The Parable of the Wheat and Weeds, as the first parable from the Gospel Reading for today is often called, deals with age-old questions: Why does God allow moral evil to persist in society? Why doesn't God just remove all evildoers from the world? Or why doesn't he make all people act with goodness? A great deal has been written on this subject throughout Christian history.
At the heart of the answer is free-will. God is love and he made the world out of love in order to share his love with us. For us to be able to experience his love in a meaningful way, we have to have free-will. Otherwise, we would be just like robots programmed to respond in a certain way. By creating free-will, God takes a risk, because there is always the danger that we will abuse our freedom and turn against his love. But God loves us so much that he accepts this risk so that we might be able to experience his love.
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Image Credit: Sunset over the wheat field featured, from Wikimedia Commons.
