A parable of Jesus

The Parable of the Wheat and the Tares

Good and evil grow side by side in the world until the harvest, when God, not us, will finally sort them out.

Where and to whom Jesus told it

Jesus told this parable to the same lakeside crowds who heard the Sower, and then, when he had left the multitude and gone into the house, he explained it privately to his disciples, as he did with only a few of the parables. That careful, point-by-point explanation is itself a gift; we are not left to speculate about what the tares mean. The setting matters too. Jesus is speaking to people who longed for God's kingdom to arrive in unmixed purity, sweeping the wicked away in one stroke.

The tares are almost certainly darnel, a poisonous weed that in its early growth is nearly indistinguishable from wheat. Only when the heads form can the two be told apart, and by then their roots are tangled together underground. Sowing an enemy's field with such a weed was a known act of malice. Every detail Jesus chose was true to life, and every detail carries the meaning.

The parable

A man sowed good seed in his field, but while men slept his enemy came and oversowed it with tares, and went his way. When the blade sprang up and bore fruit, the tares appeared, and the servants came in alarm, asking where the weeds had come from and whether they should go and gather them out. The householder answered, No, lest while you gather the tares you root up the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and in the time of harvest I will tell the reapers to gather the tares first and bind them to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.

Jesus then unfolds every image. The one who sows the good seed is the Son of man. The field is the world. The good seed are the children of the kingdom; the tares are the children of the wicked one. The enemy who sowed them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are the angels. As the tares are gathered and burned, so shall it be at the end: the Son of man will send his angels to gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and the righteous shall shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father.

The heart of the story is the owner's refusal to let his servants weed the field early. The wheat and the darnel are too intertwined, too alike, to be safely separated by human hands before the harvest. A premature purge would tear up the good with the bad.

What it means, and how it has been misread and rightly read

This parable has been misused in two opposite directions. Some have read it as counselling indifference to evil, as though God does not care how we live in the meantime. But that is not its point; the tares are gathered and burned in the end, and their sowing is called the work of the devil. Others have used it, with great damage, to justify the church attempting to root out and destroy everyone it judges to be a tare, the very thing the owner forbids.

Read rightly, the parable is a lesson in patience and humility about judgment. It teaches that in this age the community of faith and the wider world will always be a mixture, that we often cannot tell true from false with certainty, and that the attempt to force a final separation now does more harm than good. The final sorting is real, but it belongs to God and his angels at the end of the age, not to us in the middle of it. Our confidence is not that evil does not matter but that it will not have the last word.

The heart of God and the kingdom

The parable reveals a God whose patience is not weakness but mercy. He permits good and evil to grow side by side, not because he is indifferent to the tares, but because the time of growth is also the time in which hearts can still change, and because a harvest is coming that only he can gather rightly. His restraint now guarantees justice later; the delay is grace, giving room for repentance.

It also shows the kingdom advancing in the middle of opposition. The enemy really does sow his weeds in the same field, and the children of the kingdom must grow up entangled with them, not in a protected garden. Yet the end is certain and glorious: the righteous shall shine forth as the sun. The mixture is temporary; the radiance is forever.

What it asks of us

This parable frees us from the exhausting and dangerous work of trying to purify the world, or the church, by our own judgment. We are not appointed weed-inspectors, and our attempts to sort the saved from the lost usually damage the wheat. Our task is to be wheat, to bear the character of the children of the kingdom, and to leave the final reckoning in hands wiser and more just than ours.

At the same time it steadies us when evil seems to flourish unchecked and the good seem to gain nothing. The tares are permitted for now, but a harvest is coming. So we neither despair at the presence of evil nor take vengeance into our own hands, but live faithfully and patiently, trusting the Lord of the harvest to make all things right at the last.

How it points to Christ

The Son of man who sows the good seed is Jesus himself, and it is he who will return as the Lord of the harvest to send out his angels. His patience now is the very space in which sinners can still be gathered as wheat rather than bound as tares. Every hope of being counted among the children of the kingdom rests not in our own unmixed goodness, which none of us possesses, but in belonging to him who sowed us and will one day cause us to shine like the sun in the Father's kingdom.

Frequently asked questions

What does the parable of the wheat and the tares mean?

The field is the world, the good seed the children of the Kingdom, and the tares the children of the evil one. God lets both grow together until the harvest, the end of the age, when he alone will separate them (Matthew 13:37-43).

Why doesn't God remove the evil now?

In the parable the owner says pulling the weeds early would uproot the wheat with them. God's patience gives the faithful time to ripen and the lost time to turn. The final separation is his, at the harvest.

Who are the reapers?

Jesus said the reapers are the angels, and the harvest is the end of the age (Matthew 13:39). The judgment belongs to God and his angels, not to us.