The parable of the wheat and darnel

 A16 | 19 JULY 2026 | MATTHEW 1324-30 

 This week’s parable is a tale of agricultural dirty tricks, in which a field of wheat is deliberately contaminated with darnel by a farmer’s rival. Roman law meted out draconian punishment for such crimes. To this day, the same kind of sabotage is common in some rural societies. In some parts of India, for instance, the threat to sow bad seed in another’s field is taken as seriously as a threat to life itself. 

Leaving aside sabotage, the problem of weeds is perennial and ultimately insoluble: even domestically, they can never be eradicated completely, only controlled. But the weed in this parable, darnel or tare (lolium temulentum), was not just a nuisance but noxious, one of the most dangerous with which farmers in Palestine had to wrestle, equivalent to the contemporary problem of Japanese Knotweed. 

The problem peculiar to darnel, however, was that, in its early stages, it so closely resembled wheat that it was impossible to distinguish one from the other. Eventually, of course, the difference would become all-too obvious: but by then, the roots of both the wheat and the darnel would have become so intertwined that the darnel couldn’t be removed without the risk of tearing out the wheat too. Nevertheless, eventually you had somehow to separate them, given that darnel was not only a mild narcotic inducing dizziness, but a poison that could cause serious sickness. Patience was needed, however. Separation lay in the future, at harvest time, not before. 

So, in its original context, this was a gripping tale that would have set its hearers on the edge of their seats, as they waited for the dénouement. The genius of the parables, however, is that their message extends far beyond the original context of their telling, making them susceptible to many different interpretations. Many readers on both sides of the divide at the time of the Protestant Reformation, for instance, thought this parable shed light on the problem of heresy and the urgent need to root it out. 

But a less polemical and more widely applicable interpretation suggests itself. It is a powerful reminder, first, of God’s inscrutability and the inevitable limitations of both our understanding and our overall perspective. Until all is revealed, our view of everything remains incomplete. Secondly, it reminds us that, with respect to reality in general and our relationships in particular, we need two indispensable virtues, namely, patience grounded in hope and reserve rooted in realism. In practice, that means that we are to hold back from judgment – judgment, that is, in the sense of condemnation – not only because our view is unavoidably partial and incomplete, but because we are not God. Who are we to condemn even ourselves? Ultimate judgement is God’s: and in him alone justice and mercy are one. 

That does not mean, of course, that we are to prefer complacency or collusion over exercising our critical faculties: far from it, especially in the quest for justice and protection of the innocent. As Robert Bolt has St Thomas More say in A Man for All Seasons, “Man is made to serve God wittily, in the tangle of his mind.” But we cannot peer into another’s soul and, above, all, we must never trespass on anybody else’s relationship with God. 

In the meantime, we must learn to live with weakness, untidiness, and vulnerability, in ourselves and others. Our natures are flawed; things are not as they originally were. This is the condition into which all human beings, save two, are born. Remember how, in the face of his own candidly admitted personal difficulties, St Paul reports receiving reassurance from God: “My grace is enough.” Not only is it the case that even our most troublesome weaknesses and dire failings can be turned by God to his glory and our good but, as was said by the young German Lutheran theologian executed by the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-45): at the last, we will be judged not on how we coped with our weaknesses, but on what we did with our strengths.