Like chapter 12 of Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 13 is crowded with important material. And since I’ve broken it up into two posts here, it maya be helpful to remind ourselves of how parables work. They are images and stories—some strange, some quite ordinary—that can be read in many ways, but one thing they consistently do is to challenge us to think about where we might locate ourselves in relation to the story. There is no single answer to that. We may find ourselves in various places at different times—or even at any one time.
But Jesus says that the next series of parables are specifically about the kingdom of heaven. Isn’t it a little presumptuous to assume they’re about us?
It might be if Jesus hadn’t already said that the kingdom of heaven has a great deal to do with us: “Repent [or, better, Turn around!], for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (4:17) The better we understand the kingdom, the better we can imagine the meaning of our own lives in terms of the good news.
I’m not so sure about the parable of the wheat and weeds (vss. 24-30). It has more to do with the Last Judgement than with present life—like a preview of the Sheep and Goats in chapter 25, especially if I look ahead at the “explanation” of it in vss. 36-43.
Yes, it deals with judgement as an aspect of the kingdom. But what is it saying about judgement? We start with a farmer who has a field and sows it with wheat. An enemy, by night, throws some weed seed in among the wheat. The older translation “tares” doesn’t mean much to most of us, but it was more precise because tares are closely related to wheat and the two are hard to tell apart when the plants are young. The farmer’s work crew has what they think is a good idea–weed the field immediately. The farmer says, “No, you’ll wind up pulling up too much wheat. We can separate them at harvest time.” It’s a very ordinary, practical little story, but why tell it just now? What does it mean for the people with Jesus?
The explanation applies it to the fact that sin is a powerful force in every community but can’t ultimately have any place in the kingdom. How do we make sense of this in the community of faithful people today? Jesus begins by claiming ownership of the field for himself, “the Son of Man.” Without that explanation, we might have assumed that the owner is God—just as God appears in Isaiah 5 as owner of the vineyard that is Israel. Jesus dares to place his human self in the same position here because his ministry embodies the kingdom—God’s love and care for humanity.
But how does a community of this world (e.g., Israel or the church) with all its evils become fit for the kingdom of heaven? The workers want to start sorting it all out right now. Jesus says that, no, he will take care of that at the end of the age
So it really is about the Last Judgement. Is that when the kingdom begins?
No. The kingdom is here from the start. The good seed is already planted and starting to grow, but there are weeds mixed in, as in every human life. And the workers have a very human reaction to it: “Let’s throw the sinful and imperfect out.”
The desire to create perfection in the community right now crops up again and again in religious and quasi-religious communities (such as fascism and communism). It sometimes takes on repressive and even bloody forms. Right now, we may be aware of this mainly in terms of some developments within Islam; but the church has had its own deeply shameful passages of history. And Jesus’ critics among the scribes and Pharisees, too, are looking precisely for this—for some way to purge him as an evil influence. The parable warns us against taking this authority on ourselves. The final separation of good and evil belongs to Age to Come.
Why do the devout keep falling into this trap?
Because we want so much to see ourselves as children of the kingdom! So it’s very tempting to identify those we disagree with as children of the evil one. We ourselves are in danger of turning into the workers, ready to rip up the whole field in our effort to purge it of tares. The whole history of the church would have been a great deal less destructive and bloody had Christians heeded this parable more carefully.
Jesus—and Matthew—must have known we would find this warning hard to accept, for there’s another parable here, The Fish of Every Kind, that makes the same point in another way (13:47-50). We are all in the net together whether we like it or not. It is for the angels to sort us out in the Age to Come. We should be cautious about trying to impose all our own definitions of purity on the church here and now.
What about the four parables we just skipped over? They’re very different.
Quite different, because they’re focused on the discovery of the kingdom and its cost. And their placement is interesting: the experience of discovery and conversion is placed squarely between the two warnings about one of the dangers in embracing the life of faith. Here, bracketed by the two warnings against premature judgement, Jesus encourages and celebrates the joy of falling in love with the good news.
The Mustard Seed and The Leaven (13:31-33) both speak of a contrast between the smallness of the kingdom’s beginnings among us and the disproportionate size of the result. The Leaven is one of the “ordinary” parables—nothing new or strange, just a summons to pay attention: even a tiny thing, like hearing the good news, can transform one’s whole life. The Mustard Seed, on the other hand, is a “strange” parable. It communicates the same message through exaggeration—turning the mustard plant, which is really just a large bush, into a great tree with birds nesting in the branches. (Mark 4:30-32 has a more “ordinary” version: the mustard is “the largest of garden plants” and the birds “live in its shade.”) The exaggeration in Matthew serves to underline the astonishing power of the good news. It may turn you into something you couldn’t even have imagined!
The Treasure Found in the Field and The Pearl of Great Price are different again. They celebrate the joy of being touched by the good news. Both treasure and pearl are of immediately recognizable value. The same is true, for the one who truly catches its meaning, of the good news. It transforms our sense of the possibilities and blessings of human life. But the point isn’t just the intrinsic value of God’s love, but the joy its discovery inspires in us—and the willingness to sacrifice other things to lay hold of it. It recalls Jesus’ summons to the disciples to abandon everything for the sake of the kingdom (10:37-39). “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (10:39) In the same way the two seekers in these parables sacrifice everything for the wonderful treasure they’ve found. They aren’t acting out of duty, but out of joy and delight.
You jumped over another bit here—about why Jesus was teaching in parables (13:34-35). It’s very different from the passage we had back in 13:14-17.
Yes, it is. This time, Jesus, with a quote from Psalm 78:2, speaks of the parables as a means of revealing the mystery, not (as in 13:24-15) as a way of obscuring it.
How can both of these be true?
As we said earlier, understanding a parable is bound up with understanding one’s own life in relation to the kingdom of heaven. Parables will be quite opaque until we begin to make this connection. They do offer understanding, but it isn’t simple “objective” knowledge. It is understanding of mysteries, which become intelligible to us only as we ourselves begin to be shaped by them. These mysteries don’t come clear by means of information, but through lived knowledge. Parables, then, wind up both concealing and revealing, depending on our own interaction with their meaning.
You may notice that we get another reference to the privilege of the disciples, as in vss. 16-17. Jesus asks them (13:51), “Have you understood all this?” And they answer, “Yes.” But there is a note of irony here. Knowing, as we do, what is yet to come, we can only question their self-assurance. And this is a reminder to question our own, as well. However well we may think we have comprehended the message of Jesus, we need to remember that even his immediate disciples stumbled again and again. The good news is something to be learned over and over in the course of a lifetime.
“Things new and old” from the household treasure? (13:52)
Yes. Some have suggested that the “scribe trained for the kingdom of heaven” is a good image of Matthew himself, drawing freely as he does on both the scriptures of Israel and on Jesus’ teachings. But it’s more than a self portrait. It offers all of us a pattern for trying to understand what Jesus was telling us. The old treasures—those from the past, such as scripture—and the new—the ones we discover only by living them—are both important. The process of understanding is one of renewing and deepening a conversion that we have only half understood at the beginning.
But then we suddenly jump back to family problems when Jesus goes to his hometown.
Those who knew him as a child, it seems, want to keep him in his place, which means identifying him as part of his particular family. The implication is that, since they know how to pigeonhole him, he can’t be the person of great importance they’ve been hearing about. “Old” knowledge, in effect, excludes “new.” And Jesus responds, in effect, “You won’t grasp who stands before you until you are prepared to hear something new.” There are no miracles in Nazareth, then, because they can only hold on to the old and have sacrificed their capacity to embrace the good news, whether in word or in deed
But why does the issue of family keep cropping up?
Because it was and is so difficult. Learning the Kingdom of God, as we’ve noted, involves a lifetime of deepening and renewed conversion. The existing verities of our lives and times—all the things we are sure we already know—easily become barriers to grasping the newness of the gospel. That’s why believers so easily fall into the trap of thinking we have it all figured out and demonizing anyone who questions. At the same time, merely abandoning the past for some new way of thinking doesn’t help. The treasures we need are both old and new.

Next up: DANGER, MIRACLE, FRAGILE FAITH (chapter 14)