This story of the wheat and the weeds would be very familiar to the people of Palestine. When wheat was planted and started to row, weeds would sprout too. The seeds were mixed with the wheat and could not be distinguished at first. Then, by the time you could tell them apart their roots were so tangled together, that if you tried to remove the weeds , the wheat was pulled us as well. The farmer had to let them grow together. But at harvest time, he had to separate them because the weed was toxic. This agricultural parable reminds us of some important truths about God, about the church and about our world.
Like the owner in the story, out God is a patient God. Do we want our God to be quick on the draw, to have a hair trigger? We can all look back into our own lives at times when we sinned, drifted and did wrong. It’s a comfort to know that our God is not as impulsive as we are, that God is patient. At the end there will be a judgement and a reckoning for everyone. People can slip through the justice system but they cannot slip through God’s Justice and His judgement is eminently fair and final.
Because that judgement is final, God will sometimes give us in our life early warning signs, wake up calls, fire bells in the night. Those warnings and corrections are moments of grace and signs of his love. It is an important truth to remember that our God is a God of the second chance. And all of us at some time have desperately needed that second chance.
The parable also teaches us a truth about the Church. All kinds of wheat abound in the Church. But there are also weeds . The Church is a mixed bag. We are not a Church of the perfect, but also a school for the transformation of sinners. We get a second chance!.