of the difference.
Text
[13.36] Then Jesus left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples went up to him and said, “Explain to us clearly the parable of the weeds in the field. [37] And answering them, he said: “The sower of good seed is the Son of Man. [38] The field is the world, and the good seeds are the children of the kingdom, the weeds are the children of the Evil One, [39] and the enemy who sows them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels. [40] So then, just as the weeds are gathered and burned in the fire, so will it be in the end of the age: [41] The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather up all the stumbling blocks and law breakers from his kingdom, [42] and they will throw them into the furnace of fire: There there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. [43] Then the just will sine like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father. Let those who have ears hear. (Matthew 13.36-43)
Experience
Reading Jesus’ explanation of the parable after reading the story itself feels a bit like looking into a funhouse mirror. It’s recognizable as the same story — it has all the same characters and plot points — and yet it feels completely different: The parable about gracious forbearance in God’s Kingdom is now focused entirely on eschatological (i.e., related to the end-times) judgment. A parable that subverted the logic of apocalyptic thinking now seems entirely embedded in it. What’s happening here? Has Jesus lost the plot of his own story? Did we misunderstand the story? Or is there something more nuanced at work?
Encounter
Unlike in the telling of the parable itself, here we have specific reference to its audience, namely Jesus’ disciples. Since this shift in audience was critical in understanding the difference between the Parable of the Sower and the spin Jesus places on it, I wonder if this shift in audience might again be helpful for us in resolving the differences in emphasis here.
Jesus turns the parable into an allegory, with most of the characters in the story corresponding one-to-one with figures in the apocalyptic scene he describes. Some of these have specific resonance with apocalyptic language: the Son of Man, the children of the Kingdom, the Evil One, the Devil, and so on. What might such wording have to tell us about the story Jesus is telling?
Explore
We’ve left the first two sections of the study with a lot of big questions:
- What can we learn from the shift in audience and broader narrative context of the parable and its explanation?
- Who are the apocalyptic figures mentioned in the parable?
- What does this text have to say about divine judgment?
Hopefully these three questions will help us to answer the big overarching question: How do we reconcile these two seemingly very different versions of the story, one of which subverts apocalyptic expectation and the other seems to revel in it?
Literary and Narrative Context
Following the narrative logic of Matthew 13, at some point after speaking privately to the disciples about teaching in parables and explaining the Parable of the Sower, Jesus goes back out to teach publicly. There he preaches the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat, about withholding judgment about the world while we wait for God to bring justice to it. He follows this with the parables of the mustard seed and leaven. Now at the start of today’s text, Jesus leaves the crowds again and his disciples jump at the chance to ask him questions. Specifically, they ask him about “the Parable of the Weeds of the Field” and in answering them, Jesus ignores the entire drama of the story, and instead focuses exclusively very last scene (France 532; cf. Wilson 471). To put it simply, it turns a parable about not weeding prematurely into a parable about harvesting (Marr; Capon).
While he readily admits he’s reading a lot into the story, Robert Farrar Capon offers a compelling interpretation of what’s happening here. To lay the ground work, let’s think again about this interaction. When the disciples at last have Jesus’ ear for a private word, what’s on their mind? It isn’t the two short and strange parables they just heard. It isn’t about the surprising message of forbearance in the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat. In fact, in the way they frame their question to Jesus, they don’t mention the wheat at all (France 532; Wilson 471; Capon): They just want to know about the weeds. And so, as Capon puts it, Jesus throws them a “dominical dog biscuit:” They want eschatology and judgment, so Jesus gives them eschatology and judgment.
While I think Capon is likely overstepping a bit, I think he may be on to something in at least the generalities. The question the disciples ask him, “Tell us clearly about the parable of the weeds of the field” invites a reflection on the ultimate fate of the weeds. And so in this way, the shift in audience is important here in understanding the different between the parable and Jesus’ explanation of it. This time, not because the masses wouldn’t welcome the interpretation — far from it; this is the stuff the crowds would love — but because Jesus’ response is based on how the disciples frame the question.
Two further comments on the shift in focus and tone before moving on: First, it has to be pointed out that Jesus’ interpretation isn’t all doom and gloom! Sometimes we have the same narrowed vision as the disciples, focusing on the strong language in Jesus’ description of judgment and not on the great things to say about the fate of the just. Second, and connected to this, the focus here on the last scene of the parable doesn’t undo the rest of it. Jesus’s doesn’t advocate for judgmentalism, purity tests, or separatism here. Both parts of the parable remain true: The world as know it will always be a mix of the good and the bad that is not for us to sort out, but God will sort it out in the end.
Apocalyptic Terminology
One of the things that makes Jesus’ interpretation feel so extreme is how he goes all in on the vivid language of apocalyptic writing. In the interest of time, I won’t go into details, but “the Son of Man,” “sons/children of ____”, “shining like the sun,” and references to “the devil,” “angels,” and “stumbling blocks” are all representative of Second Temple apocalyptic literature (NIV BTS; Capon; France 535; Hanger 111). Again, even as Jesus undermines apocalyptic logic, he is still working within its basic structures. And its stock images certainly help to paint a vivid picture. Here, it might support Capon’s hypothesis about the focus on judgment being Jesus throwing the disciples a bone; they wanted an apocalyptic story and he made sure they got one!
Judgment and Justice
In his interpretation of the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat, Jesus puts a spotlight on the final judgment. While this conveys images of fire and brimstone and angry street preachers (and the imagery he uses here does nothing to mitigate that!), at its most basic, in the Scriptures, judgment is about justice. For without judgment, there is no justice, and if that judgment is not just, it is not of God (Case-Winters; cf. Wilson 472; Thurman). If we replace “The Last Judgment” with “God’s Final Justice” it’s a vastly different idea for us, but it shouldn’t be. When it comes to God’s Kingdom, judgment and justice are two sides of the same coin.
Retributive Justice in Apocalyptic Literature
Jewish Apocalyptic understood this at a fundamental level, even if it expressed it in rather blood-thirsty imagery. Remember: Apocalyptic was about oppressed people telling stories of resistance in coded language, and was ultimately concerned with theodicy: How can God be said to be good when God’s people are suffering and oppressed? Apocalyptic’s answer is that no matter how bad things look now, God’s justice will prevail in the end. The bad guys and the good guys wil both get what they deserve.
Jesus and Retributive Justice
Jesus’ teaching agrees that God’s justice will prevail in the end, but his understanding of what that justice involves is more complicated, and not just a little subversive. On the surface, this parable shares the apocalyptic ideal of retributive justice: the ‘children of the Kingdom’ are rewarded and the ‘children of the evil one’, defined as ‘stumbling blocks’ and ‘Law-breakers’ (literally, ‘doers of lawlessness’), incinerated (Hagner 112).
And indeed, it is clear and consistent teaching of the New Testament that we will be judged on our actions, on the quality of fruit our lives produce (Matthew 3.8-10, 7.15-20, 12.23, 21.43; Luke 3.8-9, 6.43-44, 8.14-15, 13.6-9; John 15.2-16; Romans 7.4-5; Galatians 5.22-23; Ephesians 5.9; Colossians 1.10; Hebrews 12.11; James 3.17). But even this turn of phrase, first uttered by John the Baptist but quickly taken on by Jesus, subverts the expectations of the time. In apocalyptic literature, the righteous are generally equated with God’s chosen people and the wicked with their foreign oppressors. The focus on good fruit eliminates the sense of being on the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ team: It’s not about your identity, but about what you do with it. (As Jesus put it, “Do not begin to say to yourselves, “We have Abraham as our ancestor”; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham” (Luke 3.9).) And so, Jesus commends the faith of Gentiles, welcomes social outcasts, and casts a ‘heretic’ as the hero of one of his most famous parables. Similarly, Jesus marginalizes the details of Law-keeping in favour of its major ethical principles and does away with the idea of ritual purity. Put into this context, the warning against premature judgment in the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat makes sense: none of the criteria we are prone to using to judge good and evil are legitimate. Even “Law-breakers” are probably not who we think they are.
To make matters worse for those wanting to root out evil in our midst, we all have good and evil at work inside of us; even the best of us can’t do what is right all the time. This comes out in Jesus’ teaching against judging others earlier in Matthew: We will be judged by God on he same standards by which we judge others. If we want mercy from God, we need to be merciful to others; if we have received God’s mercy, we will properly respond to it by offering mercy to others (Case-Winters).
To summarize, Jesus’ interpretation of the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat focuses on its last scene of apocalyptic judgment. Judgment was not missing from the parable itself, but Jesus’ focus on it in the interpretation serves to emphasize that judgment is necessary because God is just. Here judgment is understood in retributive terms — the good are rewarded and the wicked punished. But in the broader context of Jesus’ teaching, he radically redefines these concepts and renders them the purview of God alone to judge. The parable remains a warning to anyone who would try to preempt God’s ultimate judgment.
Challenge
The previous post covered how the parable would have been challenging to its original audience, so today we’ll focus on some contemporary (and even ancient) challenges to the interpretation offered above.
The Problem of Retributive Justice
The main challenge is simply that retributive justice is a weak form of justice that falls far short of the biblical ideal of shalom, God’s peace that is the presence of healthy and whole relationships with God, each other, and creation.
The good news, even if it complicates our reading of this passage, is that the Bible itself, both the Old and New Testaments, and specifically the teaching of Jesus, offers a strong critique of retributive justice. While yes, the quintessential expression of retribution, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” is from Exodus 21.23-24, and while yes, retribution is commonly found in apocalyptic texts such as the one we’re looking at today, it is not the Bible’s last word about justice. As Hosea put it, “I desire mercy [or lovingkindness], not sacrifice” (Hosea 6.6, quoted by Jesus in Matthew 9.13 and 12.7). Sacrifice is not the same as retribution, but the idea is the same: when wronged, what is required is love, mercy and forgiveness. And Jesus explicitly references “an eye for an eye” in order to invalidate it, “…but I say to you … if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other too” (Matthew 5.38-39). But he doesn’t stop there; Jesus then refuses his followers the possibility of treating anyone as their enemy at all, even if it opens them up to further attack (Matthew 5.40-47).
This is not retributive justice, but neither is it the restorative justice advocates long for today: It doesn’t depend on making amends. We might call it instead redemptive justice. And ultimately, this is what God’s judgment is about (Case-Winters).
Redemptive Justice in the New Testament
This redemptive alternative to retributive justice is best summarized by Paul’s assertion in Romans 3 (often hidden in our English translations) that:
Now, irrespective of the Law, God’s justice has been revealed … : [all] are now ‘just’ by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God offered as a hilasterion [see here for a discussion of this term] by his blood, made effective through faith(fulness). (Romans 3.21a, 24)
This is a very challenging text (see here for a fuller treatment), but the point is that what God did in and through Jesus of Nazareth reveals what God’s justice looks like: Those who enter into, and live out, a good faith relationship with Jesus — bearing the good fruit of God’s Kingdom, loving others as God has loved them, forgiving others as God has forgiven them, and taking up their own crosses in following him and his ways — are just.
There may well be evidence to support such a redemptive understanding of justice within the parable. For when the servants come to ask their master whether they should start weeding, his response, “Leave both to grow…” uses a word that is most commonly used in the New Testament to talk about forgiveness. So there could be a double entendre at work (Capon; Nuectherlein; Marr). Allowing the ‘bad’ to grow alongside the good provides opportunity for repentance and for all to understand the centrality of forgiveness to the Gospel. It could be that “Jesus is not threatening us with divine vengeance but is warning us of the built-in consequences of rejecting the free gift of forgiveness” (Nuechterlein Proper 11A).
With all this in mind, there is an ancient and well-established understanding in Christianity that the cross of Jesus was God’s act of final judgment upon humanity. As one saying attributed to St. Augustine puts it, “The cross itself, if we contemplate it well, is the judgment seat.” It reveals those who put Jesus on the cross — and those who today follow in their footsteps, scapegoating the marginalized and sacrificing others out of their own misguided sense of justice — are the wicked destined for punishment and those who, like Jesus, are falsely persecuted by those claiming to be on the side of justice, to be the righteous who are rewarded and glorified by God.
Put in the terms of the the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat, we are told not to try to separate the good from the evil for the very attempt to do so opens us up to being the evil ones and subject to exclusion from the ultimate fulfillment of God’s Kingdom. For Jesus spent most of his time among the ‘weeds’ of his day, and was himself ultimately treated as such by the ‘well-intentioned’ pious (Marr). In this view of justice and judgment: “[T]he harvest was upon us in the death and resurrection of Christ, in which Jesus lets himself be plucked as a weed and the cross and God raises him as a judgment of merciful forgiveness” (Nuechterlein Proper 11A).
All this is to say that, even if the fundamental logic of the parable involves the retributive justice inherent to Jewish and early Christian Apocalyptic, the New Testament and Christian theology after it, places this in a bigger picture of redemptive justice. Even with the delayed judgment in the parable, Jesus pushes back the final separation of good and evil as far as possible so as to leave as much time for as many as possible to be brought into his redemptive fold.
Expand
How then does this reading of Jesus’ interpretation of the parable help us to grow in faithfulness and love? I think it does this by disarming the idea of divine judgment, insisting that it is not ultimately about punishment but establishing true justice: Judgment is necessary because God is just. And God’s Kingdom is not one conducive to evil thriving (Thurman).While here Jesus is playing within the sandbox of Apocalyptic imagery and therefore leans into more retributive ideas of justice, this is not indicative of his teaching on justice as a whole, which is redemptive, and oriented towards reconciliation. Therefore, Christ’s teaching on judgment is ultimately about holding it up as a mirror for ourselves and our own behaviour.
While there is still a final separation of good and evil, this is grounded in one’s good-faith relationship with Jesus, not just ‘believing in’ him, but being aligned with him and his ways. If we will be judged, it will be on the extent to which our lives express his compassion and mercy — that is to say, his justice — to those in need (Case-Winters on Matthew 25.31-46). For the ultimate goal of redemption is reconciliation and the presence of God’s shalom, the peace of healthy and whole relationships throughout creation and between creation and its Creator.
Summary and Conclusion
Perhaps in response to how his disciples framed the question, Jesus’ interpretation of the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat focuses on its final scene of apocalyptic judgment. While we often think of judgment in frightening terms, it’s nothing more than a requirement of God’s justice. While Jesus here uses the common language of Apocalypticism, with its retributive sensibilities, his teaching overall redefines these concepts and even offers a very different, redemptive approach to what God’s justice looks like. This only reinforces the meaning of the rest of the parable. For good and evil rarely look like what we think they do and so we are wildly unqualified and incapable of rendering judgment. Jesus himself was killed by ‘good religious folk’ acting with their ‘good intentions’! And so the parable serves as a warning to anyone who would try to preempt God’s ultimate judgment, lest we end up aligning ourselves with Jesus’ murderers instead of with him.
* For full references, please see the series bibliography.
Matthew Root 
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