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.
The moral brokenness that is present in society is the result of human beings abusing their free-will. God permits human beings to use their free-will for good or for ill until the Final Judgment at the end of the world, following the Second Coming of Christ, when he will refashion the whole order of the universe. After the Final Judgment, those who had chosen God's love will live with him in Heaven for all eternity in infinite joy, and those who had rejected his love will be separated from him from all eternity, suffering the torment of being without the only reality that can fulfill the desires of the human heart.
However, as history unfolds, God does not just stand by and observe, leaving humanity to its own devices. That would be the Deist and, to some extent, the humanist perspective. Instead, God is very much involved in the history of the world and in our day-to-day lives, always giving us the grace to help us to use our free-will for good. But the choice is ours. It is for us to choose to cooperate with God's grace. He will never force us. We have until the end of our lives to embrace the grace that God is seeking to give to us. Our free-will continues until the moment of our death. After that point, the choice we have made becomes locked in and we are each judged individually. The individual judgment of the dead becomes public at the Final Judgment at the end of the world. Those who are still alive at that time are judged as the world ends.
Our goal in life as Christians is to open our lives to God's love more and more each day, each hour, each moment. The fullness of God's love comes to us through the sacraments and the other prayers and practices of the Church. Our culture encourages us to achieve and it is good to seek to reach some goals in life. But at the end of our lives, no achievement will be meaningful if we have not accepted God's offer of love. That is what we must focus on first and foremost.
Furthermore, if we truly accept God's love, we will also want to share his love with others. His love will flow through us so that others can experience his love through our behavior. We will also want to share with others the Good News of Christ with all those in our lives, so that they too can embrace the infinite love that God seeks to give to each of us.
But, we might wonder, what can we truly accomplish through our limited abilities in this life? Aren't our efforts just a drop in the ocean? That's where the Parable of the Mustard Seed and the Parable of the Yeast from the Gospel Reading for this Sunday comes into focus. God knows that, in the larger scheme of things, we can only achieve a little. That is all he asks of us. Not that we do little, but that we offer all that we can, even if it is little. God then will bless our efforts and bring about great things through them.
The early disciples were not great public figures or esteemed scholars or wealthy movers and shakers of society. They came from humble circumstances and had no formal training for spreading the Gospel. But they gave all of themselves and God worked wonders through them. The small ragtag group of disciples set out to covert the whole world. The mighty Roman Empire tried to eradicate them from the face of the earth more than once. But instead, Rome, the capital of the empire, became the center of the Church.
God took the yeast that was the first disciples and transformed the world through them. He took the mustard seed that was the early Church and grew a magnificent tree from it. Such is the power of God's grace. Today, as we look around at society and see a great deal of decay, we should bear in mind all that God has already accomplished in history. True, in the Western World, the faith is under sever attack. Human sinfulness has marred or torn down much of the good that has been built up over centuries. We might wonder how we can possibly turn the tide. But our task is simple. We must give of ourselves all that we can, and God will do the rest. God's magnificent plan will come to fruition in the fulness of time.
As always, we should remember that we do not succeed through our own strength. At the same time, God will not force us to act rightly either. He gives us the grace that we need to act well, but it is for us to make the choice to accept his grace. The Second Reading in particular reflects on how the Holy Spirit helps us to pray. We cannot pray adequately through our own efforts, so we should ask the Holy Spirit to guide our prayer, to pray through us, so that our prayer is united with the will of God.
In all things, we need to ask for God to help us. We should never try to go it alone. This message in particular might be hard to hear for Americans, especially American professionals living in the Pacific Northwest, where the culture values a sense of rugged individualism and self-reliance. But spiritual self-reliance is, simply put, spiritual suicide. Without God, we can do nothing. But, as St. Paul put it, we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us. (Philippians 4:13)
The Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament, from where the First Reading for this Sunday is taken, elaborates on the need for God's grace in great detail. The Old Testament texts can be divided into three main categories: The Historical Books, the Prophetic Books, and Wisdom Literature, which includes Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Sirach, and Wisdom, from where this Sunday's reading is taken. To use a very broad characterization, the Prophetic Books comment on the overall structures of humanity and Wisdom Literature focuses on how to live our individual lives well.
At the heart of Wisdom Literature is the principle that all of our actions need to be grounded in God's Wisdom. Any action that is not will lead to ruin. God's Wisdom, as described in the Old Testament, anticipates our fuller understanding of the Holy Trinity today. The Wisdom of God is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, Christ himself, who has come among us as one of us. Thus, true wisdom is to be grounded in Christ, to live in Christ, to let the love of Christ live in us and flow out through us to the world.
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The readings for Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A are:
Wisdom 12:13, 16-19
Psalm 86:5-6, 9-10, 15-16
Romans 8:26-27
Matthew 13:24-43
The full text can be found at the USCCB website.
Image Credit: Sunset over the wheat field featured, from Wikimedia Commons.
