The Rev’d Ivica Gregurec

Sunday,19 July 2026, 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Wisdom 12:13,16-19, Psalm 86:11-17, Romans 8:12-25, Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

I love this parable. I wish that we dwell on it for a moment and focus on few details. First, I like to think of the servants of a farmer, because I think this parable of the weeds and the wheat is really their story more than it is farmer’s. They come to him in a panic. ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where did these weeds come from?’ He replied, quite calmly, ‘An enemy did this.’ And then they ask the question that I think is the most human question in the whole parable: ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’
Do you want us to fix this? Do you want us to sort the good from the bad, right now, today, so the field looks the way a field is supposed to look?
And the farmer says no. Let them grow together until the harvest.

I want to sit with that ‘no’ for a while this morning, because I think it cuts against something very deep in us – something that runs through our politics, our churches, our own hearts. We want to pull the weeds. We are, most of us, born sorters. We like categories, we like knowing who is in and who is out, who is wheat and who is weed, who is righteous and who is not – and if we’re honest, we like being fairly confident about which side of that line we’re standing on.

Jesus knew his listeners well enough to know that this parable would be uncomfortable. The people of his time, like people of every time, including our own, were deeply invested in the project of separating the righteous from the unrighteous. The Wisdom of Solomon reading we heard this morning comes from a tradition that wrestled with exactly this question: how does a just God deal with the wicked? And the answer it gives is startling in its generosity. God’s sovereignty, the writer says, is not expressed through domination or vengeance, but through mercy: ‘For your strength is the source of righteousness, and your sovereignty over all causes you to spare all.’ The text goes further still, insisting that God’s might is the source of justice, and it is precisely because God is master of all that God spares everyone.

That is a remarkable theological claim. Power, real power, does not need to crush what threatens it. God’s strength is shown not in how ruthlessly wrongdoing is punished, but in how much room is made for repentance, for growth, for change. The text even says that God disciplines gradually, giving room for repentance, aware that human wickedness is rooted in ignorant folly and choosing to convince rather than merely condemn.
This is the same God we meet in the parable. The farmer isn’t naive about the weeds. He knows exactly what’s there. But he understands something his frightened servants don’t yet understand: that premature judgment does more harm than patient waiting. ‘Let both grow together until the harvest,’ he says, ‘so that in gathering the weeds you do not uproot the wheat along with them.’

Anyone who has tried to weed a garden knows this is not sentimentality, but a quite hard work. In the early stages, the roots of wheat and certain weeds are so tangled together underground, that pulling one up disturbs the other. The very act of trying to purify the field would destroy the good grain along with the bad.

I wonder how often that’s true of us, too, as well as of our communities, our families, even our own souls. How often has an attempt at premature, forceful purification (get rid of that person, cut off that part of yourself, expel that doubt, condemn that difference) ended up uprooting something good along with whatever we thought we were removing?
I think this parable has particular weight for the church, and especially for a church like ours, which tries to hold its doors open wide. We live in an age that rewards certainty and punishes ambiguity. Social media rewards the quick verdict, the clean cancellation, the satisfying purge. And there is a version of Christianity, sadly a very loud version, that has fully absorbed this logic; it sees its task as identifying the weeds among us and ripping them out, whether those ‘weeds’ are people whose theology differs, whose sexuality differs, whose politics differ, whose very existence seems to some to threaten the purity of the field.
Jesus says: that is not your harvest to bring in. ‘Let both grow together until the harvest… and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first.’

Notice who does the collecting: not the servants, not us. The judgment, when it comes, belongs to God, and it comes at the end, not the middle, of the story. Our task in the meantime is not less important for being different: it is to tend the field, not to police it. It is to let people grow.
This doesn’t mean we’re called to be doormats, indifferent to real harm, or unable to name evil when we see it. Jesus himself, in the explanation to the disciples, doesn’t pretend that wickedness is illusory or that everything will simply work out. The image of the furnace of fire is not comfortable, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But even there, notice the timing: the sorting happens at the close of the age, in God’s hands, not ours, not now. We are genuinely relieved of the burden of being the final judges of one another. So why so often, we wish and enjoy being judges.

That brings me to Paul writing to the Romans about what it means to live in this ‘meantime,’ this stretched-out season between planting and harvest. Paul describes it as a kind of labour pain; the whole creation is, Paul says, groaning as in the pains of childbirth, and not only creation but we ourselves, waiting. We ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

I find that image strangely comforting. Paul doesn’t ask us to pretend the waiting doesn’t hurt. He doesn’t tell us to skip past the groaning to some falsely serene acceptance. He says: this discomfort, this not-yet-ness, is actually a sign of life, not a sign of failure. Labour pains mean something is being born. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what is already seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

That word patience is doing enormous work in both our readings today. Patience with the weeds among the wheat. Patience with a creation still groaning toward its redemption. Patience with ourselves, who are so often wheat and weed tangled together in the same heart, on the same day, in the same breath.

The psalmist prays, ‘Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth,’ and then, almost in the same breath, asks God to turn and be gracious, giving strength and saving one who is, quite plainly, a servant not a finished saint or a fully sorted field: a servant, still growing, still asking to be taught.

So here is what I want to leave you with this morning. The weeds are real. The brokenness in the world and in ourselves is not something we are asked to pretend away. But the harvest belongs to God, and God’s patience is not weakness. It is, the writer of Wisdom insists, the very shape of divine strength. A God secure enough in power to let the field grow, to let people change, to let repentance happen in its own time.
Our task, in this long and sometimes aching meantime, is not to play the reaper. It is to tend the field with hope, to groan honestly when the waiting is hard, and to trust that the one who sowed good seed in us is not finished growing it yet.
Amen.