The message of this parable was plain and direct, and it confronted the religious piety of that day. The disciples apparently were so surprised by the message that they had to validate it in private, so Jesus explained the parable so that the meaning could not be missed. Matthew gathered both the parable and the explanation in his gospel because that message is so important.

We as Christians are to "tend the field" and leave the judgement of "weeding" to God.

One reason we rebel against this teaching is our arrogant confidence that we can distinguish between the sinners and the saved. "Priest = Good" and "Prostitute = Bad", right? But if we think a little bit, we realize the truth about any one individual is much more complicated than outward appearances—and Matthew's genealogy of Jesus explicitly identifies a prostitute in His lineage. If we are honest with ourselves, we realize we have too much trouble identifying sin in our own lives to consider identifying others as sinners or saints.

Jesus illustrated this point with an agricultural reference that is unfamiliar to almost all of us today. I learned this parable in Sunday School as "wheat" and "weeds", and I imagined tall shoots of wheat and short broad-leafed dandelions. I thought the point of the lesson was that pulling up the dandelions would damage the roots of the wheat. That's not the point at all!

The World English Bible does a good job of translating the Greek zizanion as "darnel", which is sometimes translated as generic "tare" or "weed". The darnel plant, also known as lolium temulentum, has the nickname of "false wheat". When it grows, it looks practically identical to wheat, even when the ear of the plant starts to grow. Only after the plants start to ripen does it become obvious which is the healthy food grain and which is the undesirable weed, for the ear of the wheat is heavy and droops, but the ear of the darnel is light and stands straight. (See Wikipedia's entry on darnel weed.)

The servants who were farming the field in the parable saw something was wrong, and after research, the servants and the Householder realized how this field had been subtly compromised by an enemy. The servants were eager to serve, just like us, and they were confident in their ability to identify the darnel and leave the wheat, just like us. Every experienced farmer in that region would have witnessed the failure of this tactic when they saw a naive farmer's field where half the crop was removed and half the darnel left.

We are the servants in this parable. The command from the Householder to us is impossible to misunderstand:

"Treat every stalk in the field as a precious and valuable plant."

"Irrigate and fertilize all the wheat and all the darnel."

"Tend the field with determination and vigor so that it will grow the healthiest wheat and darnel possible."

"When the time is right, I will hire specialists to harvest the field and separate out the wheat—that is not your responsibility".

"Your responsibility is to love the wheat and the darnel as if they were the same plant."

I frequently use the term "brothers and sisters in Christ" in church life, because it does a better job of expressing our relationships than "fellow believers" or "church members". This parable warns me of a danger in that phrase. I am casually separating what I perceive as the darnel from the wheat if I construct limits around who are my "brothers and sisters". There is no person that I should exclude from being in my Family, for only God knows for certain.