The Parable of the Weeds among the Wheat and the Use of Antibiotics

If you have taken antibiotics that your doctor prescribed and dispensed, you may have experienced diarrhea. It is because the antibiotics not only killed “bad bacteria” but also “good bacteria” in your intestines.  

A lesson from this kind of experience with antibiotics can resonate with what we can learn from Jesus’ parable of the weeds among the wheat (Matthew 13:24-30). Though we think that it is not so difficult to distinguish weeds from wheat, the kind of weed in the parable is darnel, which resembles wheat. The Greek word used for its original text is “zizanion”, which means darnel, or spurious wheat. In other words, darnel and wheat look alike to each other, until they grow enough to start showing their ears.

In this parable, Jesus tells that the servants reported to their master about the presence of darnel in his wheat field.  Contrary to what they might have thought, the master told his servants not to pull darnel at this time, when they asked him if they should pull the darnel, growing in the wheat field. Jesus says that the master told them to wait until the harvest time to sort darnel from wheat.  According to Jesus, the master’s rational not to pull darnel at that time was not to inadvertently damage to the wheat, as pulling darnel prematurely may harm the wheat.  Pulling darnel too soon risks collateral damage to important crop, in other words.

Unless you are trained in bacteriology, many kinds of bacteria in the intestine may look alike, just as darnel and wheat are difficult to distinguish until later time in their growth. Killing “good bacteria” as a collateral damage to kill “bad bacteria” by taking antibiotics is like unintentionally hurting wheat in pulling darnel too soon. When antibiotics are used injudiciously, we not only damage “good bacteria” but also weaken our immune system.

In this application of the parable of the weeds among wheat into the context of antibiotics use, the kingdom of God addressed in the parable is compared to our total health. We can better understand what Jesus meant by the kingdom of God through this parable as we reflect on how we maintain our total health in dealing with the fine balance between “good bacteria” and “bad bacteria” in our system.

May the parable of the weeds among the wheat serve as a “good medicine” for today’s medicine to use antibiotics more conservatively for the sake of our total health.