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Don’t Mistake the Wheat: On Matthew 13:24–30

Don’t Mistake the Wheat: On Matthew 13:24–30

Last updated on: July 18, 2026 at 8:18 pm by Jeff Hood

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Don’t Mistake the Wheat: On Matthew 13:24–30 2026-07-18T20:18:06-06:00 Jeff Hood

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The Wheat

A farmer plants good seed in his field. While everyone’s asleep, an enemy sneaks in and scatters weed seed right through the same ground, then disappears. The wheat comes up…and so do the weeds, right alongside it. The workers come to the farmer, alarmed: didn’t you plant good seed? Where did all this get in from? He tells them plainly: an enemy did this. They want to go pull the weeds out immediately. He stops them — no, because pulling the weeds now means tearing out the wheat with them. Let them grow side by side until harvest. Then, and only then, will the weeds be gathered and burned, and the wheat brought safely into the barn.

-Paraphrase of Matthew 13:24–30

We live in a field full of contradictions. This is where Jesus starts. Not in a pristine field of uniform grain, but in a world where beauty and brutality share the same soil, where love and violence occupy the same neighborhoods, where justice and oppression sit inside the same institutions…sometimes the same courtroom, the same sanctuary. Hope and despair grow root to root, tangled past telling apart at the surface. Jesus does not deny any of this. He does not invent a cleaner field to preach about. The Kingdom he describes arrives in the field we actually live in: contaminated, contested, and real.

Who Planted the Weeds in the Wheat?

Into that field, the servants bring the first hard question: who did this? Jesus refuses the easy answer. He does not say that suffering is simply the way of things, an accident of weather. An enemy has done this. Not every sorrow belongs to this category…illness, grief, and death carry their own harder mystery, one this parable is not trying to solve. But the suffering built by human systems is a different matter, and liberation theology has insisted on this for generations: that suffering is not natural, but produced. White supremacy produces it. Capitalism without conscience produces it. So do patriarchy, militarism, the death penalty, colonialism, and every quieter system that teaches some lives matter less than others. These are not abstractions floating above daily life; they show up in zoning maps, sentencing guidelines, wage gaps, and border policy…wherever a system quietly decides whose life is negotiable. The weeds did not seed themselves in secret. Someone planted them. Oppression, whatever else it is, is organized.

Once that much is clear, the servants reach for the obvious next step: should we pull them up? Here the parable turns from diagnosis to temptation, because violence always volunteers itself first, and it always sounds reasonable. History is crowded with people entirely convinced they were only removing weeds…slaveholders convinced of it, lynch mobs convinced of it, dictators and executioners and inquisitors and the architects of mass deportation all convinced of it. Every generation finds its own vocabulary for calling human beings weeds, and every generation believes its own harvest will be the righteous exception. Every atrocity begins with someone convinced they are performing careful gardening.

The Landowner Says No

This is where the parable becomes genuinely shocking. The landowner says no. Not conditionally, not later…no. Liberation, he insists, cannot be built on collateral damage. “You might uproot the wheat along with them,” he says, and that single sentence collapses the whole logic of purification. The oppressed are always the first casualties of purity campaigns. Whenever governments promise security through force, whenever churches promise holiness through exclusion, whenever movements promise perfection through ideological cleansing, someone vulnerable ends up crushed underneath. “Collateral damage” is the phrase invented to make that arithmetic sound reasonable. The parable refuses the arithmetic altogether. Jesus does not treat the wheat and the weeds as equal risks to be weighed against each other. He values protecting the wheat more than he values destroying the weeds. That ordering changes everything about how justice is allowed to be pursued.

There is a deeper humility folded into this story. We don’t always know which is which. The roots are tangled below the surface, invisible to the servants standing over the field, and if we are honest, just as invisible to us. History keeps proving how often societies label their prophets as criminals. Jesus himself was executed as one. The state looked at him and called him dangerous. God looked at the same man and called him beloved. Liberation theology’s oldest instinct is to distrust any system, political or religious, that claims certainty about who deserves exclusion. Certainty about exclusion is usually the first sign that the wrong harvest is about to happen.

That tangle may not be only a problem of poor eyesight across a crowded field. It may run through each stalk. The servants assume wheat and weeds are two separate populations, sorted from the start. Jesus never actually says that. A harder reading asks whether the same person can carry both complicity and belovedness at once…whether someone crushed by one system can, in another, do the crushing; whether an oppressor remains capable, however unlikely it seems, of repentance. Liberation theology has always insisted that liberation is not only the freeing of the oppressed. It is also the conversion of the oppressor. The harvest, then, is not a sorting of good people from bad people. It is the slower work of naming what in us needs to die, and what deserves protecting until it ripens.

Cultivators of Wheat, Not Weed Inspectors

And yet…notice what actually grows. The wheat. Despite the weeds, despite the enemy, despite every purification campaign ever launched against it, the wheat keeps growing. Oppression never gets the final word in this parable, and it does not get the final word in history either. The Kingdom advances anyway. Communities love anyway. Mothers keep hoping, prisoners keep praying, organizers keep marching, neighbors keep feeding each other without waiting for permission from whoever claims the authority to decide who counts. The Kingdom turns out to be more resilient than anything trying to choke it out.

The cross makes this concrete. Rome believed Jesus was the weed. Rome had its own servants, convinced they were only doing necessary cleansing work, and they nailed him to wood to prove it. God raised him. The resurrection is God’s refusal to ratify the verdict of empire…proof that the very people we condemn may be precisely the ones through whom God is saving the world. Every cross an empire builds with confidence is a warning against premature harvest.

So what does this mean for us? The church is not called to become an expert panel of weed inspectors, sharpening its criteria for who belongs and who doesn’t. The church is called to cultivate wheat…to feed people, protect the vulnerable, stand with the condemned rather than over them, tell the truth about the enemy without becoming the enemy’s method, and love past the point that feels safe or strategic. It means resisting every system that sorts human beings into disposable categories. And it means leaving ultimate judgment to God rather than seizing it for ourselves.

The Kingdom does not ask who deserves to stay. It asks how we keep the wheat alive. Every act of liberation begins there, because every empire, sooner or later, starts calling people weeds. This is not passivity; it is patience with teeth, the discipline of refusing to let fear write the harvest schedule. The gospel’s answer has not changed: not so fast. You may be standing over wheat. And the God who raised the crucified Christ will not allow the vulnerable to be uprooted in the name of righteousness. Our task was never to become better weed-pullers. It is to become better cultivators of life…to keep the wheat fed, watered, and growing, and to trust God, not us, with the harvest.

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Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds

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About The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood

The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood is a Catholic priest (Old Catholic), theologian, and nationally recognized activist based in North Little Rock, Arkansas. A spiritual advisor to death row inmates across the country, Dr. Hood has accompanied more people to their executions than any other advisor in the U.S., including the first-ever nitrogen hypoxia execution in 2024. His work sits at the intersection of justice, radical compassion, and public theology. Dr. Hood holds advanced degrees from Auburn, Emory, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, University of Alabama, Creighton, and Brite Divinity School, among others. He also earned a PhD in metaphysical theology and founded The New Theology School, where he serves as Dean and Professor of Prophetic Theology. Author of over 100 books—including the award-winning The Courage to Be Queer—Dr. Hood’s writings and activism have been featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, NPR, CNN, and more. A frequent collaborator with men on death row, he sees theology as a shared, liberative act. Dr. Hood has served on the leadership teams of organizations like the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. His activism has earned multiple awards, including recognition from PFLAG and the Next Generation Action Network. On July 7, 2016, Dr. Hood led the Dallas protest against police brutality that ended in tragedy. His actions that night saved lives, and his story is now archived in the Dallas Public Library. A father of five, husband to Emily, and friend to the incarcerated, Dr. Hood rejects institutionalism in favor of a theology rooted in people, presence, and prophetic witness. You can read more about the author here.

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