16TH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR
The Gospel text for this Sunday is a long one. It is taken from the section of Matthew’s Gospel that presents the “wisdom teaching” of Jesus. It contains three parables about the kingdom of heaven (a term used by Matthew; other New Testament writings generally use the phrase “the kingdom of God) – a kingdom that Jesus never defines but only describes in story form. Since the Community of believers in Jesus was seen to be the initiation of the Kingdom, Jesus gives some important lessons for the Community to learn to be true to His idea of the Kingdom.
The first story is about the wheat and the weeds. The farmer plants good seed for the wheat, but weeds also appear. The servants ask if they should pull up the weeds. But the farmer says “no”; let them grow together lest they pull up some of the wheat as well. At harvest time the wheat and the weeds can be separated.
I always smile when I read this story because it reminds me of my mother. At a certain point she “banned” me from helping in her garden. She told me: “you cannot tell the difference between a weed and a flower and you are removing some of my most beautiful flowers.”
In the parable Jesus was trying to tell the disciples not to be surprised if there is both good and bad in the kingdom. There will always be saints and sinners in the Church. There has been a tension all through Church History between those who want the Christian community to consist only of saints and who therefore want to “weed out” all the sinners and those who see the Church as always being made up of saints and sinners. The first group wanted the sinners excommunicated, or sent into exile, or killed to preserve the good plants. And so the Church has had an inquisition, a persecution of “heretics”, a burning of “witches”, etc.
It is not always easy for the second group in the Church who are willing to allow the good and the bad to live side by side. We have seen this expressed in response to the Royal Commission’s Hearings on the Sexual Abuse of Children. There are those who would like to “pull out” all the weeds – all who have been accused of evil doing, even though they might be innocent; they want a Church only of saints. There are others who accept that the Church will always be made up of saints and sinners and that the final “sorting” must be left up to God. In the meantime we must acknowledge and regret the presence of the weeds but also be careful about not injuring the good wheat. What sometimes looks like a weed is really good seed.
When I was in charge of the formation of our seminarians I found this to be a tension in carrying out my responsibilities. On occasion the Superiors would ask me to dismiss a seminarian because he seemed not “to fit in”. But because I knew him and his background and realized his goodness and commitment I found I had to disagree with them and did not favour his expulsion. In almost all the cases on which we had a disagreement the men turned out to be superb, creative, and extraordinary missionaries. Maybe it was my mother who taught me to be more careful about what looked like weeds when they were really flowers.
The other two parables invite Jesus’ disciples to be patient in the building up of the kingdom of heaven. A very small seed can become a great bush; a little yeast can provide the needed quality for a large batch of bread (this didn’t make much sense to me until I spent one summer working with the Brother in our bakery in the seminary and we baked 200 loaves of bread a week!). We don’t always have to be the bush or the bread to start off with. Sometimes we are asked to be just a seed or a bit of yeast – and then let God take care of the rest.