The Underside of Grace

Us weeds are indistinguishable from the wheat

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

The lectionary gospel passage for this coming Sunday is Jesus’s parable of the weeds and the wheat. Earlier in Matthew’s Gospel, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus had commanded those who would follow him to “Love your enemies and pray for them.” Only, through the very discipline of praying the Bible’s prayers for my enemies I am confronted by the uncomfortable claim that I am not someone who can be trusted to deal with my enemies. Later, in Matthew 13, Jesus sizes each of us up and shakes down the state of the world with a parable.

According to Jesus, it’s really an allegory, meaning each character in the short story has a specific referent.

Living in the Kingdom, living with me, Jesus says, it’s like this:

A farmer sowed good seed in his field, wheat.

Every which way you look over his acreage its amber waves of grain.

But then one night, while his farmhands are fast asleep in the bunkhouse, the farmer’s enemy slips through the barbed-wire fence and scatters bad seed.

The enemy sowed weeds among the wheat.

And the word Jesus uses for weeds is zizania.

It’s scientific name is Lolium temulentum.

In English, it’s darnel, an annual grass that, with its long, slender awns, or bristles, looks so much like wheat you could scarcely distinguish between the two.