We all know the parable of the wheat and the weeds. And Matthew’s Gospel conveniently provides an interpretive guide. So it’s easy to skim this teaching, and to float along its surface … assuming the meaning is obvious. So obvious that AI can give you an instantaneous interpretation and I quote “God allows both good and bad to coexist in the world for a time. Because human judgments are flawed, hastily attempting to root out all evil or false believers (the weeds) could result in harming the innocent.” There is however ultimate justice: “Evil (the weeds) will not go unpunished forever. At the end of the age, God will execute a final separation, removing wickedness (the weeds) and rewarding the righteous (the wheat),” unquote. This is a cautionary interpretation; human judgement is flawed and a hasty identification of people, beliefs, and actions as weeds can hurt the innocent. Simple. Straightforward. Relatively uncomplicated. Like most of the interpretations feeding into this AI generated summary, the focus is on the weeds. Complicating considerations of hasty assumptions concerning the wheat largely escape critical examination.
I have a complicated relationship to wheat. There was a time in my somewhat distant past, that I spent almost every Saturday morning hunting down the perfect cinnamon roll. I was unconcerned and unaware that the seemingly random set of increasingly catastrophic gastrointestinal symptoms besetting my family circle was related to the gluten filled wheat in those cinnamon rolls. Given my family’s genetic inheritance that stretchy gluten that created the perfect yeasty rise in my cinnamon role, functions as a kind of poison for some members of my family.
If I got to choose, wheat would be categorized as a weed. A perspective based on personal experience – true; and therefore, not necessarily determinative – also true. However, if you take a little time to consider wheat and its very long history, it turns out that gluten intolerant people aren’t the only ones with a complicated relationship to wheat; historians like Jared Diamond, who wrote the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, suggest taking the long and varied colonial history of the planet into account. From this more critical perspective, our assumptions about wheat as the ideal cultivar might be as hasty as any assumptions we make about weeds. Wheat is a complicating source of sustenance for all humans in terms of culture, religion, economics, politics, and the wielding of power.
Wheat, one of the firsts crops to be domesticated, is indigenous to the Fertile Cresent which includes the region where Israel came to be. And so, it makes sense that Jesus would use this indigenous grain as a metaphor. In the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus constructs a parable to teach his followers, or feeds the multitudes, or shares a last meal before his death with his disciples, he uses the common bread from their everyday tables as sustenance and symbol; easily accessible and affordable, the work of their own hands, this food, bread likely made from wheat, has deep, psychological and biological roots in the memories of the people who come to Jesus for healing and justice. Across all the Gospels, Jesus intended to speak in language that made sense to his followers; with metaphors and stories that they could identify with. Here justice (and love) begins with the telling of stories and the use of symbols that are familiar, common, and ancestral.
For the followers of Jesus and for the early church community, wheat was the preferred grain for the bread used for communion because it was indigenous; it was the bread of their ritual communion because it was their daily bread. It is its commonness that made it a symbol and an act of inclusion and justice in the church’s early love feasts. Yet as the institutional church comes to be and starts to spread, the regulation of bread becomes a centerpiece; where bread does not function as a symbol of inclusion (as it did for Jesus) but instead as a locus of regulatory power in the form of a ritual law requiring purity – the bread must be wheat or its not communion. It seems small; after all we are only talking about the recipe for a loaf of bread — but the global consequences across time have been substantial.
In 380 A.D., Christianity is adopted as the sole official religion of the Roman state which includes most of the land mass that we, in modern times, identify as the continent of Europe. In 500 A.D., wheat is still an exotic cultivar in this region. However, by 1000 A.D., less than half a millennia later, early medieval Europeans have adopted wheat as a favored cultivar, a shift that creates mass disruption in local environments and economies including a vast reduction in the biodiversity of local agrarian landscapes and ecosystems. The Christian cultural and ritual preference for wheat is a significant, contributing factor.
European, colonial expansion, motivated by the establishment of trade routes and the acquisition of resources and power, begins in earnest, in the 1500s. Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage to the Americas introduces wheat to the eastern coast. While, even earlier, Spanish missionaries like Eusebio Kino planted wheat in the North American Southwest in order to make communion bread. Before wheat arrived, Native American groups relied on indigenous crops; corn or maize, beans, squash and native grains like wild rice. As the United States expanded, the government took millions of acres of tribal land to create large wheat farms in order to feed the growing number of colonists – forcing Native Americans onto reservations where they had to abandon their traditional farming methods and grow wheat for survival.
This pattern repeats itself across the globe; in Sub – Saharan Africa; in Asia, and in Australia. Exploration and conquest were justified by the goal of spreading the Christian faith which almost always came at a high cost to local cultures and people. Viewed across time, the ritual regulation requiring wheat for communion turns out to be a regulation that supplants and suppresses indigenous cultures and traditions and oppresses indigenous people in service of a supposed replication of a sacred moment and ideal. This is quite the opposite of what Jesus intended by his parable of the weeds and the wheat where he uses a common, indigenous grain to proclaim a coming reign of justice and love for his followers who know the cost of regulations that create, support, and extend power.
So what does the complicating story of what unfolded after Jesus telling of the parable of the wheat and the weeds have to do with us today? Well, we live in a day and age, not so different from the early followers of Jesus. Then as now, our time is characterized by massive extensions of power by a few; and by divisions fueled by certainty about religious, political and cultural ideals and certainty about whose is righteous and who is not. A story that interrupts our easy assumptions about wheat as an ideal, perhaps even a sacred cultivar for the entire world, suggests that we need a critical, contemplative consideration of both metaphors Jesus uses in today’s parable; the weeds and the wheat. The identification and regulation of ideals; ideal cultivars, or ideal religions, ideal people or even ideal Christians, along with the identification of people and things we consider to be undesirable, contaminating, illegal, and sinful is always tricky, always perspectival, never innocent, and always a function of power. And so, following Jesus in today’s parable, the wiser course might be to be patient and to tend, with love, the whole field – all of it, the wheat and the weeds; and with humility – a great Benedictine virtue – wait for the harvest to reveal itself – “where the righteous [whether they are labeled by the powers that be as wheat or weeds] will shine like the sun in the reign of God.”