Whenever I see a weed, it just seems to scream, “Pull me!” When Jesus tells stories about farming, his stories simply don’t make any agricultural sense. Listen to the story again - A farmer plows his field, sows it with wheat of the highest quality, and goes to bed that night. While he was sleeping an enemy comes and lays some weed seed in the same furrows. So as the wheat starts to grow, the farmer's hired hands notice the weed growing with the wheat and ask the farmer

Rarely did Jesus say things bluntly or straightforwardly. More often than not, he came at a truth indirectly, sideways-like, in order to come in under our defenses and around our prejudices. His best tools in this were his “parables.” In them, Jesus takes images drawn from familiar things and uses them a new way, to explain God’s Kingdom. It’s to our benefit then that Jesus’ first parable is such an easy one to understand. The story begins with a man who goes forth to s