2026-07-19 (Iain) A Mixed Bag

July 19th 2026: A Mixed Bag

Our Gospel reading today is one of the most contested passages in the Gospels because we have an interpretation of a parable by Jesus which on a number of levels is so out of tune with the parable itself that most scholars argue that it is added later by Matthew and the early church. Consequently we can approach it in 3 ways, all potentially leading to different outcomes:


Take the interpretation as a later addition, and ditch it, but be accused of avoiding some of the difficult imagery concerning judgment.


Take the interpretation seriously with the danger of negating the power of the original parable, and be accused of domesticating Jesus original teaching.


Simply ask what does it all mean for us today, with the danger of being accused of fitting the text to our own needs without really honouring the text and context.

I want to start at the beginning and ask why Jesus’ used parables to communicate his message, to give us clues to what the message might be in the parable of wheat and tares.

Jesus uses parables to provoke and make people think. He draws the listener into a familiar world they are comfortable in and then subverts the expected outcome, forcing a reassessment of assumptions about how God, morality, and the world work; effectively forcing the listener into asking questions, into discourse, into participating in discussion. The last thing they were meant to be is material for a sermon, as preachers/reflectors will often try and come up with a definitive meaning – frankly an impossible task with many parables. Parables are a collision between the story-world and the hearer's ordinary world, getting people to think, discuss and potential their shift worldview, so they resist being reduced to a tidy summary.

So the interpretation of the parable of the wheat and tares turns an open, unsettling story into a neat moral code, which is exactly the opposite of what Jesus' parables were designed to do – which was to provoke and make you think! Also Matthew would have taken Mark 4: 26-34 and Thomas logon 57 as his source material, neither of which have an interpretation. And it is important to note that between the parable and interpretation is sandwiched the parable of the mustard seed: a revolutionary, subversive parable if ever there was one.

So I am going to look at the parable in isolation first but before I do I want to briefly outline some of the common threads of subversion and challenges in Jesus’ parables, which align with how he lived his life, in order to give us clues on how to approach it.


Firstly the Kingdom/Queendom of God cannot be controlled and may not be found where expected. Jesus constantly challenges the politics of purification – which he also did when he has table fellowship with sinners and healed across purity boundaries. There is always a movement towards inclusion bringing the outsider in.


He speaks, to use religious language, about eschatology or the nature of the end times, but this is often misunderstood to mean the end of the world. The word eschaton is an ordinary Greek word simply meaning the end – nobody in 1st Century Palestine would imagine this means the end of the world, like we can for we in this room because we have the means to do it. So what does the word end mean to Jesus’ followers?

They had a foundational belief that God is a God of distributive justice and restorative righteousness, and is in control of the world. Yet their experience is that the world is unjust and the unrighteous prosper. God is just but the world is unjust; God is righteous but the unrighteous prosper. In order to hold these two things together their Faith demanded a God who will at some point overcome evil and bring about justice. So for Jewish hearers the end is the end of evil, violence, war, oppression, injustice, inequality & so on. They were waiting for, as Dominic Crossan puts it, the Divine clean up of the world to happen and for God to come and sort out the mess. And Jesus says the most bizarre thing: The Kingdom of God is not coming soon, it’s here already. Many hearers probably think he’s lost the plot – how can the Kingdom of God be here when nothing has changed - we are still suffering from evil, oppression and empire. It would require a huge paradigm shift in thinking about God to believe God is already here. But what is Jesus saying: ‘Don’t you see what’s happening – you want God to sort out evil, violence, injustice through divine intervention but God is waiting for you to do it with him/her. As Desmond Tutu famously said: ‘God without you will not; you without God cannot.’ Jesus shows us how to work with God, to bring about God’s Kingdom/Queendom on earth: through non violent direct action, through forgiveness, through love, through mercy, through service, through accountability, through inclusion. In other words Jesus is promoting a participatory collaborative eschaton!


In order to be involved in this participatory eschaton – bringing an end to oppression, violence and empire you need to know how the world really works. "The absolute darkest triumph of the ruling class is when their extreme, systemic corruption becomes so normalized that you no longer even feel the boot on your neck. In a completely rotted society, the only man viewed as a lunatic is the one screaming the truth." So Jesus, in his parables and actions exposes structural systemic violence and injustice, in coded form a lot of the time, at a time of exploitation and oppression under Roman and elite landowner pressure.

So remembering the point of a parable is to provoke and make the listener think, and that a nice neat interpretation can be elusive: What on earth was Jesus getting at in the parable of the Wheat and the Tares. Here are 3 possibilities.

Jesus gives his hearers a realistic view of the world, that it is a mixture of good and evil – that although there is evil in the world the Kingdom is here and at work. The instruction by the farmer, "let both grow together until the harvest", seems to be the fulcrum of the story. Jesus uses a familiar agricultural scenario to challenge the impulse and desire to draw purity lines between the righteous and the sinful, the pure and the impure, between who’s in and who’s is out. Basically leave that to God.

The weeds or tares Jesus is referring to is likely to be darnall, which in early stages of growth looks like wheat, suggesting that evil cannot always be distinguished from good: Jesus is moving the hearers from personal evil, which is usually easy to spot, to structural evil, evil hidden in a system that is harder to discern. The landowner's order — "let both grow together," is a call to those resisting evil to show restraint, patience and persistence and leave judgment to God: for some the refusal to pull up the weeds is a call to nonviolent, non-retaliatory action instead of an impulse for revenge.

Richard Rohr suggests a more personal understanding that it teaches us to be more compassionate with ourselves and other people. We are a mixed bag of good and bad. We have to learn to accept this mixed bag of reality in ourselves and everybody else. This does not mean its okay to be selfish, violent and evil but to recognize it in ourselves and to learn to receive love but also to love others in their imperfection. What transformative love means is to say, “I know your faults, I see your weeds, and I care for you anyway.” It is a call not to judge too readily as we might not know all the facts and motivations behind people’s actions.

A radical liberation reading of the parable proposes that the protagonist is not an image of God, but a despotic patriarch of a household estate encompassing oppressed female relatives, enslaved bondservants and hired day laborers, an elite predator on “the people.” Wheat was the bread of the rich while the poor used barley: most peasants subsisted on barley, valued at half the price, so the crop under threat here is elite grain, not every day subsistence food. Wheat represents the commercial farming for profit which benefits the rich at the expense of the poor, while the tares, sown by an enemy represent an act of subversion against the rich landowner. This chimes with the scandalous image of God’s Kingdom/Queendom being like a mustard seed, an invasive weed that pops up unexpectantly and inconveniently destroying a purity-minded, hierarchical agrarian mono crop.

Turn to the interpretation which asks a different question? Why did Matthew and/or the early church insert it. Liberation Theologians argue that it is an attempt to tone down Jesus difficult teaching and make it more palatable. But I believe that Matthew is using Jesus’ parable to speak into a particular context and that we can learn from the interpretation as well, without allowing it water down the impact of the parable itself.

Matthew is addressing a community, many of whom are poor and persecuted, living through a crisis of identity in relation to their Jewish heritage, culture and faith. In this community there were deep divisions between various groups and trauma after the destruction of the temple, 10-20 years earlier. Matthew is aiming to unite a diverse group of people, reground their faith with a Christological hope regarding the identity of Jesus and to reignite their ability to stand firm, resist the oppression they are under, and continue in their journey of faith.

Therefore, Matthew counters sectarian impulses to free the community of all perceived impurity, warning that if they did that they are highly to damage the good as well as the bad. He wants to avoid potential infighting, whilst offering consolation, comfort and assurance that evil will be judged and those perpetuating it will be held accountable.

For me, a belief that God will judge and hold people accountable for their actions is the only way that I can make sense of our world, in which, for example, Palestine children are imprisoned without charge and tortured, die due to preventable malnutrition and lack of medical care, and are deliberately targeted and murdered by snipers and drones, and there is complete silence from our mainstream media and politicians. My howl from the heart requires Divine judgment and accountability, for perpetrators and victims. The problem in this parable is not that Divine justice will be done because that is a comfort for oppressed people but for us is the imagery used to describe it – with ‘throwing people into a furnace of fire,’ and ‘the weeping and gnashing of teeth’. I think we need to purge ourselves of medieval images of Hell and eternal damnation and torment and realize there is a great deal of hyperbole and rhetorical imagery used that shouldn’t be taken literally. Also Divine judgment is not a final, retributive sorting of humanity into everlasting winners (those going to Heaven) and losers (those going to eternal damnation), but a purifying encounter where people will have to face up to and be held accountable for their actions. For God takes injustice seriously but, if we take Jesus as the living expression of God, God is merciful and promotes restorative justice over punitive justice. But the good comforting news at the end of the passage is that the righteous will shine like the sun.

So what can we learn from this parable:


Life is a mixed bag of good and evil and do not be too quick to judge others. Leave it to God. Do not be too quick to draw purity boundaries of who is in and who is out. The movement towards inclusion is part of God’s Kingdom/Queendom on earth.


The Kingdom/Queendom of God is here now but God requires us to collaborate with him/her to bring it about, calling for solidarity with the oppressed and actively promoting justice, sustainability and compassion.


Participating in the bringing of God’s Kingdom/Queendom now needs an understanding of systemic injustice and ideologies which drive so much violence, oppression, inequality and injustice and actively challenging it and imagining new ways of being in this world.