AIM: To show the hearers
that the Church is a Church of sinners, not a
gathering of the righteous.
A number of you are gardeners. Why on
earth, you are probably wondering, does the man in this story tell his workers not to pull up the weeds in his field?
The story, like many passages in Holy Scripture, makes us shake our heads and
wonder how we can make sense of it all. Jesus tells us this story to show us
that God’s ways are radically different from ours. The story is also Jesus’
answer to his self-righteous critics who complained: “This man receives
sinners, and eats with them” (Lk 15:2). Why?
The suggestion of the farmer’s slaves that
they should pull up the weeds in his field was entirely reasonable. The farmer
rejects the suggestion nonetheless. There will be a time for separating the
weeds from the wheat, he says. But that is later, at the harvest. Until then,
he orders, “let them grow together.”
‘That is how I am acting,’ Jesus is
saying. ‘That is how God acts — like this farmer.’ Jesus knew there were many
people in the crowds which flocked to hear him who did not accept his message.
Challenged by his critics to send such people away, however, Jesus refused. The
time for separation and judgment, he said, was not yet. That would come later.
The prophets of Jesus’ people, right up to
and including John the Baptist,
believed that when God sent his promised Messiah, the first thing this anointed
servant of the Lord would do would be to judge people. Yet when Jesus came he
did not judge. He ate with sinners. He prevented the stoning of the woman taken
in adultery. He proclaimed God’s love for all – given freely and lavishly,
whether people deserved God’s love (like the good Samaritan aiding the wounded
man by the wayside), or whether they did not deserve it (like the younger
brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son who came home, after wasting his
entire inheritance, not with true sorrow for his sin, but simply to put food on
his table and a roof over his head). Jesus healed people, without investigating
first whether they repented of their sins or not.
Jesus spoke of judgment too, of course.
But he made it clear that this would come later. And it would be based on how
people responded to God’s freely given love. In his great parable of judgment,
the story of the sheep and the goats, Jesus said that the measure of our
response to God’s love would be how much, or how little, we had done for people
in need.
Jesus’ message – proclaiming God’s love
first, and judgment later – and the story in today’s gospel of the wheat and
the weeds which explains this message, are important for all those who are
scandalized because his Church contains so many hypocrites: people who come to
Mass on Sunday, but whose lives the rest of the week are inconsistent with the
words they hear and speak in Church. There is no use trying to deny this. The
Church does contain hypocrites. It
always has. It always will. And it would be dishonest to pretend that they all
laypeople.
Jesus never promised that every baptized
Catholic would be part of his heavenly kingdom, any more than he promised the
crowds who flocked round him in Palestine
Separating true believers from hypocrites,
however, is for God not for us. “If you pull up the weeds, you might uproot the
wheat with them,” Jesus warns. Every attempt to create a “pure” Church of true
believers has ended in failure. Only God can purify his Church; for only God
can see people’s hearts. If God chooses to delay his work of final judgment and
purification, it is for the reason given in our first reading: God’s “mastery
over all things” makes him “lenient to all.” God can afford to be generous and
merciful because he is all powerful.
The story tells us of God’s patience. It
warns us not to be less patient than God. Which one of us would not like to
have a Church in which there were no hypocrites? In which everyone from First
Communion children to the Pope always practiced what they preached? That would
be beautiful, wouldn’t it? But creating such a pure Church is God’s work, not
ours. And the time for God’s final purification is not yet.
Note that I said “final purification.” Purification
of the Church through repentance and forgiveness of us, its members, goes on
all the time, and must go on. The Second Vatican Council said that the Church
is “always in need of being purified” (LG 8, end). The painful crisis which
burst upon the Church in our country fifteen years ago through the misconduct
of some priests and bishops is part of this ongoing purification.
The time for final purification, however, is not yet. That “not yet” contains a
warning, and a burden, but also encouragement. The warning is contained in the farmer’s order at harvest time: “First
collect the weeds and tie them in bundles for burning.” God delays his judgment
because he is patient, to give us every chance to decide for him while there is
still time. One day, however, there will be no more chances. Judgment will
begin. That is the warning. The burden
is having to live in a Church of sinners, where many are hypocritical and
insincere. The story’s encouragement
is its message that the Lord’s Church has room for everyone.
I’d like to leave you with a question, for
your own reflection: If the Church were really as pure as we would all like it
to be, can we be confident that there would be room in this pure Church for
ordinary, weak sinners like ourselves?
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