NOTES for Mat 13:24-30
To some extent, the evangelist presents the parable of the wheat and the weeds that we read today as a complement to the parable of the sower recorded earlier. There, the Lord spoke of the Kingdom of heaven being sown everywhere by the Word of God, and of how the fruit this seed bears depends on us. In today's parable, using the same agricultural imagery, the Lord speaks of the origin of evil and, more importantly, of the Kingdom of heaven's attitude towards it. While Christ's words about the origin of evil are brief and clear—‘An enemy... has done this’—we must listen closely to what he says about the attitude towards the ‘weeds’, because these are precisely the words we are to follow.
All human experience, practical and agricultural as well as spiritual, suggests that weeds should be pulled up as soon as possible, because they hinder the wheat's growth and contaminate the harvested grain. So, as soon as we discover anything bad, especially in the people around us, we try to pull it out—most often along with the person. Yet this is precisely what Christ's parable does not approve. Two explanations can be offered.
First, human spiritual freedom is so important a value for the Kingdom of heaven that even the weeds are left until the last day. For the Almighty is long-suffering. This means that he bears with us for a long time, giving us real freedom: both the possibility of being a weed and the possibility of returning to his truth, his light and life.
Second, it is important to pay attention to Christ's words: ‘Lest, in gathering the weeds, you uproot the wheat along with them.’ Both the parable of the sower and that of the wheat and the weeds share an unspoken awareness that the battlefield between good and evil is the human heart. Perhaps our stereotyped notion that we are Christ's wheat and they are the weeds is mistaken. True ‘bad guys’ exist only in action films. Real people always have both good and bad in them. The movements of the human heart are varied, and even if your heart is becoming overgrown with weeds, you yourself can cleanse it through repentance. The parable then tells us that the Kingdom of heaven—or, more precisely, the heavenly King—does not pull you out with your sins like a weed, because cleansing the heart is our right and our possibility, reserved for us until the last day of life.