There's a particular satisfaction in pulling a weed.

You get your fingers down into the dirt, close to the root, and you pull slow and steady. And if you've done it right, the whole thing comes up in one piece. And you stand there holding it, this thing that didn't belong, this thing that was stealing water and light from the plants you actually wanted, and you feel like you've set something right with the world. The bed looks cleaner. You can see the good plants better now. There's an honest pleasure in having sorted the world into what stays and what goes.

I think that pleasure’s worth identifying out loud, because it's where this parable starts.

The workers in Jesus's story feel it. And we should be fair to them, because what I want to say doesn't work if we get to stand apart from them, especially not in an elevated position above them. They're not villains. They're conscientious.

The workers are the ones who noticed there was a problem in the first place. They're out in the field, and they see the weeds coming up green among the wheat, and their first instinct is the instinct of anyone who's ever loved a garden: This doesn't belong here, and I can fix that.

"Do you want us to go and gather the weeds?" It's a good question, demonstrates faithfulness. It's the kind of question that comes from people who love the field and want to protect it.

And the boss says, "No. Just leave it be."

Not "good idea, but be careful." Not "wait a little bit." Just, no. The boss says, ”In pulling the weeds you'd wind up uprooting the wheat along with them." Let them grow together. Both of them. Until the harvest.

Now if you've ever pulled a weed, some part of you is sympathetic to the workers, a little frustrated. Because you know how to do this. You've done it a thousand times. It’s just pulling weeds. What do you mean "let them grow together"? The whole point of tending a field is that you don't let just anything grow in it.

But there's something the boss knows that the workers don’t know, and it's the pivot the whole story turns on.

The word Matthew uses here isn't just "weed." It's zizania, and the people who spend their lives translating and interpreting this text are nearly unanimous about what zizania is. It's a specific plant. Darnel.

Turns out, darnel has one quality that helps this story make a bit more sense. Seen, when it's young, first coming up green, you can't tell darnel from wheat. It mimics the wheat, growing up looking like the very thing it isn't. And by the time the heads finally form on the wheat, and you can see the difference, the darnel roots have already gotten tangled underground with the wheat, so that if you pull up the one, you tear up the other.

So the boss's no isn't just sentimental softness or the owner being relaxed about the issue of weeds and sound horticultural practice. It's that the boss can see something the workers can't see. The workers are really confident they know what's going on. They think they can tell.

But the boss knows they can't tell. Not yet. And the price of acting on a confidence for knowledge you don't actually have will cost a healthy crop of wheat.

Pull the weeds now… and you lose the very thing you were trying to protect.

Think about how strange this is. The crisis of the parable is that we can't see well enough to pull the right weeds. The workers' hands are itching to pull, and the boss is telling them the truth about the limits of their vision.

And if that were only a factoid about farming, we could admire it and go home. But Jesus never told a story only about farming, did he?

But this isn’t just a story about a patch of weeds in some ancient plot of ground. The impulse the workers felt, to protect what's good by tearing out what threatens it, that impulse doesn't stay in the garden. People are always looking for something to tear out by the roots.

The language of the fields in this story sounds like the language of our common life, doesn’t it? We've started to talk about people the way the workers talked about the weeds.

Officials in our government are calling human beings an “invasion,” an “infestation,” “a poison in the bloodstream of the country,” “a contaminant to be identified and pulled before it spreads.”