OF WHEAT, WEEDS, & THE WAIT

Reflections for the Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time: Wisdom 12:13, 16-19, Romans 8:26-27, & Matthew 13:24-43

The Bible employs a wide range of rich images to refer to the Church: bride of Christ (Mk 2:18-20; Jn 3:29; Rom 7:1-4), the Temple of God (2 Cor 5:1; 1 Pet 2:4-8), the Flock of Christ (Lk 12:32; Jn 10:1-16; Acts 20:28), the body of Christ (Eph 4:4-13; Rom 12:1-31), the Vineyard of God (John 15:5), etc., This Sunday’s Gospel presents a lesser-known yet equally profound image for the Church: a field of wheat and weeds. What better image to represent our contemporary Church plagued by abuse, divisions, and corruption, while at the same time serving as a sign of hope, conscience, and charity? The servants of the parable are understandably puzzled at the discovery of the weeds in their master’s field. They ask, 'Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where have the weeds come from?' Their proposed solution to the ‘problem’ is quite logical too. They wish to uproot the weeds. The Master, however, takes a rather surprising approach. He obliges his servants to wait and “let them grow together until the harvest”. Why wait?

1. Wait, it’s His Church: In the field of the wheat and the weeds, the Master sees the prototype of His Church: a blend of wheat and weeds, of the virtuous and the weak, of the healthy and the sick, of good and bad fish (Matt 13:47), of well-dressed and under-dressed guests (Mat 22:10-11). The Catechism of the Catholic Church (no827) underlines this paradox as the very nature of our ecclesial identity when it remarks, “The Church, clasping sinners to her bosom, at once holy and always in need of purification, follows constantly the path of penance and renewal. All members of the Church, including her ministers, must acknowledge that they are sinners. In everyone, the weeds of sin will still be mixed with the good wheat of the Gospel until the end of time. Hence the Church gathers sinners already caught up in Christ’s salvation but still on the way to holiness”.

In the Master who prohibits his servants from weeding the counter-productive weeds, Jesus wants us to stay in touch with this inalienable reality of His Church: we are a permanent work in progress. The Church is divine and human at the same time. It is made up of the living stones of individual human persons, built into a believing community gathered around Christ. Understandably, therefore, the Church mirrors the imperfections of its members while also reflecting the perfection of Christ, its head and bride groom. The Church is not perfect but it is beautiful. Though imperfect, it continues to help the world discover the beauty and the power of God at work in and through it. So the imperfections of the Church should not lead us to negativity, nor should its accomplishments blind its eyes to the opportunities of conversion and growth. Pope Benedict XVI, in his Spiritual Testament written on 29th August 2006 (one year into his pontificate) and released on 31st December 2022 (on the day of his death), affirms, “Jesus Christ is truly the way, the truth and the life — and the Church, with all its insufficiencies, is truly His body”.

2. Wait, His patience transforms: The Master’s directive perfectly reflects God’s transformative patience. The Father, who makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous (Matthew 5:45), does also find space for the wheat and the weeds alike in the farm of his heart. His providential love provides the same water and manure to the 'good' and the 'bad' crops. To him, no sinner is permanently lost and no saint is free from the danger of sin. As the first reading reminds us, God cares for all including the 'condemned'. His justice makes him lenient to all and teaches those who are just that they must also be kind. He obliges us to give good ground for hope and repentance. In a similar vein, Pope Francis observes in Amoris Laetitia no.297, “No one can be condemned forever because that is not the logic of the Gospel!”.

God’s patience can help the unthinkable and the implausible come to pass. His patient mercy can turn weeds into wheat-producing crops. Saint Augustine, speaking from his episcopal ministry says, “Many are at first weeds and later become wheat” and adds, “If these persons, when they are evil, were not tolerated patiently, they would never reach the praiseworthy change in their life” (Quaest. septend. in Ev., PL 35, 1371). John Mary Vianney, an acclaimed apostle of God’s patience at the confessional says, “that it is not the sinner who runs after the Good Lord to receive his forgiveness, but it is the Good Lord who runs after the sinner to plunge him into this mercy. God’s transformative patience, as Peter rightly affirms, “is our opportunity to be saved” (2 Peter 3:15).

3. Wait, He does not give up! Collapsology is a transdisciplinary thinking that began in France a decade ago heralding the imminent collapse of human civilization. Critical of the industrial civilization and its negative impacts on the world, these thinkers (Pablo Servigne, Raphaël Stevens, etc.,) use bestselling books, packed-out public lectures, and viral social media videos to prophesy the imminent and inescapable doom of all humanity. While the issues and concerns raised by this school of thought (climate change, scarcity of resources, vast extinctions, and natural disasters) are certainly just and demand our urgent attention, there is a fundamental problem with certain elements of its approach. The fatalistic affirmation of an apocalyptic scenario is resigned and depoliticising. It does not inspire any compassion or reaction and thus risks enticing people to just give up! Its political overtones can at best only lead to the emergence of an authoritarian providential figure. 

The parable of the weeds warns against such a collapsologist approach to the Church, understood as a field of wheat and weeds. Make no mistake, the judgement is indeed imminent. The wheat will be gathered into His barn while the weeds will be bundled to be burnt! However, contrary to the collapsologist view, the Master hasn’t given up on his farm yet. He has a practical reason for his refusal to uproot the weeds, “If you pull up the weeds you might uproot the wheat along with them”. He is sensitive to the fact that as long as the grass is green and the seeds have not formed, it is impossible to differentiate the weeds from the wheat with any certainty. While we rush to judge by our limited human standards and perceptions (John 8:15), God shows an anti-collapsologist choice to hope. As Czech theologian Tomas Halik asserts, the co-existence of weeds and wheat is an opportunity (Kairos) for us "to unclutter our eyes” (Patience with God)! Adel Bestavros, in his epigraph to the same book, writes, "patience with others is love, patience with self is hope, and patience with God is faith".

In warning the servants of the risk of rash judgements, the Master invites us to understand and accept the complex reality of ourselves, the society and the Church, farms that are made up of wheat and weed alike. In the words of Gabriel Marcel, we do live in a broken world filled with weeds like political crises, systemic oppression, terrorism, natural disasters, excessive violence, and the pillage of our planet Earth, but there are still positive reasons to hope. We live in a church in crisis, whose voice doesn’t seem to inspire credibility but reform and conversion are still plausible. There is no shortage of weeds in our society, families, and institutions but there are also fruits that can sustain us. Let us wait then, for the farm belongs to the Lord, who alone knows to rightly differentiate between the wheat and the weeds and His patience is transformative.