Rooting for the Tares

Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. — John 12:24

The Question the Botany Cannot Answer

In the field, a tare cannot become wheat. The darnel that wore the wheat's coat all season ripens as darnel; no green week and no late rain converts its kind. I will not pretend otherwise, because the whole weight of what follows depends on conceding it fully. In temporal biology the answer is no, flatly and without appeal. But the parable was never a lecture in botany, and we know this because Jesus gave us its own key, and the key does not turn on plant-kind. The good seed are the sons of the kingdom; the tares are the sons of the wicked one; the enemy that sowed them is the devil. Read what that explanation actually names. It does not finally classify a species. It names a sowing — a hand that cast seed in the dark, an origin, a claim laid on a field by night. And the moment the question becomes not 'can a plant change its kind' but 'can a sowing be re-sown,' the closed system opens, because the same God who permitted an enemy to sow is not himself barred from sowing. The miracle the metaphor seems to forbid is one the Author of the metaphor performs all the time. He has only to re-sow the row.

The Witnesses Scripture Itself Calls

And he has left us witnesses, lest the re-sowing sound like a thing I invented to comfort the desperate. Consider Saul of Tarsus, who held the coats while Stephen died, who breathed threatenings and went house to house to drag the church to prison — by any honest reckoning of his trajectory a vessel fitted for wrath, a tare so determined he hunted the wheat through every city he could reach. And the same man, on a road, in a single arrested hour, became the most productive apostle the church has ever counted. If anyone was sown by the enemy and re-sown by God in the space of a morning, it was Paul, and he never stopped naming it: I was a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious; but I obtained mercy. Consider the flat assertion he then built his whole gospel on — if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; old things are passed away. Not reformed. Not improved. New. A creature that was not there before, made where the old one died. And consider the unsettling completion of the picture, the one the comfortable do not like to hold beside the first: a wheat once fruitful can go fruitless, can sour, can become to the field what a tare is. Scripture knows the backslider as surely as it knows the convert. The traffic, in other words, runs both directions — which is exactly why the sorting cannot be trusted to any eye but God's, and exactly why it is not yet final this side of the harvest. The categories are real. They are not, today, closed.

Judge Not Before the Time

Here is the hinge, and it is a command, not a sentiment. Judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come. The parable made the same point in farmer's language: let both grow together until the harvest, and the reason given was not tenderness toward weeds but the servant's incapacity — he cannot reliably tell them apart, and would tear up wheat in his zeal to pull tares, because the darnel wears the wheat's own coat until the ear betrays it. So the prohibition is double. You may not pronounce another man a tare, because you cannot see well enough to be right and would do damage being wrong. And — this is the part that lands on the frightened — you may not pronounce yourself a tare either, finally, because that verdict too belongs to the harvest and not to the anxious self at dawn. No one who is awake this morning can know himself to be irreversibly a weed, because the sorting that would settle it has not been handed to him. It has been kept, deliberately, in the only hand that can see the grain. And the gap between now and that harvest is not an oversight. It is the whole room in which repentance lives — the not-yet that mercy holds open on purpose, so that the door marked today stays a door.

Every Lemon for Lemonade

Lay Romans 8 over the field now, because it changes what the reapers at the edge are even waiting on. And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God — all things, and the word will not be talked down to a polite subset. What the enemy sowed by night, God is not merely permitted but pleased to repurpose by day; what was meant for evil he bends to good; there is no lemon in the whole field he cannot press to lemonade. This is the farmer's refusal to waste. And it tells you something about his disposition toward the weed itself, if you will hear it: he is not eager for the burning. The Lord is not willing that any should perish, and any is any — not any of a favored row, not any already evidently grain, but any, the word as wide as the field. So ask the question the way a farmer would, because he is one. Would a farmer rather a weed in his ripe crop die to itself and rise as grain — or rather send the reapers down that row, knowing, as every farmer knows, that you cannot rip a tare from a ripening field without tearing the wheat beside it? The rooting-up is the costly option even for God. The dying-to-self is the one that saves the whole row. Of course he is rooting for them. He is a farmer. The answer explains itself.

How a Tare Is Re-Sown

So how is it done — by what mechanism does a weed become grain, when the botany forbids it? By the only mechanism the gospel ever names, and it is not improvement. It is death and resurrection, the corn of wheat falling into the ground. Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. The tare does not get upgraded into wheat across the season. The tare dies — dies to the self it was sown as, dies to the old claim and the old hand — and is raised a single kernel of an entirely different kind. That is the whole transaction, and it is available to a will this morning. He woke. He has breath and a choice still resident in his hands, and the very mercy that let him wake with them is the standing evidence that the harvest has not yet closed on him. He has only to ask the Creator for the thing the Creator is already disposed to give: not a better version of the weed, but the death of it, and a new creature raised where it fell. The free will is the tell. A field already harvested does not deliberate. The fact that the question can still be asked is the proof that the asking is not yet too late.

A Single Day, and the Field It Can Fill

And what that one re-sown kernel becomes is the part that should arrest the despairing utterly. For the kernel that falls and dies does not rise alone; the parable of the sower fixes the yield — some thirtyfold, some sixty, some a hundred. One grain into good ground becomes a harvest. Now hold that beside the age we actually live in, where a single soul may have spent an entire life as a determined tare and amassed, by that very determination, a vast following — a reach, an audience, a name that turns heads. Let me say the dangerous thing carefully, because the careless form of it is a lie. It is possible, in such an age, for a person who spent his whole life sowing against the wheat to fall into the ground in one day of sincere testimony and bring forth, from the field his old life gathered, more grain than Paul gathered in his earthly ministry. But hear the carefulness. The miracle is the dying, not the audience. Reach is not fruit; it is field size, and seed on a vast rocky ground still withers fast and feeds no one. The platform only multiplies whatever the soil truly is. What converts a weed is the kernel's death; what the following then determines is merely how wide the harvest runs if the death was real. So the scale is real, and it is a reason for hope and not for spectacle: the same God who can re-sow one row can, through one re-sown life, sow a continent. But he does it through the grain that died, never through the husk that only grew loud.

Rooting for Them All

Which brings it home to the present, and to the news that occasioned these words, which I will name as a circumstance and not as a roster — because the whole of what I have written forbids me the roster. There are lists being scoured this week; circles of the powerful are being read out and weighed, peerages traced, works tallied, attendances catalogued, and the air is thick with the outward audit that scripture never assigned to anyone. I will not run it. I cannot see the grain in those rows and neither can the scourers, and the One who can has reserved the telling for a harvest that has not come. So I do the only thing the parable leaves a servant free to do, which is to hope without sorting. Among any such circle there are, for all I can know, both kinds growing together — and the wheat I could not pick out, and the tare I could not pick out, are alike still standing in a field where the reapers have lined up but not yet moved. That gap is mercy, and it is mercy aimed at every head in the row without exception. If even one among them woke this morning wondering, honestly, whether grace would stretch as far as the life he has led — the answer the whole field is shouting is that the gap itself is the stretch, that the reapers waiting is the patience, that the breath in his lungs is the open door. A tare cannot become wheat. But a tare can die, and what rises where it died is not a tare at all. I am rooting for them. All of them. God, I am fairly sure, is rooting harder.

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A word on what this essay does and does not claim. Its central counsel — that the wheat-and-tares parable is read by its own given key as a matter of sowing and origin rather than fixed biological kind; that scripture testifies to genuine transformation across the apparent line, in Saul of Tarsus made Paul and in the doctrine of the new creature; that the believer is forbidden by Matthew 13 and 1 Corinthians 4 to pronounce the tare-or-wheat verdict on others or finally on himself before the harvest; and that the open interval before that harvest is itself an act of mercy in which repentance remains freely available — stands on its own and is offered to any reader. The scriptural anchors are Matthew 13:24-30 and 13:36-43 on the wheat and tares and the parable's own explanation as a matter of sowing, John 12:24 on the corn of wheat that must die to bear fruit, Mark 4:8 and 4:20 on the thirty-, sixty-, and hundredfold yield, 2 Corinthians 5:17 on the new creature, 1 Timothy 1:13 on Paul's prior life and the mercy he obtained, Romans 8:28 on all things working together for good, 2 Peter 3:9 on God's unwillingness that any should perish, and 1 Corinthians 4:5 on judging nothing before the time. The reading of free will and present breath as evidence that the harvest has not yet closed on a given soul is offered as pastoral encouragement and not as a doctrine of assurance; assurance, as the companion essays argue, rests on the character of the One who promised and not on any self-issued verdict. The distinction between reach and fruit — that a wide following multiplies field size but does not itself constitute harvest, the conversion being the miracle and the platform merely its scale — is held deliberately against any reading that would equate audience with fruitfulness. The reference to lists of the powerful being examined this week describes a documented public circumstance and deliberately names no individual and pronounces on no person's standing, in keeping with the essay's own central claim that this sorting belongs to God alone. Disclosure: this essay was drafted with the assistance of Claude, an AI system made by Anthropic; the conflict is named so the reader can weigh the argument accordingly. The argument stands or falls on its own.