Today’s readings: Wisdom 12, 13.16-19; Romans 8, 26-27; Matthew 13, 24-43.
Atheists are right to find difficulty believing in a God whom we believe to be omnipotent, all-loving and caring, and yet who seems to be not so efficient in eradicating evil and its effects on man and society.
Jesus taught in parables to help us see the crisis that otherwise cannot be seen. A parable, like a poem, is a teaser.
John Howard Joder, a mostly influential theologian and ethicist, claims that Jesus’ parables did not simply represent, as we are led to think, a mere pedagogical choice of story-telling, but rather a more understandable way to communicate to illiterate crowds.
If it were so, then what need was there for his disciples to repeatedly ask for an explanation, as we find in today’s gospel? There must have been a depth towards which Jesus was seeking to draw his disciples.
In his book A Cross-Shattered Church, Stanley Hauerwas claims the familiar character of the parables is the reason why they are so deceptive and why we so often get them wrong.
They deal with matters that are so everyday, like today’s field where weeds grow alongside the wheat, that we may easily take them to be simply descriptive of realities that are evident to the naked eye.
But why would Jesus tell a parable to speak of what is evident to all? Instead, Jesus is seeking to draw us closer into his mystery, into a depth of meaning that is veiled.
From our standpoint as believers, or even taken collectively as Church, we may find it quite easy to distinguish what is wheat from what is weed around us. But is that the deep truth Jesus came to reveal to us? Can our reading of reality ignore the apocalyptic character Jesus himself is attributing to this parable?
Through today’s parable, Jesus is not simply saying look out because evil exists. That is in evidence and we need no special revelation for that. In his explanation, Jesus speaks of “the sower of the good seed” who is the Son of Man, and the enemy who sowed the weed who is the devil.
What Jesus is speaking about is not simply ‘do good, avoid evil’. In his letter to the Ephesians, St Paul writes: “We are not fighting against human beings but against the wicked spiritual forces in the heavenly world”.
That is precisely why, in the second reading from Romans today, he writes of “the Spirit that comes to help us in our weakness”.
Without sounding dramatic or fundamentalist, this is what we used to term spiritual warfare. There are battles going on in present-day culture in various areas where the mind and soul are concerned.
Our crisis, contrary to what we normally think, is not simply a crisis of values. It is basically a spiritual crisis which can only be won by means of spiritual tools. “The Spirit comes to help us in our weakness”. We need the Spirit who is our defender, our healer, our source of wisdom and life.
The dramatic language which Jesus uses in explaining the parable, contextualising it at the end of time, unveils the ambiguity of all our attempts at justice.
We would all and always want “to uproot the weeds”, both in the Church and in society. But God thinks otherwise. “Let the wheat and the weeds both grow together until harvest”. We tend to be tired of waiting. But God is patient.
It is the perennial conflict between God’s wisdom and ours. The wisdom of the top men in the religious system at the time of Jesus condemned Jesus himself as weed to be uprooted in order not to let him disturb the peace.
Whenever religion turns into ideology, it loses perspective and seeks to anticipate harvest time which exclusively belongs to God.