The weeds need to stay

Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity, 19 July 2026, preached by the Vicar, Fr Christopher Woods

Readings: Wisdom 12:13, 16–19, Romans 8:26–27 and Matthew 13:24–30

The Kingdom of Heaven is one of the great themes of St Matthew’s Gospel. Yet when Jesus speaks of the Kingdom, he is not usually describing a distant place to which the faithful might one day escape. He is speaking about the presence and reign of God: God at work among us, God’s purposes unfolding within the ordinary and often bewildering circumstances of human life.

Jesus does not give us a tidy definition of this Kingdom. Instead, he tells stories.

Across these Sundays, we hear a collection of seven parables. Last week, there was the sower scattering seed with astonishing generosity. Next week, we shall hear of treasure hidden in a field, the pearl of great price, and the net cast into the sea. Today, we are given the unsettling parable of the wheat and the weeds.

There is a particular weed which grows in that region in Galilee and it is called darnel, or ‘false wheat’. Its particular malice is that, until the ear forms, it is almost impossible to tell it from wheat. The same green blade, the same slender stem. Only at the harvest, when the true grain hangs heavy, can the eye tell them apart. Any farmer who took a hoe to his field in June would find himself tearing up the very crop he meant to save.

So the field gatherers ask the landowner the obvious question: “Do you want us to go and gather the weeds?”

The answer is surprising.

“No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest.”

It is not difficult to understand the gatherers instinct. They want to put things right. They want a clean field, clearly divided between the useful crop and the harmful weeds. They want to identify the problem, remove it and restore order.

There is something of the gatherers in most of us.

We like to divide the world into neat categories: good people and bad people, the righteous and the wicked, those who belong and those who do not. And if we are honest, we generally imagine ourselves standing among the wheat or weeds.

The parable unsettles that confidence.

Jesus tells us that, for the present, wheat and weeds are growing together. Good and evil are entangled. Grace and sin exist side by side—not only in society, not only in the Church, but within each human heart.

None of us is entirely wheat. None of us is simply a weed.

We are all mixtures of courage and cowardice, generosity and selfishness, faith and doubt. Even our best actions can contain mixed motives. We may do the right thing partly for the wrong reason. We may speak the truth without love or show kindness because we want to be admired. Conversely, even within our failings, there may be a hidden longing for goodness which God alone can see. The servants see only plants to be sorted. God sees the whole field.

That does not mean that evil does not matter or that we should just let sin fester. Jesus is not asking us to be indifferent to injustice, cruelty or abuse. There are times when wrongdoing must be confronted, vulnerable people protected and destructive behaviour restrained. Christian patience must never become an excuse for cowardice or neglect.

But the parable warns us against imagining that we possess God’s perfect knowledge. We cannot always see clearly enough to make final judgements about another person. In our eagerness to remove what seems bad, we may damage something tender and good which is still growing.

This is the divine character described in our first reading from the Book of Wisdom. God’s strength, we are told, is the source of justice; yet God’s sovereignty causes God to spare all.

“You judge with mildness,” says the writer, “and with great forbearance you govern us.”

That is a remarkable vision of divine power.

We often imagine power as the ability to compel, punish or destroy. But God’s power is revealed in mercy, restraint and patience. God does not need to prove his strength by crushing his enemies. Because God is truly sovereign, God can afford to be gentle.

The reading continues: “Through such works you have taught your people that the righteous must be kind, and you have filled your children with good hope, because you give repentance for sins.”

The patience of God is not weakness. It is the space in which repentance becomes possible. God waits because human beings can change.

The person we are tempted to dismiss may yet surprise us. The life which appears barren may still bear fruit. The sinner may become a saint; indeed, the Church’s calendar is filled with people whose lives bear witness to precisely that transformation.

St Augustine of Hippo spent years searching in all the wrong places before becoming one of the great teachers of the Western Church. St Francis of Assisi began as a wealthy and ambitious young man dreaming of military glory. St Ignatius of Loyola was converted while recovering from wounds received in battle. The grace of God does not merely label people good or bad. Grace changes them.

The Church must therefore be very careful whenever it begins to see itself as a community of pure wheat surrounded by a field of weeds outside.

The Church is not a society of those who have already arrived. It is a school for sinners, a hospital for wounded souls, and a field in which God is still patiently bringing a harvest to maturity.

This should shape the way we treat one another. It should make us slower to condemn, slower to gossip and slower to reduce another human being to their worst moment. It should also make us more patient with ourselves. Some of us are painfully aware of the weeds within our own lives. We see our mistakes, our recurring weaknesses, the habits we have tried and failed to change. We may wonder whether God has grown weary of us.

But God is not standing over the field impatiently, ready to tear up everything that has failed to become perfect overnight. God tends the field. God nourishes what is good. God gives time for growth. He invites us to receive the Sacrament of Absolution, to receive the Sacrament of the Eucharist, to draw closer to him in prayer and contemplation as a way of tending the field and eliminating the weeds. We cannot do this work in our own strength and calling is not to play God's reaper, but to let God's Spirit pray in us, and to grow.

This is the patience Pope Francis pressed upon us in Evangelii Gaudium — the Church learning "the art of accompaniment," walking alongside the struggling stalk rather than standing at the field's edge with the blade.

And so, The Kingdom of Heaven is not an escape from the ambiguity of life. It is God’s hidden activity within it. For the moment, the field remains mixed. The Church remains imperfect. Our own hearts remain divided. We do not yet see the finished harvest. But we are not the owners of the field. God is.

And the God who owns the field is strong enough to be merciful, wise enough to judge rightly and patient enough to let grace grow. The harvest belongs to God. And because it belongs to God, we may live not in fear, but in hope.