Readings (Year A):
Wisdom 12:13, 16 – 19
Psalms 86:5 – 6, 9 – 10, 15 – 16
Romans 8:26 – 27
Matthew 13:24 – 43
Reflection: Leave the judgment to God
Today’s gospel is troubling. Read as a metaphysical parable, Jesus seems to be confirming that fire and brimstone are real. Polemicists often turn to parables such as these to “prove” that, come harvest time, the wheat and the chaff will be divided. And the gospel truth is, for the doers of wicked weeds, some very bad news.
However, taking a wide-angle view of Jesus’s speech, tarrying with the under-interrogated aspects of his lesson, and considering alternative takeaways from these parables (yes, parables plural: the wheat and the weeds being just one analogy Jesus uses to make his point) will be both theologically useful and spiritually comforting. Rather than being a statement on certainty (heaven awaits the true believer and hell is certainly for the sinful) what if Jesus’s lesson is about patience and the discomfort of waiting, especially waiting when we are uncertain about what the future holds?
To get at Jesus’s parables, I’d like to detour through an anecdote of my own. Once, when she was a child, my sister-in-law was tasked with weeding her father’s garden. She ended up pulling up whole plants along with a few weeds. How often has an honest mistake gotten us into a problem that was bigger than the one we set out to fix?
In Jesus’ parable, the landowner instructs his workers to let the weeds grow alongside the good plants, until harvest time. If we weed out the suspected weeds too early, we might uproot our good crop, too. Interesting advice from the master gardener. Just wait. Uncomfortable advice, for sure. Live amongst the weeds for now (as an amateur gardener myself, this advice is discomforting and pointed). Don’t act prematurely, Jesus seems to council. God’s grace-filled activity will guide us, in due time.
A second parable in this sequence often goes unnoticed, overshadowed by those pesky weeds: “He spoke to them another parable. ‘The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed with three measures of wheat flour until the whole batch was leavened.’” Reading the two parables in sequence, a different message comes into focus. It is simple, but it is also uncomfortable: wait. Just wait. Don’t go pulling weeds willy-nilly, don’t go rushing your harvest or messing with your baking. By God’s grace the yeast will rise, and the plants will grow. Leave the judgement to God, whose time is not our own.
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