English reading aid for the Zugemutet entry of July 19, 2026 (16th Sunday in Ordinary Time). The German original is the authoritative text.
Whoever sorts wants to belong with the right ones, and precisely that is the problem. On the strength it takes to bear a mixed field.
Venice, Basilica del Santissimo Redentore, July 24
This Sunday's Gospel tells of an act of sabotage. A man has sown good seed in his field; at night his enemy comes and sows weeds among the wheat: a grass deceptively similar to it until the ears appear. Darnel is its name, given for the dizziness its poisonous grains cause. When both come up, the servants want to weed, at once. The owner forbids it: you would pull up the wheat along with them. Below ground the roots have long grown into one another; whoever separates above destroys both below. Let them grow together until the harvest.
The parable is one of this Sunday's four readings. If you already follow this series, you know the procedure: the lectionary lays the texts before us, nothing gets chosen, and we listen to what comes across. In its field, different things stand side by side, and nobody weeds.
This Sunday, though, the voices lean to the same side. The Book of Wisdom praises a God who judges with leniency precisely because he has might at his disposal, and who grants sinners repentance. The Psalm (86) calls him good and forgiving. The Letter to the Romans (Rom 8) does not even trust our own praying: we do not know how to pray as we ought. Even the not-knowing is held. With the parable, that makes four voices for letting things stand.
The servants' urge is our own. An organization restructures, a unit is recut, and on the list stands a colleague everyone has long since sorted out: too unwieldy, too slow, no longer a fit. What stands on no list: the trust between two people that hangs on him, a knowledge documented nowhere, the climate of a corridor. Roots cannot be seen. Whoever pulls now, pulls up more.
The first reading has an answer to this urge, one you have to read twice: leniency comes from strength. Whoever carries can wait; whoever sorts could not carry at that moment.
There is a word for the urge, found of all places in a crime novel. Gianrico Carofiglio's narrator calls it ambiguphobia: the inability to bear that a situation allows more than one valid reading. The servants in the field are an early case. By the time they ask, the ears are long since out; so what they cannot bear is not the confusion but the side-by-side: a field that carries both and is meant to keep both. Better to separate wrongly than to wait rightly.
Then Jesus dismisses the crowds and goes into the house. There the disciples ask for an explanation, and the answer sorts: the good seed, those are the children of the kingdom. The weeds are the children of the evil one. The enemy is the devil, the harvest is the end of the age, the harvesters are angels. The weeds are collected and thrown into the fiery furnace; there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.
The patience of a moment ago still stands, but it now serves the deadline, not the field: the separating happens after all, only later, and more thoroughly. And the picture of the human being is a different one. Last week the same chapter told of the sower; one and the same seed fell on four kinds of ground, and every ground had a history. This explanation knows two kinds of seed. In it, someone is a child of the evil one before he has done anything.
Only: the crowd never heard this. The explanation falls inside the house, behind the door; outside, the last word is letting things grow. And the lectionary repeats the scene to this day: it allows a short form that ends exactly where the crowd was dismissed. Depending on which is chosen, a congregation hears this Sunday about patience or about judgment. The first reading had proclaimed the hope that sinners are granted repentance. Repentance and two kinds of seed: this Sunday carries both and does not even them out.
I would like to know that I belong with the wheat, and precisely that is the problem. The sorting comforts those who take themselves for wheat; the letting-grow comforts those who do not know. And even the patience is not entirely to be trusted: whoever lets things grow is also waiting for a harvest; the owner has long since given the harvesters their instructions. My patience, too, presumably has a date. Only the sickle, that much at least, lies in neither version in my hand.
Two weeks ago a classification stood here that I did not know what to do with. By now I know there are two ways to hear it: as a judgment on others, or as a question to me. The parable lets both grow. Until the harvest.
Readings: Wisdom 12:13, 16–19 · Psalm 86 · Romans 8:26–27 · Matthew 13:24–43 — USCCB, Sunday readings July 19, 2026. Quotations follow the New American Bible.