Let Both Grow Together

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A — Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Let both of them grow together until the harvest [Matthew 13:30].

Years ago, during my time at Asbury, a gardener I knew — a woman who had spent decades with her hands in North Carolina soil — told me about a young couple new to Durham. Like so many who land here, drawn by the university and its constant churn of academic hope, they had come from somewhere colder, somewhere without much of a growing season, and they arrived determined to have a garden of their own. They’d read the right books. They knew, in the abstract, what a garden required.

Early one March, the young wife spent an afternoon clearing a flower bed that had overwintered — pulling up everything that looked, to her eye, like the ragged remains of last year’s weeds. She was thorough. She was proud of the work. When the older gardener came by that afternoon and saw the bed, freshly cleared and neat, she didn’t say anything at first. She just winced.

“You've just pulled out half your perennials.”

In March, she explained, a hosta looks like nothing at all. A peony’s first shoots look exactly like something you’d want gone. The bed that looks cleared of weeds may simply be a bed that has been cleared of everything that hadn’t yet had the chance to show you what it was.

It takes very little confidence to pull up a plant in March. It takes a great deal of patience to leave it alone.

Jesus tells a similar story.

A man sows good seed in his field. That night, while everyone sleeps, an enemy comes and sows weeds among the wheat — and slips away before anyone sees him do it. By the time the seedlings come up, it's too late to ask who did this or why. The damage, whatever it is, is already growing.

The servants notice first. “Master, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where did the weeds come from?” It's a fair question, and an old one — the same question that sits underneath most of our grief and confusion about the world: if the sowing was good, why does the field look like this?

The master doesn’t linger on the question. “An enemy has done this,” he says, and moves immediately to what matters more to him: what happens next.

The servants already know what they’d like to do. Let us go and pull them up.

Two commentaries mention that the weed in question — zizania, almost certainly darnel — is, in its early growth, functionally identical to wheat. Not similar. Identical. The two plants are indistinguishable until the heads form, weeks into the growing season, and by then their roots have already grown together underground. You cannot pull up one without bringing up the other.

Jesus’ story is about a field in which no one — not the servants, not anyone with the sharpest eye and the best intentions — can yet tell wheat from weed. The master’s answer is not “leave the wicked alone.” His answer is “you don’t know what you’re looking at yet, and pulling now will destroy what you're trying to save.”

Let both grow together until the harvest.

I think this is one of the hardest sentences that Jesus ever speaks, not because it’s difficult to understand, but because it asks something we almost never want to give: the surrender of our own timing, and our own certainty, to someone else’s harvest.

Matthew tells us that later, indoors, away from the crowd, the disciples ask Jesus to explain what the story meant. What follows is a form ancient in Jewish teaching — a mashal, a comparison-story, paired with its nimshal, its explanation, a structure that shows up centuries later in rabbinic commentary as well, where a king’s orchard stands in for the world and the king’s uprooting stands in for divine judgment. Jesus explains his own story in exactly that key: the sower is the Son of Man, the field is the world, and the harvest is the end of the age — angels doing the separating, not us.

The servants had asked to be given the sickle. They are told, in effect, that the sickle was never going to be theirs.

I’ve come to think this is less a story about patience than it first appears, though patience is certainly part of it. It’s a story about the peculiar freedom that comes from being relieved of a job you were never actually qualified to do. I do not have the eye to tell, in March, which shoot in the bed is a peony and which is something better pulled. Neither, as it turns out, do you. We are not being asked to like this. We are being asked to trust it — to leave the sorting in hands more capable than ours, and get on with the business of becoming, ourselves, the thing that was planted.

There is something almost restful in that, once one stops fighting it. I do not have to spend my life deciding who belongs in the field and who doesn’t. I have enough to do simply becoming the wheat I was planted to be.

None of this, though, is permission to stop caring about the difference between wheat and weed. The parable doesn’t ask us to become indifferent to what’s growing in the field, only to stop trusting ourselves with the sorting of it. There is a difference between refusing to wield the sickle and refusing to notice what needs one. The master delays the harvest. He does not deny that some of what grows in that field will, in the end, be found to be exactly what the servants suspected.

We are not asked to call evil good, or to mistake patience for blindness. We are asked to hold both things at once — the harm is real, and the timing is not ours. That’s a harder position than either the servants’ urgency or a comfortable neutrality. It offers no shortcut, no early relief. It just asks us to keep our hands off the sickle and stay in the field.

I think about that couple sometimes, the ones who came to Durham from somewhere colder, who wanted so badly to be good at something they’d only just begun. I don’t know what became of their garden. I don’t know if they stayed in Durham or moved on, the way so many do, chasing the next position, the next city.

But I know what the older gardener told them in March. Wait. You don’t yet know what you're looking at.

Sunday’s Gospel text does not end there, of course. It ends in fire, and in a harvest that finally, decisively separates what could not be separated before — the righteous shining like the sun, the rest gathered and burned. Matthew doesn’t let us stay in the patient middle forever. There is a harvest coming, and it will not be gentle.

But the harvest is not March. Most of what we’re given is March — the long, uncertain middle, where the shoots look alike and the roots are already tangled and no one standing in the bed can yet say for certain what they’re looking at.

Let both of them grow together.

Somewhere, underground, in a bed I’ll never see, something is still deciding what it’s going to be.