Our gospel passage today is this peculiar parable of Jesus about the wheat and the weeds. Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven (that is, the rule of God) is like this: A man went out in his field and sowed (by hand, of course, in those days) the good seed that he had saved from the previous year's crop. It was sown all over, not in neat rows or spaced evenly. And since nearly 2,000 years ago there were no chemical fertilizers or insecticides, weeds grew up with the wheat: worthless weeds that competed for the soil's moisture and nutrients -- the work of an enemy of the farmer as well as his crop.

While it is not obvious in English, the biblical word that Jesus uses for this particular weed describes an especially noxious weed that yet looks a lot like wheat at first, so that both the weed …