Today’s Gospel is another case where Jesus gives a parable
and then explains it himself. This makes the job of preaching both easier and
more difficult. The interpretation is already given to me; how arrogant would I
have to be to come up with a different interpretation of the parable than the
Lord gives, yet I am struggling with the interpretation today because it is not
easy to understand. I wanted to say, after reading the first half of the Gospel,
that the field stands for each one of us and the good seed is the good that God
has put in us and the bad seed is the sin that Satan has put in us and at the
end of time God will only keep what is good and burn away what is bad. I wanted
to say that, but I cannot, because Jesus says differently.
Jesus tells us that the field is the world and the good
plants are the children of the kingdom and the bad plants are the children of
the evil one. At the end of time, the children of the evil one are collected up
and burned. I struggle with understanding this interpretation because it seems
to divide the world so starkly between good people and bad people when most of
us are a mix. I can see the wheat, the saints, and some weeds are pretty clear,
but I do not know where I fall.
We need to examine the parable more closely. When I first
read it, I thought that the enemy had snuck into the field and planted the
weeds among the wheat. I see now that that is not necessarily the case. We are told
that “an enemy has done this”, but we are not told what exactly “this” is that
the enemy did. Indeed, it is not the case that the enemy planted his own seeds.
All human beings are created in God’s image and likeness. There are not two
species of human beings, the good and the bad. Just as all humanity is one, so
the weeds and wheat are one. It is not the case that some of the seed was bad,
as if some people are just bad seeds, as if some people are bad from the
beginning, with no hope of salvation. No. The weeds and the wheat are one. If
we were to check the DNA of the weeds we would find that they are actually
wheat. Nothing else was planted.
So what happened that some of the wheat is referred to as
weeds? The difference between a stalk of wheat and a weed is the fruit, the
kernels of wheat. If a stalk of wheat grew up and never produced any kernels of
wheat, we should call it a weed. So it is that by remaining faithful to the
interpretation that Jesus gives we begin to understand the parable correctly.
Satan does not have the power of creation. He could never create something, not
even something as good as a weed. He is the destroyer. He can only ruin some of
the wheat so that it does not produce fruit.
If you plant a vegetable garden, and one of the bean plants or
one of the rose bushes fails to produce anything at all, what is it but one
large weed? It was a good seed; it has gotten plenty of sunlight and water, but
in the middle of the night your enemy crept up to your garden and poisoned the
plant. It did not die; it still grew up, but it never produces any fruit. This is
what has happened to God’s field.
Now we have a good image of the field! Properly speaking
there is not a single weed in the whole field. Billions of stalks of wheat are
growing, but some are producing fruit and some are not. Some stalks are tall
and thick as tree trunks, full of wheat kernels, more perhaps that seems
possible. There is St. Francis and, next to him, St. Clare. You could feed a village
off each of those stalks of wheat. Now I see the rest of us Christians: some
are growing well, but many of us are sickly stalks, short and thin. Too small
for so late in the season. A few buds perhaps. We will see later whether they
produce any fruit at all. There are other stalks that have no fruit on them.
They are tall and thin and useless.
So let us consider, we stalks of wheat, what is the fruit and
what is the poison. The fruit is the part of a plant that does not exist for
its own sake. The fruit is a gift from the plant to the world. So too with us
people: if we are existing only for ourselves, if we plan our lives, beginning
to end, so that we have what we want and we take everything we can get, are we
not weeds? Our fruit is service for others, which service has at its heart
love. Our fruit is love: love of God and love of neighbor. A human being who
does not love with unselfish love is as useless as a stalk of wheat that does
not produce grains.
I do not know so much about botany to be able to identify
exactly which poison could prevent wheat from producing fruit, but I do know
about the poisons which prevent us from loving. They are Lust, Greed, Gluttony,
Laziness, Envy, Wrath, and Pride. These dangerous poisons have been spilled
throughout the world; our world is like a toxic waste dump. These poisons
course through our arteries, stopping us from loving, from giving unselfishly.
Jesus’ parable and interpretation does not separate the world
into two types of people. All of the wheat was poisoned, except a couple of
stalks. When we see someone growing strong and producing fruit, love beyond measure,
we should know that they did not start out like that. They had the same poisons
in their heart as us, but they overcame all the poisons which prevented them
from fulfilling the purpose of their life.
