In his parable about wheat and weeds, Jesus makes us think about the reign of Christ. Maybe, after 2,000 years, it’s time we reconsider what we call weeds and what we call wheat.
Erik C. Nelson
19 July 2026
Texts: Isaiah 44:6-8; Psalm 86:11-17; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30
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Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
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In the year 1002, the Christian king of England, a man called Aethelred, issued a vile proclamation, calling for the extermination of all Danish people who lived in the realm of England.
In the days that followed, hundreds of people were killed by their neighbors. A couple years later, Aethelred proudly told a story of a couple dozen young Danish men in Oxford, being chased by their neighbors, who went into a church seeking refuge and barricaded the doors for safety.
Their neighbors, seeing that they couldn’t drive them out, set fire to the church, killing all those young men. In telling this story, Aethelred reached into today’s Gospel reading, saying, “all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination.”
Today’s parable, wielded as a weapon, has done unimaginable damage throughout Christian history. People who assume that they are the good wheat miss the point entirely, thinking that it’s their duty to destroy the weeds.
I want to invite you to reconsider the point of this parable.
This parable is not prescriptive, telling us what to do. It’s descriptive. It describes the world, which is a difficult place to live. It describes how good and bad seem totally intertwined.
And this is the way that for better or for worse, God, in infinite wisdom, has designed our universe. And this parable promises us that God has a plan to disentangle the good and bad, to save us from the suffering that seems unavoidable. But in the meantime, as we trust in God to provide for us, we wait.
We wait in a world where good and bad seem like they shouldn’t coexist, and yet they do.
Cycles of life and death and new life surround us. The good soil we grow crops in is organic matter, once made of living things, who got their sustenance from sunlight and the ground.
The sun, a giant orb that is slowly burning itself to extinction. The ground, made up of tiny rocks that were eroded over eons from mighty mountains who have their own life cycles on time scales we can’t imagine, rising up and grinding away and rising up again, over and over.
This parable describes our everyday realities. Good and bad, life and death, creation and destruction, they’re all tangled up.
That doesn’t give us justification to make more bad, more death, more destruction. It actively cautions against that.
Because very often when we are the ones who decide what is good and bad, who’s wheat and who’s a weed, we get it wrong. Our wisdom is not perfect.
One of the first things I learned in my college Environmental Science program was that there is no real scientific definition of what a weed is. Any plant can be a weed if it’s growing where people don’t want it.
We decide what a weed is. And usually we just use that as justification to destroy something. If you went back 50 years and showed people the wildflower gardens that we have in our parking lot now, the beautiful, beautiful gardens, they’d probably think the parking lot is overrun with weeds.
They’d probably pinch your ear and tell you you’re doing something wrong.
But in embracing these native plants we used to call weeds, I believe we’re finally listening to the voice of God. We’re seeing the wisdom of God in nature.
Saint Augustine said that God gave us two books of divine revelation, two ways to hear God’s voice, two ways to know God in the universe. The first, of course, is Scripture itself, and the second is all of creation. He called it the Book of Nature.
So what else is God teaching us about this parable, through nature? through weeds?
The incident described in the parable is something that has happened over and over, basically every year for the last 10,000 years or so. As long as humans have been cultivating certain plants as crops, other plants have been jumping into our fields as weeds.
This is a destructive process often, with those plants killing our crops or hurting us with their thorns, or just generally decreasing productivity, but sometimes those weeds have been what we never knew we actually needed.
Several of our favorite grain crops started as the weeds within a wheat field. Over thousands of years, rye and oats both underwent significant changes from their wild forms as people accidentally domesticated them.
Like the servants at the end of the parable, humans tried to sort the wheat from the weeds, but humans always made mistakes, happy accidents, and missed the oats and rye that looked the most like wheat.
As generation after generation of human farmers were tricked by the cleverness of the rye and the oats, those grains became more and more desirable as crops in their own right. And as humanity spread out around the world, they encountered more difficult climates where oats and rye could survive where wheat could not.
And so the weeds became the precious wheat. Oats helped humans move into hotter and drier climates. Rye saved my ancestors’ lives when they moved to colder and wetter places.
When we get up on our high horses, when we think that we get to decide what’s wheat and what’s weeds, we put ourselves in a dangerous position. We can’t even begin to imagine what we’re missing out on when we decide that we’re better judges than God.
When we hear the parable for today, I’m sure many of us had people we thought of when we heard about the weeds. An annoying neighbor. Difficult relatives. Certain politicians. Other Christians who believe differently from us.
When we think that we get to decide, we get it wrong.
The reign of Christ is not about who’s in and who’s out. The reign of Christ isn’t about who’s wheat and who’s a weed. The reign of Christ is about God’s cleverness surprising us. It’s about trusting God’s wisdom, the wisdom that comes to us through Scripture and through nature, as Saint Augustine would say.
The reign of Christ is always subverting our expectations, demanding that we reconsider our assumptions. The people we want to cast out as weeds might be the rye or oats that save us in the darkest times. The people we want to cast out are loved by God.
King Aethelred, that King of England who ordered those massacres, is remembered in history as Aethelred the Unready. The arrogance that led him to use this parable to justify brutal violence became his downfall. In spite of him taking up a sword and turning scripture into his weapon, he still lost the throne.
When we rely on our own wisdom to decide who belongs and who doesn’t, it can have disastrous consequences. Instead, rely on God’s wisdom, wisdom that comes to us in nature.
Wisdom built into the fabric of the universe that casts down the mighty, that lifts up the lowly, that binds up the broken-hearted and the beaten-down.
Wisdom that comes to you in bread and wine, simple everyday things, that are for us, the body of blood of Our Lord, the creator of the whole Universe, who made stars and mountains, and wheat and rye, and you and your loved ones and your enemies.
God, who sometimes works through our mistakes. God, who takes what we intend for evil and uses it for good. God, who is always extending grace and love to us.
God invites us to respond to that love not by wielding it as a weapon, but instead invites us to go into the world looking for the places where God is already working, making things more beautiful than we can imagine.
Thanks be to God.
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In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
