Conversation Points for Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?

Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• While Jesus used metaphorical speech before (ex. 5:13-16; 7:6, 24-27), Matthew 13 is the first time Jesus specifically spoke in “parables.” The Greek word parabole means “something cast beside” something else, like a comparison or an analogy. The synoptic Gospels expand that meaning to nearly any kind of indirect or metaphorical speech. Historically, the early church has treated the Gospel parables as direct allegories, assigning specific groups to each character or item. Modern theological study understands parables to be both more and less specific than simple allegories. Jesus used parables to proclaim how the kingdom of God is both already and not yet. Boring describes parables as “like a musical composition, a painting, or a poem that is not an illustration of a prosaic point, but is itself an inseparable unity of form and meaning. To reduce a parable to a “point” is to dismiss it as parable and domesticate its message to more comfortable and manageable categories.” Parables challenge the hearers understanding of the world around them. Jesus used parables not to offer tidy moral teachings, but to subvert the secure assumptions under which his hearers categorized their lives and offer a new and different vision for the world.
• This is a second parable where Jesus first told a parable to the crowd and then offered an explanation to the disciples alone.
• V. 24 is the first usage of a phrase Jesus used to begin many parables, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to (is like)…” The repetitiveness of this phrase restricts simplifying the comparison to one thing. The kingdom of heaven is like someone sowing good seeds, a mustard seed, yeast, etc. Because the kingdom of heaven is complex, no one metaphor can capture all of it. Instead, each offers a different piece of the mystery.
• The “weeds” (sometimes translated as “tares”) were very likely darnel, a plant that grows in the same climate as wheat and looks very similar to wheat until the heads of the wheat appear. Darnel was a major problem until modern technology allowed wheat seeds to be separated from darnel seeds.
• The distinctive element for Dr. Boring in this parable is the two sowings, first a sowing of good seed, then a second sowing of bad. In the parable of the sower, the difference was the type of soil, here the difference is the seed itself.
• Dr. Boring sees the transition from the crowd to the disciples in v. 36 as theologically significant. The reader “overhears” Jesus’ private message to the disciples, thus readers are considered part of the “in-group” of disciples.
• Like the parable of the sower, much of the parable of the weeds and wheat remains unallegorized. Jesus didn’t explain the sleeping, the initial servants, the fate of the good seed, etc. The allegory about the good and bad seed is one explanation, but there are clearly many more.

Works Sourced:
Boring, M. Eugene. “The Gospel of Matthew.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.