Matthew 13:24-43 presents three parables about the kingdom of heaven. Taken together, these stories envision the kingdom of heaven as new life springing forth among us in surprising and uncontrollable ways. They call upon the church to cease being an arbiter of righteousness and to start nurturing the world into abundant life for all.

Don’t Pull the Weeds!

To me, one of the most challenging of all of Jesus’s parables is his comparison of the kingdom of heaven to a field planted with both wheat and weeds (Matthew 13:24-30). As the story goes, a man plants a field of good seed, but an enemy comes by stealth and plants weees among the wheat.

When the garden sprouts, the weeds and wheat come up together. The man’s servants are troubled by the presence of weeds in their master’s field. “Do you want us to go and gather them?,” they ask.

Now, I’m no farmer, but it seems to me that the servants have a point. Weeds in the field can cause damage to the crop. They steal valuable minerals from the soil. They consume scarce water that the good seed needs to thrive. Indeed, earlier in this very chapter, Jesus has told a parable about a sower who planted seed that died because precisely because thorns choked them out. It seems any decent farmer would go into the field and pull the weeds.

But not this farmer. Instead, he instructs his servants to leave the field alone, allowing the wheat and the weeds to grow together. He knows the enemy has planted weeds to damage his crop, and yet he refuses to pull them. The reason he gives for leaving the weeds alone is that his servants “would uproot the wheat long with [the weeds]” (13:29).

Instead, he says, the field should grow untended until the harvest. At that time, the harvesters will come, first binding the weeds for the fire and then gathering the wheat into the barn. These harvesters (Gk theristai) are distinct from the servants (Gk douloi). They are professional harvesters rather than household servants. With their greater skill, they will separate the wheat from the weeds.

The Parable of the Servants Who Can’t Be Trusted to Pluck Weeds

New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine observes that we do a lot of unconscious interpretive work by the way we name parables. For instance calling Luke 15:11-32 “The Parable of the Prodigal Son” leads us in very different interpretive directions than calling it “The Parable of the Man Who Lost His Son.”

So, too, we do unconscious interpretive work when we refer to this story as “The Parable of the Weeds,” which focuses our attention on those pesky and unwanted seeds. I prefer to call this story “The Parable of the Incompetent Servants.” Or, if you prefer, “The Parable of the Servants Who Can’t Be Trusted to Pluck Weeds.”

And I think we in the church should view ourselves as those incompetent servants. I’ll tell you why.

At the end of our passage, the disciples confess to Jesus that they haven’t really understood what his parable is supposed to be about. “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field,” they say (13:36). Jesus obliges by explaining the parable. The sower is the Son of Man. The enemy is the devil. The reapers are the angels. The good seed is the children of God. The weeds are the children of the evil one. The harvest is the end of the age where the righteous and the wicked will be separated.

But Jesus doesn’t mention the servants. Who are they supposed to be? We know they are servants of the Son of Man, whom they call “Master” (7:26). We know their job is to tend the field until the angelic harvesters. We know they are not themselves harvesters. Given that, it seems clear that these servants are Jesus’s disciples. They are the followers of Jesus tasked with tending the field until the harvest comes. They are the leaders of the Christian community. They are us.

Help the Whole Field Grow

Surprisingly, the servants are tasked with tending to the entire field—not simply the children of God but also the children of the evil one! The servants want to go through the field, plucking out the weeds and tending only to the wheat. But the master doesn’t trust that they can pluck the weeds without also damaging the good plants.

So, too, we in the church can become obsessed with the purity of our own fields. We too easily find ourselves trying to root out the wicked from the righteous. We pretend to be purveyors of judgment, wielding our sickles with the confidence harvesters when we are, in fact, merely field hands. Like those servants, when we try to pluck out the weeds among us, we do damage to the good seed, as well.

Rather than plucking weeds, the servants’ job is to help the whole field grow. They are to water the whole field. They are to fertilize the weeds right along with the wheat. “Let both of them grow together,” says the master (13:30).

The parable suggests that the church’s mission should likewise be to spread life throughout the entire field in which we labor. We shouldn’t try to decide which seeds are good and which seeds are bad. We shouldn’t try to nurture the good plants and cut out the bad ones. The task of the church is to bring forth life everywhere, for everyone, good and bad alike.

Ones more competent than us will sort out in the end who will be gathered into the barn. That’s not our job. (And my suspicion is that many we might wish to throw in the fire will instead be gathered into the fold.)

Leavened Bread and a Very Fine Shrub

Alongside the parable of the servants are two other parables, one about a mustard seed and the other about some yeast. I wrote a about Mark’s version of the parable of the mustard seed a few month back. In short, the parable describes someone planting a mustard seed that grows into a really impressive shrub that provides a refuge for birds (Matthew 13:31-32). But one doesn’t plant a mustard seed in order to create bird sanctuary. One plants a mustard seed because one would like to grow some mustard, perhaps for cooking or for a medicinal herb. Such an herbalist would view birds as pests. And yet, in this parable, the greatest thing about the mustard seed is that it provides refuge for the very pests the planter wants to keep away. Such is the kingdom of heaven.

Likewise, the parable of the yeast depicts a woman mixing a small amount of yeast with three measures of flour, resulting in a fully-leavened dough suitable for baking (13:33). The yeast doesn’t leaven the flour selectively. Rather, the yeast infuses all of the flour, enlivening the dough and causing the whole to rise together.

Abundant Life for All

The common theme in all of these parables, then, is that the kingdom of heaven brings life to the world in ways that transcend all of our expectations or intentions. We cannot leaven part of a loaf of bread. We cannot keep our mustard seed from serving as a birdhouse. We can’t excise the weeds from the wheat but rather must tend to them all.

The task of the church—the task of we who believe—is to bring life. To bring life indiscriminately. To bring life to all. To bring life without preconceptions of who deserves it or what such a life should look like. We should bring abundant life for all, as Jesus might say (John 10:10).

So let’s put our sickles away. It’s time to go water the field!

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Discussion Questions

• When you read the parable of the weeds and wheat, what do you see? What do you think Jesus was communicating to his disciples (and to us)?
• Do you agree or disagree that the church should be about the business of bringing life to all, whether righteous or wicked? Why?
• What might it look like (in practical terms) for the church to nurture life rather than seeking to judge righteousness and wickedness?