Shine like the Sun

Imagine that the harvest is finally brought in, and the light goes on.

Not the gray light of a field where the work has yet to begin, but the full, golden light of the barn where the wheat lies safe — weighed, winnowed, brought in, home. And in that light you stand. No longer a stalk among a thousand stalks, bent under the wind, standing mingled with what looks like you but is not. You stand upright, and you shine. "Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father" (Matthew 13:43). Hear that word: shine. Not flicker like a candle nearly spent, not gleam with borrowed light, but shine — like the sun, with a radiance that comes from within because the Father has laid it there. This is what the whole parable runs out into. Not the tares. Not the furnace. The sun.

With that image the field must be entered, or it is read wrongly. Almost everyone stays hanging at the tares — the enemy who sowed in the dark, the separation, the fire. That stands there too, and there is no going around it. But the Lord did not let His explanation end at the fire, but at the light. The very last sentence is the sun. The admonition hangs wedged between two radiances — the barn at the beginning, the sun at the end — and whoever forgets that hears a threat where a glory sounds.

For here everything turns: you are called to shine. Not to barely get away with it, not as a wretched remnant that scarcely survived the sieve, but to shine with a radiance the ages will no longer quench. Daniel already saw it: "Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament, and those who turn many to righteousness like the stars forever and ever" (Daniel 12:3). That is the prize. And only when you have seen that radiance does the field come into view as it now is — full of tares — and with it the sharp question that this parable puts to us.

That image first says something about the Lord. A man who only wanted to keep his field clean would have let the parable end at the furnace. But the Lord ends at what remains, and what remains shines. His heart is not in the first place on the burning away of the tares, but on the kindling of the wheat. And you — if you are wheat, and in Christ you are — are not the by-catch of His judgment but the aim of His labor. The sharpness of this parable does not spring from a master who likes to punish, but from a Father who so longs to see His child shine that He does not withhold from it the truth about what stands in the way.

The Field as It Now Is

Begin at the sower, for he is good. "The Kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field" (13:24). Good seed. No tares, no half work. The field as God intended it bore only good seed — children of the Kingdom, sown by the hand of the Son of Man Himself.

And then came the night. "But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went away" (13:25). Hear the stealth. The enemy does not work in broad daylight; he waits until men sleep, scatters his seed among the good, and vanishes before anyone sees him. "And went away" — a chilling trait. The evil one plants the wickedness and withdraws, so that it seems as if the tares came up without a father, of themselves, as if they belonged there. That is his signature: to sow evil and stay invisible.

And now they grow up together. That saves you from an illusion that makes many believers sick. The field on which you stand — the world, and yes, the Church too — is no flawless wheat field. There are tares standing among it, not because God meant it so, but because the enemy sowed them; and until the harvest they stand there, stalk by stalk, not to be separated by your hand. Whoever expects that the Church is a pure field, or that it would become one if only so-and-so were out of it, has not heard the parable. The Lord did not promise a clean field before the harvest. He promised that a harvest is coming, and that the wheat will then shine.

Note where the blame for the tares lies. The servants thought at once: did the master not sow good seed? "Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares?" (13:27). The answer is unequivocal: "An enemy has done this" (13:28). Not the sower failed. Not the field was at fault. So when you see the evil flourishing, you need not conclude that God did slovenly work. The evil in the field is not God's handwriting; it is the signature of an enemy whose sowing is burned at the end. The flourishing of today is not the last word; it is the work of an adversary whose days are numbered.

In Depth — Zizania: the Darnel That Poses as Wheat

The word here translated "tares" is, in the Greek, no general word. It is zizania (singular zizanion), and it denotes one plant: darnel, Lolium temulentum, in older books also "bearded ryegrass." The dictionaries and biblical botany agree on this. (Well documented.) The word is not original Greek but a Semitic loanword; rabbinic Hebrew has zonin for the same plant. The Lord and His hearers knew darnel by name — and by reputation.

The treacherous thing is this: in its young, green stage darnel is hardly to be distinguished from wheat. Through thousands of years of growing up together and being harvested together it has come to resemble the wheat among which it stands — what botanists call "crop mimicry." Only when the ears form does the difference break open: the ripe wheat grows heavy and golden-brown, the darnel bears smaller, almost black seeds. Nineteenth-century eyewitnesses in the Holy Land wrote that even the sharpest eye cannot tell the two apart in the blade. (Well documented.) Here lies the real reason why you cannot weed early: not because the roots are entangled — that popular explanation is botanically weak — but because in the young crop you simply do not reliably recognize the darnel and, in pulling it up, take the wheat along with it. (A weighed reading that the accent lies on the impossibility of early, infallible recognition, not on entangled roots.)

And darnel is not innocent. The Latin species name temulentum means "drunk"; the French word for darnel, ivraie, carries the same memory of drunkenness. (Well documented.) Bread into which darnel has been ground causes dizziness, a drunken gait, blurred vision, trembling — in severe cases death. No innocent little grass, but a plant that intoxicates and sickens: a telling image of what poses as grain but bears poison.

What the Lord Himself Unlocks

Here something rare happens. The Lord explains this parable Himself. Word for word. At the request of His disciples, apart, "in the house" after He had sent the crowd away, He unlocks the allegory with His own hand (13:36–43). Most parables He leaves standing as images over which you must bend; this one — beside the sower — He takes apart and says: this is what it means.

That changes how you read it. What follows is no find of an interpreter, but the cast of roles from the mouth of the Lord. Whoever contradicts it contradicts Him. "He who sows the good seed is the Son of Man" (13:37) — Himself, then. "The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the Kingdom, and the tares are the children of the evil one" (13:38). "The enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the completion of the age, and the reapers are angels" (13:39). Seven equations, clear as glass. And one of them concerns you presently: the good seed are the children of the Kingdom. No riddle anymore; an open book. And precisely because it lies open, you can hide behind it no longer.

Consider too where this parable stands. It follows on the sower. The sower was about the soil — about the four kinds of hearts, and why three of the four do not reach the harvest. The tares goes further: not about the soil, but about the field as a whole, and about a second sower who in the dark scatters his own seed. Where the sower asks why the harvest disappoints, the tares asks why so much evil stands among the good — and what must be done with it. It is told to those who know the disappointment of a field that is not clean. And it says: wait. The judgment is coming, but not yet, and it is not yours. Bear fruit in the meantime.

In Depth — The Seven Equations Jesus Gives Himself

It is striking how seldom the Lord explains His parables. He tells them, and mostly leaves them standing — images that do their work in the heart of whoever has ears to hear. But in Matthew 13 He twice draws the curtain aside: at the sower (13:18–23) and here, at the tares (13:37–39). That makes these two into keys: they teach not only what they mean, but also how the Lord meant a parable to be read. (Well documented.)

The seven run, word for word: the sower of the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world; the good seed are the children of the Kingdom; the tares are the children of the evil one; the enemy is the devil; the harvest is the completion of the age; the reapers are the angels (13:37–39). Above these sounds an eighth layer: the Kingdom out of which the gathering is made is "His Kingdom" (13:41), and the final destination of the wheat is "the Kingdom of their Father" (13:43) — the Son sows and sends, and the Kingdom is ultimately the Father's.

One warning belongs with it, and the Lord gives it Himself by what He does and does not unlock. He explains the main figures, not every detail. That men slept, that the enemy went away, that the tares are bound into bundles — those traits color the image, but the Lord attaches no separate meaning to them. That guards against squeezing loose details, a temptation to which many interpreters have succumbed. (A weighed reading that the key supplied by Jesus fixes the main lines, not allegorizes every part.)

It Is Not Yours to Weed

Now the servants want to set themselves in motion, and the master holds them back — and this cuts outward before it cuts inward.

"Do you want us then to go and gather them?" (13:28). An understandable question, even a pious one. There are tares standing in their master's field; it vexes them, they want them out. The zeal to keep God's field clean seems a good zeal. And yet the master says: no. "No, lest while you gather the tares you also uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest" (13:29–30).

That is sharper than it seems. The master forbids the weeding. Not because the tares leave him indifferent — they will be burned, of that later — but because the servant who wants to separate cannot separate without damage. He does not see the difference reliably; he grasps at what he takes for darnel, and pulls the wheat along. However piously he begins, his eye does not distinguish what God alone distinguishes.

And here you must unlearn something that sits deep in pious hearts: the urge to purify the field yourself. It is not yours to weed the children of the evil one out of the Kingdom. "The reapers are angels" — not you. The separation happens at the completion, by heavenly hand, on God's time. Whoever now grasps the sickle does the work of the angels before the time — and the wheat pays the price. How many real believers have not been pulled out of the field by people who supposed they were weeding tares? How much soft, beginning grain has been trampled by someone who knew for certain that he saw the difference? Let it stand, says the Lord. That is no passivity; that is obedience to a boundary He drew.

In Depth — Field = World or Church? Augustine and the Mixed Body

This is the most famous battle-question of this parable, and the answer of the text is surprisingly unequivocal: "The field is the world" — not the congregation, not the Church, but the world (13:38). That is the starting point, and to it every interpretation must hold. (Well documented.)

Yet for centuries this has also been applied otherwise. In North Africa there arose in the fourth century the struggle with the Donatists, who after a time of persecution wanted a pure Church and shut out those who had failed during the persecution. The remarkable thing: both parties cited this parable and both accepted "field = world"; the dispute went over the application. The Donatists reasoned: the tares have increased, so the true must separate themselves from them now. Augustine contradicted that: premature separation is forbidden until the harvest; the visible Church remains a corpus permixtum, a mixed body, and precisely the drive to separate prematurely betrays the tares in yourself. (Well documented.)

The weighed line is this. The parable is in the first place about the coexistence of the children of the Kingdom and the children of the evil one in this world, and about the danger of a premature, presumptuous human judgment of separation. But the application inevitably touches the mixed congregation too: there also darnel and wheat resemble one another, there also no man can infallibly separate the true from the false before the harvest. (A weighed reading.) Whoever, however, employs it to remove all church discipline applies it wrongly, for elsewhere the New Testament does indeed command the dealing with open, unrepentant sin (1 Corinthians 5:13; Matthew 18:15–17). Jerome already saw that tension and resolved it thus: the parable forbids the hasty judgment over doubtful cases, not the disciplining of open guilt. That is the balance, and the confusing of it has been the root of much church-tearing. (Well documented.)

Do I Look like Wheat, or Am I It?

Now the sentence falls inward, and it falls on the writer of this chapter before it falls on you.

The whole sharpness of darnel is that it looks like wheat. Until the ear forms, it is not to be distinguished from the real grain. It stands among it, drinks the same rain, feels the same sun, bends in the same wind — and you would take it for wheat. The difference shows only at the ear. At the fruit. And until it comes to that, no one knows for sure.

So I must put the question to myself, and I cannot get out from under it. Am I wheat, or darnel? Do I really bear grain, or do I only look like it? I know how well I can look like wheat. I stand among the grain — in the congregation, in the service, in the right company. I sing the same songs, I use the same words. But the parable does not ask whether I stand among the wheat. It asks whether I bear grain.

And it is not the gross sin that threatens me here. Not that I walked away, cursed, stole. It is something far more innocent-looking, and precisely therefore more dangerous: the going along. The looking-like. The standing alongside without fruit. Being busy the whole week with things that look good and bear nothing. Growing year after year among the grain without ever setting an ear myself. That is the darnel in me — not the shameful sin I would never dare, but the tidy, fruitless moving-along that resembles wheat so suspiciously closely that I myself no longer see the difference.

Keep the order pure. The question is not whether I am saved. That does not lie here on the field; that lies fixed in Christ — whoever is in Him is wheat, sown by His hand. The question the darnel puts to me is that of the steward: what do I do with what is entrusted to me? For it is possible — and Scripture says it unequivocally — that a man is saved and yet bears no fruit. Not the matter of belonging, but of what you did with your life after He sowed you in His field.

Keep those two tracks sharply apart; the whole temperature of this chapter hangs on it. The New Testament draws not one but three outcomes, and whoever mixes them up hears a death sentence where a prize-giving sounds. First: the not-being-saved — whoever was never in Christ, the tares that are gathered and burned. That is the lot of the darnel. But for whoever is wheat, the other two hold, and they stand razor-sharp side by side in 1 Corinthians 3. "If anyone's work which he has built endures, he will receive a reward. If anyone's work is burned, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire" (3:14–15). There you have the two forms of the wheat: saved without reward, and saved with reward. The one comes into the barn with empty ears, rescued like a man who runs from a burning house with nothing in his hands. The other comes in bearing, with grain, with a reward the Lord counts His joy to give out.

And there the darnel holds up to me the uncomfortable mirror. The difference between those last two is the difference between the stalk that only grew up and the stalk that also bore grain. My salvation is not in question; that lies in Christ and does not fall back. But my fruit, the radiance with which I will presently shine or the lack that I will feel at that light — that is indeed at stake, at every choice I make today. And that is no question for the harvest day alone; it is a question for this ordinary green week in which the ears can still be set.

From Milk to Grain

The Letter to the Hebrews clarifies where darnel and wheat part. The writer reproaches his readers — believers, people who stand in the field — that they have stayed hanging. "By this time you ought to be teachers, but you need again someone to teach you the basics of God's words; you have become as people who need milk and not solid food" (Hebrews 5:12). And then the image that touches everything: solid food is for the mature, "who by use have their senses trained to discern between good and evil" (5:14).

This life is a hothouse, a kindergarten of eternity. You are here to grow up — from milk to solid food, from seed to ear, from the standing alongside to the bearing. The wheat does not stay green forever; it ripens, it sets an ear, it bears grain. And the darnel? It too grows up, just as tall, just as green, but when the fruit must come, it has nothing but small, empty, dark seeds.

And that cuts, for standstill is no neutral condition. Whoever stays at the milk, whoever refuses to ripen, comes to resemble the darnel more and more — not because he does the evil, but because he leaves the good undone. The Lord did not sow you to remain an eternal seedling. He sowed you to bear grain.

The Higher the Calling, the Blacker the Straying

Here a word must fall that sounds hard, and it sounds hard because the glory is so great. Consider to what you are called: to shine like the sun. Not to be a blade of grass, not to be a number in the barn, but to shine with a radiance that the Father Himself lays in you. And precisely therefore the straying is so grave.

The higher the calling, the blacker the drifting away from it. Whoever is called to the dust loses little if he stays in the dust. But whoever is called to shine like the sun, and instead chooses the comfortable going-along, the form without fruit — he leaves lying a glory that was offered him by the hand of his Father. That is the tragic thing about the fruitless believer: not that he falls into the lake of fire — he is wheat, he is brought in — but that he comes in with empty ears, while he was called to shine.

For the Father wants to see you shine. And if you then, year after year, choose the tidy nothing, then you do not merely evade a duty — then you miss a glory that He had laid ready especially for you. The sharpness of this chapter is no threat of a judge lying in wait for your faults. It is the concern of a Father who sees his child steering toward an empty harvest, while He knows how it could have shone.

The Separation, and Then the Sun Again

And then comes the harvest, and the parable is honest about what it brings — first the separation, but not as the last word.

"The Son of Man will send out His angels, and they will gather out of His Kingdom all stumbling blocks and those who practice lawlessness, and they will cast them into the furnace of fire; there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth" (13:41–42). There it is, in full seriousness, and I do not go around it, for the Lord did not either. The separation is real, and it is terrible. The reapers are angels — not you, not the Church. The wailing and gnashing of teeth is no grief that repents; it is the powerless rage of one shut out, too late to return.

But see now where the sentence falls, for the Lord does not leave it here. Immediately after the fire, in the same breath, He returns to the radiance: "Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear" (13:43). Hear the structure: the fire does not stand at the end. The sun stands at the end. The Lord paints the judgment — honestly, without softening — and then lets it vanish behind the light of the brought-in wheat. The last word is not "furnace." The last word is "sun."

In Depth — Shine like the Sun (Daniel 12:3)

The closing sentence of the parable is no loose figure of speech but a deliberate allusion. "Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father" (13:43) reaches back directly to Daniel 12:3: "Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament, and those who turn many to righteousness like the stars forever and ever." Daniel 12 is the clearest resurrection word of the Old Testament — it speaks of the awakening out of the dust, some to everlasting life, others to everlasting horror (12:2). (Well documented.)

The bond is strikingly close. The Greek verb the Lord chooses here for "shine" (eklampo, "to shine out") occurs in the whole New Testament only in this place — a rarity that is no coincidence, but points the reader to Daniel. And the subjects answer to one another: "the righteous" in Matthew corresponds to Daniel's "the wise" and "those who turn many to righteousness." (Well documented that this is a direct allusion to Daniel 12:3.)

What that means: the brought-in wheat does not vanish anonymously into a barn, but goes to light up with a heavenly glory. It is the same line that runs through all of Scripture — from the face of Moses that shone when he came down from the mountain, to the promise that we are "changed into the same image, from glory to glory." (A weighed reading that the "shine" promise pledges the wheat an active sharing in God's own radiance, not merely a safe storing.) The parable that begins so soberly ends in the light of the resurrection: righteous ones who shine like the sun, forever, in the Kingdom of their Father.

And so you must carry this parable. Not as a threat that paralyzes you, but as a calling that lifts you. The separation is real — I have not polished it away — but it is not the aim; it is the hinge after which the wheat goes to shine. The question is not whether you come in — that is fixed. The question is with how much grain in your hand.

In Depth — Anomia: the Lawlessness That Piles Up

The angels gather "all stumbling blocks and those who practice lawlessness" (13:41). The Greek word for lawlessness is anomia — the life outside and against God's law, not one loose transgression but a disposition that sets the law as a whole aside. It is a typical word of Matthew (7:23; 13:41; 23:28; 24:12), and the choice here is deliberately scriptural: it sounds together with Psalm 37, which is precisely about not envying the prosperity of those who practice lawlessness, because that prosperity passes — exactly the patience-until-the-harvest theme of this parable. (A weighed reading.)

Grammatically "the stumbling blocks" (neuter) and "those who practice lawlessness" (masculine) stand side by side, but the common reading is that both denote the same people under two sides: those who make others stumble and themselves live lawlessly. Verse 42 confirms it: "they will cast them into the furnace" — it concerns persons. (A weighed reading.)

And here the parable touches a larger line. Paul speaks in 2 Thessalonians 2 of "the mystery of lawlessness" that is already at work (to mysterion tes anomias, 2:7) and condenses at the end into one figure, "the man of lawlessness" (2:3). The link is real: Matthew and Paul share the root anomia and the expectation that the lawlessness piles up at the end of history — in Matthew 24:12 it stands stated outright: "because lawlessness increases, the love of many will grow cold." But a direct literary borrowing cannot be demonstrated; it is kindred language and expectation, no quotation. (Disputed whether there is direct dependence; the thematic resonance, however, is unmistakable.) The tares parable shows the harvest of that lawlessness; 2 Thessalonians shows its climax in one person. Two gazes upon the same reality.

The Tares Are Not Endured for Their Own Sake

There is one more thread, for it guards you against a wrong conclusion. You might think: if the tares stay standing until the harvest, then the evil evidently does not trouble the Lord so much. The opposite is true. The tares are not endured for their own sake. They are endured for the sake of the wheat.

Hear the master say it himself: "Let both grow together until the harvest, lest while you gather the tares you also uproot the wheat with them" (13:29–30). The reason for the delay is not indifference; the reason is protection of the good. Whoever now weeds tears up the real grain along with it. So the master waits. Not because he cannot care, but because he precisely does care — for the wheat.

And see what that delay means for whoever still stands on the field. It is God's longsuffering in time. For the darnel it means nothing good — it is gathered after all at the end and burned. But for whoever is wheat and bears no fruit yet, it means everything: the granted time to begin bearing after all, to use the green weeks you still have.

In Depth — The Sowing of Darnel as Sabotage

That someone out of revenge scattered darnel in another's field was a recognizable crime in the ancient world — and of it there is a real, preserved testimony. The Roman jurist Ulpian, included in the Digest of Justinian, discusses a case, going back to the jurist Celsus from the beginning of the second century, in which someone sows darnel or wild oats in another's standing crop to spoil it. Roman law treated this as an actionable wrong: the owner or the tenant could claim damages. (Well documented.)

Here honesty is fitting, for the popular presentation exaggerates. It was not a separate penal law that made the sowing of darnel punishable by name; it was a case that fell under the existing law on property damage. Older interpreters spoke of "a crime under Roman law" without a source; they were right that such a text exists, but the precise reference was only added later. (A weighed reading.) What stands — and fits beautifully with the parable — is that Roman law precisely covered the damage that was inflicted clam, "secretly": exactly the nocturnal, silent deed of the enemy "while men slept."

Whether such a deed was everyday in Jesus' time or rather sounded like something outrageous is less certain; one nineteenth-century observer in Palestine found no one who had ever heard of deliberate darnel-sowing. (Disputed.) Perhaps, then, the hearers heard here a shocking deed — which only underscores the malice of the enemy. Who sows poison among another's bread, in the dark, and slips away? Only someone who wants the evil for the evil's sake. That is the enemy of the parable to the life.

Live as Wheat

What do you do, then, today, on a field where the tares stand among the grain and the harvest has not yet come? The parable gives no vague feeling but a clear posture with three sides — all three born out of that one glory with which the chapter began.

Expect the tares. That saves you from the bitterness that consumes so many believers. Reckon on it that there is darnel among the wheat — do not be surprised, not cynical when you meet it, as though the field ought to have shone and you have been cheated. Whoever demands a pure Church demands something the Lord gives only at the completion, and grows bitter along the way, hard, and suspect himself.

Do not do the work of the angels. It is not yours to purify the field, to go through the congregation with the sickle and pull out what seems tares to you. That work belongs to the angels, on the day of the harvest. Your eye is not sharp enough; you would uproot wheat. Leave the final separation where it belongs — in God's hand — and concern yourself with your own ear.

And see to it that you bear fruit. For there, and only there, shows the difference between wheat and darnel — not at where you stand, but at the grain in your ear. Live as wheat in the midst of the tares: ripen, grow from milk to solid food, set an ear, bear the fruit to which He sowed you. Do not be the tidy fellow-traveler who looks good and bears nothing; be the grain that bends heavy under its own fruit, for that goes into the barn and shines.

And make this concrete, for bearing fruit is no pious feeling but a daily choice. It is the hours of your week, which you can fill with things that look good and bear nothing, or with things that really set grain. The prayer no one sees, the service no one counts, the love you give where no applause follows — that is the hidden ripening where the ear forms. The darnel and the wheat stand on the same plot of ground, under the same sun, in the same congregation; the difference arises not in what they are on the outside, but in what grows on the inside. Ask yourself, then, what grain was set in you this week, and whether it was there. For that is the question of the steward, and he comes around again every day.

And hear, at the last, the open door, for this chapter ends not at the admonition but at the grace. It is not yet harvest. The field still stands green, the barn is not yet closed. Perhaps you recognize in yourself the darnel — the going-along, the looking-like, the busy fruitlessness, the years you grew along without bearing. Then this is not the word that condemns you; it is the word that calls you. For today you can begin to bear fruit after all. It is not yet too late, and the time to begin ripening is now.

For there everything runs out, the image with which the chapter began and with which the Lord Himself closed the parable: the harvest brought in, the barn full, the light on. And in that light you stand, no longer a stalk among a thousand stalks, but upright, ripe, bearing — and you shine like the sun in the Kingdom of your Father. To that you are called. For that was all the trouble. He who has ears, let him hear.