A man sows good seed in his field, and while everyone sleeps his enemy comes and sows weeds through the same ground and slips away. 25"his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away." The weed was most likely darnel, which made the act especially cruel, because darnel looks like wheat for most of the growing season. Nobody can tell them apart until the grain heads appear, and by then the roots have tangled together underground.
The servants notice and want to fix it at once, as anyone would who looked at contamination in a field they planted in good faith. 28"Then do you want us to go and gather them?" The master's answer surprises them. 29"No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them." Pulling up the weeds now would tear out the wheat too. Patience is the only way to protect what is good from being destroyed in an attempt to purify the field early. The instruction is that both grow together until the harvest, when reapers who know what they are looking at will separate them with a precision no anxious servant could manage in mid-season.
Two shorter parables follow and answer a question the scene raises without stating it. If this is God's kingdom arriving, why does it look so small and so mixed with evil? A mustard seed is tiny and grows into something large enough that 32"the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches," a picture older prophets used for a kingdom big enough to shelter nations. A woman hides leaven in three measures of flour 33"till it was all leavened," and the yeast works through the whole mass unseen until no flour is untouched. Both parables insist that what looks small and hidden now is headed somewhere large and complete, even while the field looks like a mess for a season.
Jesus leaves the crowd on the beach and goes into the house, and there his disciples get the explanation the crowd never hears. 37"The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man." 38"The field is the world." It is planted with people who belong to the kingdom and people who belong to the enemy, growing in the same soil, and sometimes hard to tell apart by anyone but the one who planted them. The harvest is the end of the age and the reapers are angels. At that harvest everything that causes sin and everyone bound to it will be gathered and burned, and 43"the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father."
This parable asks us to trust that the God who let the field grow mixed for a season already knows which plant is which, and that his patience now is building toward the verdict to come. The weeds are pulled eventually, all of them, and so is every doubt about whether goodness will be vindicated. Until then the field grows as the master intended: a small seed sheltering birds, a little leaven working through the loaf, and wheat and weeds in the same rows a little longer. The one who owns the field knows how the story ends.
Where are you tempted to pull weeds early, in a church, a family, or your own heart? Leave the sorting to him, and tend your own row.
Prayer
Father, thank you for the patience that lets your kingdom grow in place of tearing up the field before it is ready. Give us the trust the servants had to learn, to leave the sorting of good and evil to you and your timing. Let us be wheat that grows toward the harvest, and let the small, hidden ways you are working in us become, in your time, as large and unmistakable as you have promised. In Jesus' name, amen.