Either/or binaries help us make sense of life.
Wheat & weeds. Good seeds and bad seeds. A landowner and his enemy. A barn where the wheat will be gathered into… and a fire, where the weeds will be burned. The Kingdom of God and the fiery furnace. Jesus, the Human One – and the Devil, the Evil One. Good and Evil.
Nothing catches our attention – whether it’s on the soccer pitch or in a movie or book or in the news – quite like the story of good vs. evil, victory for the hero and justice served for the villain.
Jesus is a master storyteller – and in his parables he speaks to grab attention, to spark curiosity, to leave those who hear the parable changed by their wrestling.
Our parable for today is found only in the gospel of Matthew. Out of the four gospels Matthew has a uniquely fierce emphasis on judgment and protecting the vulnerable. In Matthew 25, Jesus describes the Human One – coming to judge all the nations, sorting them out like sheep and goats (kind of like the harvest of wheat and weeds in today’s parable). And the litmus test of this cosmic judgment is that whatever people have done or neglected to do for the least of these they have done to Jesus. Eternal life or punishment hinges on care for those who are hungry, thirsty, naked, strangers, or imprisoned.
These intense images and either/or binaires depicting the apocalyptic judgment of God on good and evil catch our attention – but how do they help us discern how to live in this messy world?
Maybe some of you are still scarred by growing up in church environments that used scare tactics about hell to motivate people into certain types of belief and behavior. Maybe you are uncomfortable about clean delineations between good and bad when your own faith feels more fuzzy and the reality of life more complicated.
Because sometimes it’s not so easy to tell what’s a weed and what’s a good plant.
I’ve heard it said that a weed is a plant out of place. And to a wheat farmer – anything but wheat in their field becomes a threat. But even when it is clear that a weed is a weed – an infiltrating plant that is causing damage or dysfunction, the flourishing of other plants you care about, to the larger ecosystem – it’s not so simple to know how to respond to that weed.
The workers in the parable want to head out into the wheat field to eliminate the weeds lurking and threatening the crop – but the landowner cautious them to wait because they’d end up uprooting or trampling the wheat also.
We can think of lots of examples where in agriculture and ecology – where humans in our zeal to prioritize the thriving of one beneficial plant or species target another deemed a weed or a threat – and end up causing even worse damage in the long run.
For example the heavy application of herbicides like glyphosate or Round-Up to fields can bring with it the side effects of chemicals drifting to harm nearby plants and wildlife, compounds lingering in soils and water causing damage, and the emergence of herbicide-resistant weed strains.
The labeling and pursuit of getting rid of weeds has been a human concern since humans first began to till the earth. And today, around the world, we humans apply over 2 million metric tons of chemical herbicide each year – to try to kill the proverbial weeds in the wheat field.
And yet even in this parable of binaries – of identifying the difference between wheat and weeds, good and evil – the landowner cautions his workers not to tear out the weeds: “No,” he says, “for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow until the harvest.”
The weeds are not ours to pull.
Jesus’ explanation of this parable and its imagery of the harvest points to God taking sin and evil seriously and that in the fullness of time justice will be done and evil will be overcome by God. It would be easier to interpret this parable by just saying that weeds are really only a problem in the eye of the beholder or that evil and sin are really just a misunderstanding between people.
But what this parable points us to is a clear image of the way that sin and evil infiltrates the work of good by subterfuge or mimicry or by strangling or overshadowing or using up the water and nutrients of the vulnerable wheat still growing.
Yet what the parable refuses to afford to the people of God is to take the responsibility for eliminating the presence of evil among us. This job belongs to the workers of the field, to the angels, God’s reapers, and ultimately to the Son of Man, Jesus himself – who has in his life, death, and resurrection overcome evil and the power of sin. The fire belongs to God, not to us – and God’s refining fire has the power to bring new life from unexpected places – as even the ashes of burnt weeds or prairie or forest fires can fortify resilient shoots to rise anew.
Therefore, our job as followers of Jesus is not to look around at the world or the church and try to purify ourselves into a sterile monoculture of wheat alone – for by this kind of trampling and uprooting, spraying an herbicide of judgment – we risk the growth of today’s field and the soil and ecosystem’s health for the future. The Anabaptist movement at times taken sometimes taken this approach, using practices like the ban and constant church splits in the pursuit of holy perfection, in the pursuit of a wheat field devoid of weeds.
That approach can miss the point that the role of the human in this parable is not to be workers separating between good and bad – but the role of the human is to be like good seed, children of God’s kingdom.
Our role is not to pull weeds – but to do all we can to grow and bear fruit – as good seed, God’s seed.
Jesus’ parable of the weeds in the wheat field hooks us with its startling binaries and attunes us to the reality of evil and injustice around us and within us. Our capacity for inhumanity, for war, for greed, for apathy must be named and addressed – but not in a way that endangers the goodness and growth of the present and future.
In 1889 – the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh had checked himself into a mental asylum. From its stony walls he could look out of his cell window at a view of wheat fields that he would paint. That year he wrote a letter to his sister Willemein, these words that I think also speak to our own calling as Jesus’ followers looking out upon a world where goodness and evil grow confusingly intertwined:
“What else can one do, thinking of all the things whose reason one doesn’t understand, but gaze upon the wheatfields. Their story is ours, for we who live on bread, are we not ourselves wheat to a considerable extent, at least ought we not to submit to growing, powerless to move, like a plant, relative to what our imagination sometimes desires, and to be reaped when we are ripe, as it is?”1
So in the face of all that we do not understand – evil and the causes of sin – may we release that which is not ours to do and trust the justice and fire of God’s love to bring life and flourishing where it might have been thought impossible.
May we be the good seed of wheat – submitting in awe – to the growth and harvest of God.
- Vincent Van Gogh museum – Facebook post – March 31, 2025 – https://www.facebook.com/VanGoghMuseum/posts/are-we-wheat-vincent-had-his-own-unique-way-of-looking-at-wheatfields-in-a-lette/1087506673421706/
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