Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church

Homily for July 17, 2005
Liturgical Year A-Cycle I
16th Sunday in Ordinary Time
by Fr. John Carney
Topic: Weeds and Wheat
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Gospel
Mt 13:24-30
Jesus proposed another parable to the crowds, saying: "The kingdom of heaven may be likened to a man who sowed good seed in his field.  While everyone was asleep his enemy came and sowed weeds all through the wheat, and then went off.  When the crop grew and bore fruit, the weeds appeared as well.  The slaves of the householder came to him and said, 'Master, did you not sow good seed in your field?  Where have the weeds come from?' He answered, 'An enemy has done this.' His slaves said to him, 'Do you want us to go and pull them up?' He replied, 'No, if you pull up the weeds you might uproot the wheat along with them.  Let them grow together until harvest; then at harvest time I will say to the harvesters, "First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles for burning; but gather the wheat into my barn."'"
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Even a cursory reading of the gospels would indicate that Jesus spent a lot of time with sinners.  The time He spent with the righteous (the Pharisees, scribes, and other leaders of the religion) was generally used to castigate them, and chew them out.  So, it appears that He preferred to spend His time with sinners.  That doesn’t mean, of course, that He accepted sin.  If you would take the entire Bible and study who taught most about sin, I think you would find it was Christ.  “Go and sin no more.”  He talks about the “fires of Gehenna.”  Jesus talks about the “gnashing of teeth.”  “The wages of sin is death.”   He hated sin, and the reason He spoke about it so much was that He knew it could kill us, so He warned us about it.  Jesus taught Hell was real.  At the time of Christ, Hell was not a well developed doctrine in Judaism.  Some Jews believed there was no afterlife.  Others believed that there was a heaven.  But, generally, they all believed that either if you went to heaven or if there was no afterlife, your soul would go to a place called Sheol, which is like a place of nothingness.  Not hell, but not heaven either, just nothingness. Jesus clearly spoke about the fires of Gehenna and hell throughout His ministry. 
 
But He loved sinners, didn’t He?  Look at the cross. There’s His answer of how He loves us, who are sinners.  Today, in the simple to understand parable of the wheat and the weeds sown together, He tells us that we are not to weed out the sinners.  He didn’t do it in His public ministry.  There were sinners among the twelve – not only Judas, but Peter and James and John, and probably all of them.  God only knows the full story of their interactions with the Lord. If He didn’t weed anyone out, we not only shouldn’t but we can’t because we will end up weeding ourselves out as well.  That’s why He gives this beautiful analogy of the wheat and the weeds. 

I was reading William Barkley, a Presbyterian scripture scholar on this. He explains that the weed that they were talking about was well known to the Jews at the time.  They were all familiar with farming.  The weed was called Fools Wheat, and its correct name is Bearded Darnell.  It looks just like wheat.  So, you can’t separate the wheat from the weeds when the plants are young because they look the same.  When they get older, by the time you can distinguish the difference in them, their roots are all intertwined.  To pull out the weed would be to destroy the wheat as well.  So, what they would do, is at the harvest time, they just take the whole crop down.  In Asia, they still do it this way. Tthey take the rice and hit it and hit it, and the seed, the grains fall out.  The Bearded Darnell seed was different looking than the wheat.  It was pale grey, compared to the white seeds of the wheat.  Interestingly, too, the seed from that weed is slightly poisonous.  It has a narcotic effect and it would make a person very sick – another homily, another parable, for another time.  The whole point being, very clearly, that our job is not to weed out the sinners among us.  Let God do that.  Indeed, we are incapable of weeding out each other, as sinners, because we will be judged on our whole life.  Only God knows our whole life.  Only God knows our family of origin.  Only God knows what we have been through.  Only God will judge, thank God, because He will judge with great clemency, and great mercy.
 
In my life, I have seen people who I thought were really good people turn out to be bad people.  And I’ve seen some people I thought were bad people turn out to be good people.  At some point, you get old enough, and you say, “I’d just better shut up with the good/bad people, and try to respect everyone the best I can.”  Only God can judge, thank God.
 
Having said that, we know how pervasive sin is in our society and in our own lives.  It’s amazing how people can make a mess of their lives. Even though we kind of know where this is leading, we end up in this mess anyway.  Sometimes they make a mess of their lives from mistakes or stupidity, but mostly it’s from sin.  In the confessional I have heard stories of hatred, of violence and betrayal, infidelity, murder, theft, adultery, fornication, all sins that merit hell.  But they’re all sinners confessing their guilt and asking God’s pardon, which He gladly gives.  He’s delighted to give us His mercy.  God is patient with sinners, with us.  He calls us to patient with each other, also.  I love the saying that the Church is not a shrine for saints, but a shelter for sinners.  Indeed.
 
At best, the best of us, the holiest person here, (undoubtedly a woman, that’s just the way it is) is just a recovering sinner.  We are like alcoholics with sin.  We are addicted to the stuff.  If you know any recovering alcoholics, they will tell you, “I am a recovering alcoholic.”  They know they can lapse, and so they say, “I am a recovering alcoholic.”  At the best we are, we are recovering sinners, and liable to lapses in our holiness.  Over the years I have heard, especially with men, about such lapses. In my other parish, I would see people at funerals and weddings that I wouldn’t see the rest of the time.  I would trick them.  I would say, “Hey, I haven’t seen you!  I saw a guy that looked just like you going into the Jehovah’s Witness place.”  Hispanic Catholics in the East Mountains don’t want to be confused with other religions.  “No, Father!  That wasn’t me, Father!”  Inevitably, that guy would be at mass the next week, “Hey, how’s it going, Father!  I’m here.  I’m at church, you know.  Here I am.”  But sometimes they would say, “Well, the church is full of sinners.”  And I said, “It is, and there’s room for you, so come and join us.”
 
This realization of our sinfulness and God’s mercy, it should do something for us and I’m not sure that it does.  But it’s this.  We should take it easy on each other – husbands and wives, parents and children, children and their parents, fellow parishioners, brothers and sisters in Christ. We should take it easy on each other.  We’ve got a lot in common – Christ’s love, the promise of eternal life if we remain faithful (which we intend to do).  Let’s not be hard on each other.  There’s enough of that out there.  Let’s love each other and forgive each other, and accept each other for who we are.
 
Finally, here is a quote by Charles Clayton Morrison. “The church is a society of sinners.  It is the only society in the world in which membership is based on a single qualification:  that the candidate be unworthy of membership.”  And that includes you.  And that includes me.