Good gardeners take great pains to keep annoying weeds from overgrowing everything else. And yet, in our Lord’s parable, we find the opposite approach. Despite the advice of the servants willing to uproot the weeds, the owner of the field is strangely content to have the wheat and weeds grow together.
Our Lord is pointing out the disconcerting reality that in this world, good and evil are intertwined, they exist side by side. Consequently, there will always be a tension between good and evil which is found at every level of our human experience—in our families, in our social groups, in our parishes, in the Church, and within ourselves. St. Francis De Sales said that there is a “civil war” that goes on within each of us.
Divine love exists alongside self-love. The Church herself is holy and sinful. She is spotless and tainted. She is not a community of saints but a community of sinners striving to become saints. St. Augustine, who certainly knew something of the tension between sin and grace, said that we are “peccatores in re, sancti in spe.” [Sinners in reality and saints in hope]. The Catechism states “In everyone the weeds of sin will still be mixed with the good wheat of the Gospel until the end of time.” We should not be scandalized by this. Perfection is found only in heaven.
Our Lord is also telling us something about God. He is the owner of the field who does not intervene hastily to remove the weeds but waits with the boundless patience of a father and the inexhaustible trust of a mother,” Jesus would have us understand that God never gives up on us. Until the last moment of any life there is the potential to sin as well as to repent. God is patient with us through our foibles and through the dark times.
We will indeed be judged at the end of our life but the Lord in his mercy never tires of giving everyone opportunities to change, to repent, to grow in holiness. It is the desire in the heart of God that what are weeds or seem to be weeds, can become wheat.
We see this in the lives of the saints. Dismas was a thief who joined the crucified Jesus in the Kingdom. St. Paul was a persecutor of Christians who became the great apostle; St. Augustine lived a dissolute life then was baptized and became a bishop and Doctor of the Church; St. Francis was a spoiled, materialistic youth who was transformed into a lover of poverty and humility. God is patient!
We must also reflect this patience regarding the sins and foibles of others. We should be slow to judge, wary of jumping to conclusions, pointing an accusing finger, or writing someone off. We should be patient, giving others the opportunity to change, offering them a new beginning. After all…
There is so much good in the worst of us
And so much bad in the best of us.
That it behooves none of us
To talk about the rest of us.
The human experience will always be a mixture of weeds and wheat. We are “peccatores in re, sancti in spe.”
