Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church

Homily for July 20, 2008
Liturgical Year A- Cycle II
16th Sunday in Ordinary Time
By Fr. John Carney
 Topic: Separating Good from Evil
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Gospel
Matthew 13: 44-52

Jesus said to his disciples: “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.  Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant searching for fine pearls.  When he finds a pearl of great price, he goes and sells all that he has and buys it.  Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea, which collects fish of every kind.  When it is full they haul it ashore and sit down to put what is good into buckets.  What is bad they throw away.  Thus it will be at the end of the age.  The angels will go out and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.

“Do you understand all these things?”  They answered, “Yes.”
And he replied, “Then every scribe who has been instructed in the kingdom of heaven is like the head of a household who brings from his storeroom both the new and the old.”

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The parable we just heard of the wheat and the weeds would have been a very familiar story to the people of Jesus’ time.  They were agricultural people, they grew a lot of wheat and probably more barley, and they were very familiar with what weeds could do to a good field.  There was an ancient Semitic curse, “May your enemy plant weeds among your wheat”.  It sounds like an Irish saying, doesn’t it? Indeed, there was one particular weed known as the bearded darnel that looked just like the young wheat plant.  You couldn’t tell one from the other when they were young and by the time they had grown and had seed on them, often times, their roots were intertwined.  If you pulled the weeds, you pulled the good wheat or barley as well.  This again is a familiar parable to them, that the weeds and the wheat are not easily separated.  Of course, what the parable means to us and what it meant to them was good and evil are not so easily separated in ourselves or in the world.  We’ve all heard the expression, “There’s a bit of good in the worst of men and a bit of bad in the best of men.”  We’ve not only heard that expression, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ve experienced it.
 
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said something along those lines much more profoundly.  If you’re not familiar with Solzhenitsyn, he was a leading Russian dissident.  He spent much of his life in prison, what are known as gulags, in the former Soviet Union, under the harshest conditions.  Initially, he was in prison for speaking against Stalin.  While in prison, he wrote manuscripts piece by piece and smuggled them out.  He got the manuscripts to his children, they got them to the West, and they were published.  The Cancer Ward was one of his more famous works and then The Gulag Archipelago another.  He won the Nobel Prize in 1970 for literature.  He was a very important figure.  I hope we don’t forget those figures that helped change the world for the better in the last century.  Imagine that, the 20th century was the last century.  Anyway, Solzhenitsyn talked about his knowledge of good and his knowledge of evil, knowledge he learned about himself and about the world.  He writes this in The Gulag Archipelago.
 
I learned one great lesson from my years in prison.  I learned how a person becomes evil and how he becomes good.  When I was young, I thought I was infallible and I was cruel to those under me.  I was madly in love with power and exercising it, I was a murderer and oppressor.  Yet in my most evil moments, I thought I was doing good and I had plenty of arguments with which to justify my deeds.  It was only when things were reversed when as a prisoner I lay on rotten straw that I began to feel within myself the first stirrings of good.  Gradually I came to realize the line that separates good from evil passes not between states or between classes or between political parties but right through the heart of every human person.  Even in hearts that are overwhelmed by evil one small bridgehead of good is retained and in the best of all hearts, there remains an un-uprooted small corner of evil.
 
It’s true of the human condition, even among Christians.  Hopefully, we have tried to make progress in our spiritual lives and yet there remains in us something deeply flawed.  Emily Giffin, the Christian author, writes this about us.
 
While he is a new man in Christ, he has brought over a good deal of the old man with him.  His little sins and temptations begin to creep back into his life and catch him unawares.  The new man, the old man, coexists throughout our lives in constant tension.  The mature Christian accepts this duality as something he will experience throughout his life.  He accepts it in himself and in others as well.
 
That’s what St. Paul was talking about when, even after his conversion, after his personal communication with the living God, indeed perhaps even after a personal experience of heaven, St. Paul said, “The good I wish to do I do not do; the evil I wish to avoid, I do.”  This parable is simple enough, though.  It’s telling us, God is telling us, that he’s willing to live with us, all of us until the harvest.  He gives us plenty of time to change.
 
The first reading from the Book of Wisdom tells us about God.  It says, “But though you are a master of might and judge with clemency and with much lenience you govern us.  And you taught your people that those who are just must be kind.  And you gave your children good grounds for hope that you would permit repentance for their sins.” 
 
Jesus lived as He preached.  He didn’t live with a bunch of perfect people.  No one ever called the Twelve Apostles perfect.  He lived with Pharisees, tax collectors.  He associated with prostitutes and those outside the law.  What He’s telling us in His Gospel today is let us grow together until the harvest and then, and only then, if some persist in their sin will separation occur. He is basically saying, “ I want you to be patient with one another.  I want to give everyone a chance, a chance to change, to give up sin, to love Me.  I want to give everyone time, time to accept My mercy.”
 
You know in the end at the harvest, at the judgment, to one degree or another, every one of us will be found wanting, some more than others perhaps.  None of us will be perfect.  In the end therefore, it’s all about God’s mercy.  We can be assured that we will meet God’s mercy if only we ask for it and accept it and if only we have been merciful to each other.  Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.