One striking feature of the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds that is easy to overlook is the balance and maturity of the servants. If there were immature or unbalanced servants among them, the parable might have ended in a different way, such as this:

And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, “Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?” He answered, “An enemy has done this.” The slaves said to him, “Then do you want us to go and gather them?” But he replied, “No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.” And one of the slaves answered, “Not me, Master, for I know exactly the difference between wheat and weeds.” And he went out and began to pull out the weeds but some of them turned out to be wheat as the Master had foretold.

Too many Christians today are like such over-zealous servants who could not tolerate the evil weeds. In their zeal to serve God they go on a crusade against those they perceive as evil with the intention of cleaning up the church, the nation, or the world. In the end they discover they have made a big mistake.

Imagine the surprise and shock the servants must have felt when they went to the farm owner to report the presence of the weeds in the farm and asked for permission to go and pull them out. As far as the servants were concerned that was the right thing to do in order to maximise output, as any good farmer knows. Why then did the farm owner restrain them from pulling out the weeds? We can think of two reasons.

First, the master knew that the wheat would survive in spite of the presence of the weeds. The weeds might inconvenience the wheat temporarily but they would not choke them to death or take over the farm. Secondly, and this is crucial, he knew how difficult it is to distinguish between the wheat and the weeds. They look so much alike. Only at harvest time could they be distinguished for sure by their fruits. If it were possible to distinguish with accuracy the weeds from the wheat he would probably not have prevented them. But he prevented them for this one reason, “lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them” (Matthew 13:29).

Jesus then went on to explain to his disciples that “the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one (verse 38). This explanation makes it clear that the point of the parable is that Christians should not try to get rid of bad people from the world. We must let good and evil people live side by side in the world till the Day of Reckoning when they will be known for sure by their fruits. We should be content to let good and evil people live in the same house, the same apartment building, the same neighbourhood, the same country and in the same world, for the simple reason that we cannot absolutely identify without error who is the good and who the bad guy. Of course we all have our ideas of who the good and the bad guys are but, like the servants, we could be wrong. Faithful servants are those who recognise this possibility that they could be wrong and so are prepared to suspend judgment and action. Intolerance, the desire to get rid of evil people around us, breads fanatics who end up being unfaithful servants of our God who “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45).

Examples of such overzealous servants who want to get rid of people they perceive as evil but who end up going against the mind of God abound. We can think immediately of the young man Saul who went on to become St Paul. He undertook a personal crusade to root out Christianity because he believed it was a bad idea. We can think of those “zealous Christians” who go about hunting down abortion providers and homosexuals. We can think of Benjamin Smith of the White supremacist World Church of the Creator who went on a shooting rampage gunning down Jews, Blacks and Asians. To people like these the message of today’s gospel is loud and clear: If you want to be a faithful servant of God you must be prepared to make room for those we perceive as evil. We must heed the words of the Master, “Let both of them grow together until the harvest” (verse 30).