Proper 11 (16) – Year A

Welcome to the 8th Sunday after Pentecost. In our Gospel this week, Jesus tells a story about a field full of wheat and weeds. Finally, a story about good guys and bad guys! 

Not so fast. Jesus begins the parable by illustrating a wildly permissive God who lets the wheat and weeds grow together, despite the servants’ eagerness to pull the weeds up immediately. Instead, the master says, “Let both of them grow together until the harvest…” ( Matt. 13:30). The word “let” (aphete) means “permit,” “suffer,” or even “forgive.” Is Jesus really telling us to sit passively and let bad things happen while people suffer, hoping that one day the hammer of God’s judgment will finally fall? 

The weeds Jesus refers to are a particular kind of weed, zizania, which looks almost identical to wheat until it’s fully mature. But the real danger isn’t the weeds themselves. It’s our need to sort, to separate, to decide who belongs and who doesn’t. 

“In gathering the weeds,” he says, “you would uproot the wheat along with them.” This isn’t a parable about pacifism or quietism in the face of injustice — the very thing God’s people are called to root out. The problem is that our usual way of “gathering” is to create a good “us” over and against an evil “them.” We locate evil safely over there, in others, while preserving our own goodness project. Jesus is helping us reimagine the entire project. 

He echoes the warning of Isaiah: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20). How is it that the “good” we so desperately cling to is revealed as evil? How is it that the “evil” we are so ready to eliminate turns out to be our very salvation? It’s only by the light of the cross that we are given the “intelligence of the victim,” by which we learn to gather in a whole new way — a way that exists over and against nothing, not even death itself. It’s when we learn to gather this way that we can sift and sort things according to God’s desire for mercy and not our need for sacrifice.