Let Both Grow: The Wheat and Tares and the Patience of the Kingdom

 

The parable of the wheat and tares (Matt 13:24–30, 36–43) appears only in Matthew and sits just a few verses after the parable of the four soils in the same discourse on the shore of Galilee, which I posted about recently. The two parables are frequently read together, and there is good reason for that; both deal with the response to the word of the kingdom, but they address different questions. The soils parable asks about the receptivity of individuals. This one asks about the visible community that the kingdom creates in the world and what God is doing with its mixed character.

The Greek word rendered tares or weeds is zizania, which refers almost certainly to Lolium temulentum, darnel, a weed so closely related to wheat in its early stages that Palestinian farmers called it "false wheat." The two plants are genuinely indistinguishable until the grain head begins to form, at which point the darnel is visible by its smaller, darker seed. This agricultural specificity is not decorative. Jesus is making a precise claim: in the present age, wheat and tares will occupy the same field and look alike long enough that premature judgment will destroy good grain along with the bad. The servants in the parable ask whether to begin pulling weeds immediately, and the householder's answer is direct: no, because in the process you will uproot the wheat. The parable is not counseling moral indifference. It is restricting a particular kind of action, the zealous human removal of those who appear to be false, before the time appointed for such judgment.

When the disciples ask Jesus to interpret the parable privately (13:36), He identifies each element with unusual specificity. The field is the world (ho kosmos), not the church, a distinction that has mattered considerably in the history of interpretation. The Son of Man sows the good seed; the sons of the kingdom are the wheat; the devil sows the zizania; and the harvest is the sunteleia tou aiōnos, the consummation of the age. The reapers are angels. The interpretation presses toward a final eschatological separation, not an ongoing ecclesiastical discipline. Augustine used this parable extensively in his controversy with the Donatists in the early fifth century, arguing that the church in the present age cannot and should not expect to be a community of the confirmed pure. The Donatists wanted a church purified through discipline and re-baptism; Augustine responded that the wheat and tares parable specifically forbids that kind of premature sorting, that it is God's prerogative at the end of the age, not the church's prerogative now.

Augustine's reading has been contested, and fairly. His ecclesiological application is plausible but goes beyond what the text strictly requires, since Jesus identifies the field as the world, not the church as an institution. What the parable more directly concerns is the mixed character of visible human society under the preaching of the kingdom, and the restraint God exercises in not consuming the wicked before the appointed time. That restraint is itself a form of mercy, a theme Paul develops in Romans 9:22, where God's bearing with vessels of wrath in much patience (en pollē makrothymia) is described as a space in which the mercy shown to the vessels of mercy becomes visible. The delay of judgment is a calculated patience with a terminus.

The harvest scene in Matthew 13:41–43 is severe. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all skandala, stumbling blocks, and those who practice lawlessness (tous poiountas tēn anomian). The language of the furnace and weeping and gnashing of teeth is unambiguous. Jesus is not describing a gentle sorting; He is describing a definitive end to the mixing. What follows for the righteous is equally direct: they will shine like the sun (eklampsousin hōs ho hēlios) in the kingdom of their Father. Matthew records Jesus' postscript: "He who has ears, let him hear." That repetition of the same phrase used to end the soils parable creates a deliberate bracket around the two parables, marking them as twin demands on the hearer's attention.

For those living in the present age, the parable is a caution against both despair and a certain kind of impatient activism. The mixed state of the visible community of the kingdom, where false grain grows alongside true, is not evidence of God's indifference or the failure of the gospel. It is the condition Jesus said would characterize this age. The wheat's task is not to perform the harvest but to bear grain. Chrysostom's Homily 46 on Matthew puts it plainly: the parable does not forbid rebuking sin or exercising discipline, but it does forbid the assumption that we can read the final state of another person's soul. The harvest belongs to the angels. The growing belongs to now.