Overcoming evil with goodness

"There was a man who sowed good seed in his field; but when he was asleep an enemy sowed bad seed too." The mystery of good and evil in the world and the strain between them: a veritable tug-of-war between good and bad, which has always existed and will last forever.

On the one side there is man, who can know what is true and seek what is good, for so has God made him; on the other side there is evil and its alluring power on every human being, including ourselves. Our own personal experience, sadly enough, goes to confirm that.

When the farmers in today's parable asked their master where was the bad seed coming from, his prompt reply was: "An enemy has done it!" The mystery of good and evil in the world is a problem which has occupied and confused man's mind from time immemorial. But only in the light of the Christian faith can we attain some understanding of it.

Sure enough, bad people do exist in the world, and their evil influence can be gauged in every aspect of human life. How many times we have realised how true this is at our own expense! To say that all evil comes from the devil is surely an oversimplification.

Whatever the devil is in reality, he is, if anything, the personification of all that is evil, including the alluring power of many things around us which attract us all the time and often make us act without any reference to what is to good or bad for us as rational beings and Christians.

Wherever we see good, we generally speaking take it for granted. But what is morally bad soon appears so in our own conscience. It would be wonderful if that were enough for us to reject it and have nothing to do with it.

Ours is no paradise on earth. The struggle between good and evil, between the good seed and the bad seed, will only cease altogether after death. Patience, perseverance, prayer: these are the three antidotes at our disposal: not to eliminate all evil around us, but to prevent it from causing us serious spiritual harm. After all, human consent is required for any morally bad act, just as it is for any good and meritorious one.

We read two other parables in today's Gospel, both of them having to do with the same theme, if only indirectly. The first one tells us that the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds and yet is destined to grow into a large tree. And the third one says that God's kingdom is like a tiny bit of leaven which spreads throughout the whole mass and transforms it into something good and edible.

These two parables, like the first one, deal with the role of every good Christian in the environment in which he lives and in the world at large. That is the role of the Christian: not to live away from the world with all its dangerous enticements, but to be right in the midst of it, to be an instrument of change in a society in which greed and hatred often give way to social injustice and become the cause of widespread poverty and suffering.

No matter how small our own contribution may seem for the building up of a society of love, its ripple effect will spread to reach the farthest shores of human behaviour. Just as grace is more powerful than sin, so is goodness more "contagious" than evil.