24 He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field, 25 but while everybody was asleep an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and then went away. 26 So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. 27 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?’ 28 He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ 29 But he replied, ‘No, for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. 30 Let both of them grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’ ” 36 Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples approached him, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” 37 He answered, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; 38 the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, 39 and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. 40 Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. 41 The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin[a] and all evildoers, 42 and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 43 Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears[b] listen!
Matthew 13:24-30,36-43
Jesus experienced the world as a brilliantly vibrant web of contradictions, intricately weaving all of creation together in one beautifully chaotic mess, and understood this lively interplay and interrelationality to be a key aspect of the life of the Kingdom. Just don’t expect a direct reading of Matthew 13 to immediately offer any evidence of that.
The challenge with this lies in the profound impact passages such as the parable of the weeds (Matthew 13:24-30) and its subsequent explanation (verses 36-43) have had on creating Christian dualistic theologies and interpretations, where the world’s complexities are tortured into intentionally divisive binaries built around humans claiming God’s power.
Influential? Incomparably! Incomplete? Indubitably!
The metaphorical undergrowth of Matthew 13 is a complex, interwoven, and inextricable root tapestry of kingdom parables, which are actually a dense web of descriptive metaphors exploring themes of duality, morality, and time. The parables work less as discrete stories teaching discrete lessons, and more as an overall conceptual fabric, using a series of images of relationships between and amongst people, the creation, and the Divine to craft an uncomplicated image of God’s kingdom as a pure place/time/state of being where all that is “bad” is also connected with the “enemy” (a.k.a. “the evil one”), and is thus separated away and removed from existence somehow. All done in order to maintain the purity of the kingdom.
It’s rather easy to understand this passage through that lens, as Jesus follows the parable of weeds taking root amongst wheat (Matthew 13:24-30) with an explicit, point by point explanation of each piece of the parable (Matthew 13:36-43).
The chapter runs along two timeframes. The first could be termed the “meantime” (our current moment) when all are in close relationship – sower and sown, “good” ground and “bad” ground,” weed and wheat, mustard seeds and flourishing fields, yeast and flour, “good” fish and “bad” fish, children of the kingdom and children of the evil one: that is, everything that exists, all exists together.
The second could thus be termed the “kingdom time,” the time that will come to exist once the notably indeterminate meantime of messy interrelationality passes, some time of great separation and reaping occurs at the hands of angels (and thus at the behest of God), the weeds (the children of the evil one) are gathered to burn together (while experiencing the most wretched remorse). After all this, the kingdom emerges into full flower. Of course, I can only assume this, as the passage doesn’t actually say what happens to the wheat, besides an oblique reference in verse 43 to the righteous, who are now resident in God’s kingdom, shining like the sun. (Hmm…an interesting omission, perhaps?)
Jesus even spends time explaining exactly what he means by all of this narrative and metaphor, allegory and imagery, not once, not twice, but three times all in the space of one chapter. He apparently lays out how we should approach and understand living alongside “the other”: as a struggle against the literal evil and wickedness sown into the soil by the devil, the enemy, the evil one. In other words, as the antithesis of God’s kingdom.
Surely, if any chapter offers evidence of Jesus holding to dualistic good/evil thinking, it’s Matthew 13. Cut and dry!
Yet maybe not. The entire middle of the story is missing, and that’s the most interesting part, particularly in how it offers a compelling vision of a dizzyingly-dense weave of relationships across an entire community, where everyone’s roots cling to the same patches of soil, interwoven to such a knotty degree that they’re inextricable from each other: an absolute interdependence – a mutually-assured destruction – where to uproot (and thus to kill) one person/plant one must uproot the other as well. I think that it’s interesting that the parable includes this vital detail while the explanation elects to remove it, as it means that the “meantime” of the world of the kingdom occurs alongside the meantime of our current reality.
In other words, the kingdom is both always becoming and has not yet become, as “kingdom” describes both all of the time that leads up to harvest as well as the moment itself. Do you see it yet? Let’s return to the parable of the weeds and its explanation, view it through the lens of multiplicity, diversity, and complexity, and see what emerges.
First, let’s explore what is said about the timing of the kingdom of heaven. Jesus offers a farming story as a framework for exploring his perspective, with the explicit frame in verses 24-25 that the kingdom of heaven – God’s kingdom – is encapsulated in this story of duplicity and sabotage. Thus, the kingdom of heaven is itself story, and is a story steeped in a complexity that speaks at multiple levels, which only magnifies upon further examination.
In other words, the kingdom simultaneously occurs at multiple timelines at once. First: as Jesus states, the kingdom exists in the portable time of story, in the sense that one can enter the world of a story (and thus its timeframe) wherever, and whenever, one might happen to be while they encounter the story. Regardless of whether you’ve heard a story a year ago or a minute ago, the story will always possess its own logic of time.
Second, stories are themselves responses to the other stories they exist amongst and are in relationship with. Third, the specific time when you are telling the story is itself a timeframe: the specific atmosphere and context existing at the moment a story is told impacts how the story is told and is received. At this specific time of history, I am guaranteed to experience the story differently than people a millennium ago – or two. God’s kingdom follows its own logic, therefore, a logic whose meaning and purpose often seem to elude us.
This means that God’s kingdom is as much interwoven, interrelated life with everyone – “good” or “evil”, however defined – as it is a state of separation. We’re as much in the time of the kingdom now as we would be at any moment before and after right now. The story of the kingdom cannot be exclusion alone, therefore, meaning that the kingdom of God must involve the same complexity, the same inextricability, the same inherently nonbinary nature of the soil of our reality, where we must, of necessity, exist alongside all others who also occupy the same land (or territory, or space) as we do.
What happens when we ignore this inextractability? We, the family of the Delaware River, those that live along its banks can tell that story for we are suffering from the consequences of our sinfulness. The two main facts of the case are these:
Philadelphia draws a truly significant amount of water from the Delaware: it’s a big city, and a thirsty one. And the Delaware River, south of the fall line near Trenton – the entirety of the Philadelphia metropolitan area – is a tidal estuary where the Atlantic Ocean tides roar up the Delaware from the Bay, salt water infusing and intermingling with the fresh water sliding down from the mountains, creating a brackish stew with varying levels of salinity the further upriver you go. Notably, Philadelphia’s draw point is located above the point where the salinity drops far enough for potability (or drinkability).
For now.
Should the headwaters receive too little precipitation, the river will send less freshwater down, and thus there will be less water to create a salinity barrier by flowing with greater force than the sucking tide. Less fresh water pushing downriver means that salt water tides can encroach further up the estuary. Remember, rivers are verbs: they either flow, or they die. The river must have a constant infusion of water to sustain itself. You can guess what happens when the zones of greater salinity start encroaching on Philly’s water drawpoints.
The water supply of millions of people will become undrinkable.
On a smaller scale, what happens if an AI data center pops up in the watershed north of Trenton, and begins to gulp water from Delaware’s tributaries? On a larger scale, what happens when the region experiences a long, exhausting drought – as happened a few years back throughout the Delaware Valley, but especially in South Jersey? The first one is obviously selfish, and absolutely ignores the watery roots entwining these creepy, bland concrete boxes into the interwoven fabric of the entire region. The second one is obliquely selfish, as the combined effects of everything we’ve done to the precipitation and climate patterns of the Delaware Valley feels distant.
Obviously, it’s not distant anymore: individual actions can and do add up into literal and metaphorical floods that completely overwhelm us. You cannot tear out your own roots without uprooting others, destroying entire ecosystem communities, all this tinged with the bitter irony that individual selfishness hurts the individual as much as it hurts everyone else: the same droughts and flooding that harm the river harm everyone else in the river family, both selfish humans and the plants and soil they depend on for survival.
Yet, we’re still in the midpoint of the story. How can we learn from this story and, hopefully, ensure our survival? Opening our imaginations to envision the middle part of the story oft-forgot blesses us with the gifts (at the very least) of perspective, humility, and grace towards our relationships with all those sharing our particular patches of ground. I’d argue that it is inherent in the human condition that we don’t always extend the same compassion towards ourselves we extend towards others – regardless of the direction.
Remembering that our current lives are being lived during the time of the kingdom allows us the humility to see each individual moment as being equally beautiful, equally meaningful, and equally essential to prepare for the harvest. Each individual moment must be lived as it comes, for we can only exist in the flow of time: endtimes (and their completions) are purely under divine control, and we can only live in our own times.
As goes us and ours goes everyone else, of course: we must extend the same grace towards others as we extend ourselves, as we fundamentally cannot predict the future: maybe the plant we are certain is a weed is actually incredibly useful and productive for the entire farm in ways our limited individual perspective is as incapable of understanding – or understanding as “good.”
That’s one of the best aspects of life (and time) in the human dimension: we can only experience time as it moves forward. We can’t begin time, and we certainly can’t stop it. Instead, all we can do is move along its threads, constantly responding to the new fabric of the future whose horizon is always being woven in front of us. Our roots are inextricably entwined with all of our neighbours: who are they, and how are we to respond?
