He said to them, “An enemy has done this.” The servants said to him, “So do you want us to go and pull them up?”
In this saying Jesus reveals that the presence of evil is the work of Satan, not of God. This answers the question of where evil comes from, when God created the world in goodness. The servants, who symbolize people, want to remove the weeds immediately, that is, evil. This expresses the natural human desire to restore justice quickly and to condemn evil at once. But in this parable Jesus shows that God’s plan is different. Here He allows good and evil to coexist together until the proper time is fulfilled.