Those of you who are gardeners are familiar with Murphy’s First Law of Gardening: When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant.

And, of course, there is a corollary to that law: To distinguish flowers from weeds, simply pull up everything. What grows back is weeds.

Last week we dealt with the parable of the sower and we learned that different kinds of soil produce differing levels of results. Today we are confronted with the question: what do you do with the weeds? Because we know, those who have ever tried to plant a flower garden, or a vegetable garden or even a plain ordinary lawn, the weeds are going to come.

So listen to Jesus’ parable: “The kingdom of heaven i…