What does Matthew 13:41 mean?
Jesus is describing something that will take place at the "end of the age" during a time of judgment on the earth. This is part of His explanation of a parable (Matthew 13:36). This end-times sorting is represented by the time of harvest, when the farmer's reapers will gather all the weeds that have grown up with the wheat to be bundled and burned (Matthew 13:24–30). Jesus has explained that the reapers in the parable represent His servants, the angels.Now Jesus says directly that He, the Son of Man, will send these angels to gather out of His kingdom all "causes of sin and lawbreakers." The Hebrew phrase these words are taken from may have originally appeared in Zephaniah 1:3. The phrase is apparently difficult to translate. Whatever it means exactly, it is clear from Jesus' teaching that the angels will take out of the world—by then entirely transformed into the kingdom of Jesus—everything that belonged to Satan or causes evil to continue in the world. This would include people and, perhaps, other things.
The fate of these children of the evil one is revealed in the following verse.
Matthew 13:36–43 follows Jesus away from the crowds and back into a house with His disciples. They ask Him to explain the parable of the wheat and the weeds (Matthew 13:24–30). Jesus tells them He is the farmer, and the field is the world. The good wheat seeds represent the children of the kingdom, and the weeds—also known as "tares," likely an inedible plant that looks like wheat—are the children of the Devil who planted them. The harvest is the judgment at the end of the age. Then the reapers, God's angels, will gather all the wicked and all forms of sin and throw them into the fiery furnace. The righteous, though, will shine in the kingdom of their Father.
Matthew 13 focuses mainly on a series of parables. Jesus first describes these to a large crowd along the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Later, in a house, He explains to the disciples the meanings of the parables of the sower, the weeds, and the fish caught in the net. Jesus then travels to Nazareth, teaches in the synagogue, and is rejected by the people of His original hometown.
