Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)

Matthew 13:24-43

Today’s gospel is a suitable sequel to last week’s Parable of the Sower with the Parable of the Weeds among the Wheat which provides us with a detailed illustration of God’s Kingdom as a fertile wheat field. Among the many teachings one could draw from this parable, I would like to focus on the warning Jesus gives us about the dangers of judging and alienating one another when difficulties arise within the Church.

We read that ‘When the new wheat sprouted and ripened, the darnel appeared as well;’ and the owner of the crop ‘said to the servants “...when you weed out the darnel you might pull up the wheat with it. Let them both grow till the harvest”’. 

Here Matthew uses a Greek word, zizanion, for the weeds that is not found anywhere else in the New Testament and scholars still argue about the true nature of this invasive plant that plagues the crop. But however this may be the darnel is for Matthew like “bad wheat” that closely resembles the good one, but stunts its growth and produces useless grains. Likewise, within the Church we have good and bad wheat that closely resemble each other. Here too, there often seems to be a little apparent difference between committed Christians and those who, though part of the same field, do very little apart from stunting the growth of the Church and producing useless fruits. 

So why doesn’t the owner want to get rid of the weeds here and now when they cause so much trouble? To put it plainly, because if we took matters in our own hands we would not be capable of judging without making a great, big mess of it. The good and the bad wheat are so similar that we would end up uprooting both of them. We cannot judge properly, it is not our duty and – as the gospel tells us – we would not be able to do so. We may be surrounded by pseudo-Christians; we may live in a nation that claims to be Christian, but fails miserably to act as such. But as followers of Jesus Christ we are called to bear with the present obstacles, the present situation without judging one another or acting holier-than-thou.

To be the good wheat is truly and essentially our Christian vocation, the call to which we responded in baptism. Each of us should only strive to produce as many good fruits of prayer, love, and justice as one can whilst refrain from judging or alienating others, leaving judgment to the one who knows better than ourselves. The owner of the crop
‘said to the servants “...when you weed out the darnel you might pull up the wheat with it. Let them both grow till the harvest”’. 
There is only one person who can judge between the good and the bad grains and he is Our Lord Jesus Christ, and no-one else. He is the owner of the crop who will instruct the angels to separate the good wheat from the bad at the end of time. He is the one to whom judgment and power belong. And so, when he we come to harvest his crop, may he find us joyful in hope, patient through difficulties, generous to others, and persevering in prayer. Amen.