<p>13:28- see on 15:14.</p>
<p><em>And he said to them: An enemy has done this! And the servants said to him: Then do you want us to go and gather them up?-</em>&nbsp;The term is used several times in the parables of Matthew 13, and in the context it effectively means 'to judge'. The gathering process is the judgment- not only because the process of gathering and judgment will likely be in a split second in terms of time as we understand it, but because our attitude in the moment when we know 'He's back!' will effectively be our judgment. Those who go immediately will be saved, and those who delay to prepare themselves will thereby show themselves unworthy. &ldquo;Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up?&quot; (Mt. 13:28) shows Christ's knowledge that this would be the desire of His servants throughout the generations. If we take His teaching seriously, we must come to the conclusion that all of us have a desire to &quot;help&quot; our brethren by 'sorting out' the weaknesses which we see in them, but that there is the real possibility that often this desire is spiritually grotesque in God's eyes. According to the parable of the tares, we are very sure that we know who are the tares and who are the wheat. But we can't be as sure as we feel, is the Lord's message. Some we feel are obviously tares are actually wheat. And the sensitivity of Jesus foresaw this so accurately.&nbsp;There's a fascinating twist in this story that is exactly descriptive of our experience. The servants slept first of all, after the word was first sown, and only once the wheat and tares came to bear fruit did they pester the Master to let them root up the tares. This reference to bearing fruit must be read in the context of the preceding parable of the sower, which describes how the good ground bears fruit (Mt. 13: 26, 8). The implication is that the servants shouldn't have been sleeping first of all, thinking there wasn't really much to do in the field. And so it is a familiar pattern: conversion is followed by a period of feeling there isn't much to do, and then the realization dawns that due to our own negligence in those early days there are some tares in the ecclesia. The desire to sort out the tares therefore comes some time&nbsp;<em>after</em>&nbsp;conversion. And on the overall level, there is another truism: the servants of Christ are keener to eradicate error than stop it in the first place. It's sad to see that there is almost a despising today of the warnings against 'the thin end of the wedge'; awareness of the possibility of apostasy is seen as somehow negative- exactly as the parable predicts. The parable implies that&nbsp;<em>if</em>&nbsp;a greater level of watchfulness was maintained by the servants, there wouldn't be the tares. But, as the Lord foresaw, we seem to lack this watchfulness, often under the guise of feeling that we must sort ourselves out rather than guard against apostasy being introduced. The sensitivity of Jesus constructed that parable with the aim of showing the thoughtful how deeply inappropriate is their desire to root up the tares. He clearly had in mind the prophecy of Himself in 2 Sam. 23:6,7: &quot;The sons of Belial shall be all of them as thorns thrust away, because they cannot be taken by (human) hands: but the man that shall touch them (Christ) must be fenced with iron and the staff of a spear; and they shall be utterly burned with fire in the same place (just outside Jerusalem) &quot;where Christ was &quot;fenced with iron&quot;. It isn't possible for us to uproot the tares because this can only possibly be done by the one who totally uprooted&nbsp;sin in Himself, dying to it on the cross. This association between Christ's right to judge and His victorious death is shown by the way the &quot;tares&quot; will be burnt in the same area as He was crucified in. Phil. 2:9-11 reasons along the same lines; because Christ died for us, He&nbsp;<em>therefore</em>&nbsp;has the right to have every knee bowing to Him at the judgment. On account of being &quot;the Son of man&quot; and yet also being our perfect Messiah, He has the right<em> therefore</em>&nbsp;to be judge (Jn. 5:27 cp. Dan. 7:13,14). The Lord understood all this; and to the thoughtful, those who would grasp His allusion to 2 Sam. 23, He was saying: 'If you think you can root up the tares, if you think you have that wisdom to identify the tares, you are really insulting the greatness of what I achieved on the cross. It's only on account of that that I have the ability and right to divide wheat from tares, sheep from goats'. See on 7:4.</p>
<p><em>That we go-</em>&nbsp;The emphasis is surely on the &ldquo;we&rdquo;. They assumed that because they were the man&rsquo;s servants, they were therefore also the reapers. The contrast drawn between the servants and the reapers was an element of unreality in the story. For farmers didn&rsquo;t have a separate category of workers who were specifically &ldquo;reapers&rdquo;. But this householder did, and the element of unreality points to the fact that contrary to what we intuitively think, the work of reaping is&nbsp;<em>not</em>&nbsp;for us. There are others, the Angels, who will do this. And the other element of unreality is that the householder wanted the weeds to continue to grow, even though they would be taking away moisture and nutrients from the good seed. This is the way the Lord wishes for things in this life. Those who offend, who cause the righteous to stumble, will only be removed from them at the last day (:41). The preceding parable of the sower had featured a type of ground where there were thorns who grew up and stopped the good seed from developing; but the point was that the &lsquo;good ground&rsquo; category would still prosper&nbsp;<em>despite</em>&nbsp;growing next to weeds. Such was and is the power of God&rsquo;s word in Christ, that those who respond to it can still bring forth amazing yield&nbsp;<em>despite</em>&nbsp;the presence of the weeds next to them.</p>