The Time that Is Allotted to Us (16th Sunday - Cycle A)

The Parable of the Wheat and Weeds, as the first parable from the Gospel Reading for today is often called, deals with age-old questions: Why does God allow moral evil to persist in society? Why doesn't God just remove all evildoers from the world? Or why doesn't he make all people act with goodness? A great deal has been written on this subject throughout Christian history.

At the heart of the answer is free-will. God is love and he made the world out of love in order to share his love with us. For us to be able to experience his love in a meaningful way, we have to have free-will. Otherwise, we would be just like robots programmed to respond in a certain way. By creating free-will, God takes a risk, because there is always the danger that we will abuse our freedom and turn against his love. But God loves us so much that he accepts this risk so that we might be able to experience his love.

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Image Credit: Sunset over the wheat field featured, from Wikimedia Commons.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race (15th Sunday - Cycle A)

In his parables, Jesus often uses incongruous images or anecdotes, which would have made people in the culture of his time do a double take. The purpose of this technique is twofold. One is to engage the audience all the more by making them think through the incongruities. The other is to illustrate certain points more clearly through exaggeration. For us today, removed as we are from the culture in which Jesus lived, the rhetorical technique is harder to follow. We have to make an effort to enter into the culture of the time.

For example, the parable of the lost sheep would have been very startling in the culture of Jesus. In the story, the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine sheep to chase after the one sheep that was lost. Such an act would have been incredibly reckless for a shepherd whose entire livelihood depended on safeguarding the flock. He could not have risked losing all the other sheep in order to save the one. He would have had to cut his loses and protect what he still had.

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Image Credit: Irrigated Wheat field, from Wikimedia Commons.

The Flesh and the Spirit (14th Sunday - Cycle A)

In different parts of the New Testament, we see a dichotomy delineated between the spirit and the flesh. We have to be careful as to how we interpret these passages. We could easily assume that the "spirit" here is synonymous with the spiritual, and the "flesh" with the material. But the meaning is a bit more complex. Flesh, in this context, refers to anything that takes us away from God; whereas spirit refers to anything that takes us toward God. Some material things, depending on what they are and how we approach them, can take us toward God. Some spiritual things, again depending on what they are and how we approach them, can take us away from God.

Christianity does not consider the material world to be evil. We believe that the material world is good in its nature, but fallen and marred by sin. Human nature too is fallen due to sin, and as a result, we have concupiscence, that is to say, a tendency toward sin. Due to concupiscence, our desires are disordered, and we are continually tempted to use the material world in an unwholesome way, harmful both to ourselves and to the world around us.

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Image Credit: Icon of the Resurrection of Jesus - Resurrection Gate, from Wikimedia Commons.