The gospel this Sunday reminds us that we live in a world where evil is mingled with good. It is a field where wheat and weeds grow together. How this comes about is explained by the parables of last Sunday and of today. While the master sows only good seeds in his field, the enemy scatters bad seeds during the night. The allusion is clearly about the divine Sower and the evil Scatterer (diabolus), the battle between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan.
The workers want to pull out the weeds, but the master intervenes and allows the weeds to grow side by side with the wheat. He inhibits the workers from pulling the weeds lest they uproot the wheat together with the weeds.
We often ask why God allows evil to thrive in the world, if he is truly good. How we wish he totally eliminates it. Our catechism teaches that God allows evil because he can draw good out of evil. We see this in the story of Joseph whose captivity in Egypt brought salvation to his brothers (who had sold him) and his entire family. We see this best in Jesus whose suffering and death brought our own salvation. In the first reading, the Book of Wisdom acknowledges, “Your mastery over all things makes you lenient to all.”
Another reason why God allows evil to coexist with good is proposed by St. Augustine. Commenting on the parable, the saintly Bishop of Hippo says, “Many are at first tares (weeds), but then become good grain… If these, when they are wicked, are not endured with patience they would not attain their praiseworthy transformation.”
As a family does not give up on a wayward child or a member who suffers from drug addiction, so does the Father await the return of every prodigal son. God does not take any pleasure in the death of the wicked, but in his conversion and new life. (Ez 18:23)
The parable of the wheat and the weeds fittingly applies to the world, the Church and to any society or community. It can also apply to each of us personally.
Indeed, man’s heart is a mixture of good and bad. Although created in the image of God, the human person is wounded by original sin and is born with concupiscence (evil inclination). By the grace of baptism, he receives God’s own life through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and becomes one with Christ as member of his Body, the Church. Thus, every baptized is called to live God’s own life, the life in the Spirit.
How does one live the life in the Spirit? Bishop Louie Galbines has an interesting insight in this regard. He defines spirituality or the life in the Spirit as a process of subtraction. It consists in subtracting one by one anything that is not of Christ until only Christ remains. It is consists in weeding out whatever is un-Christlike in me. “He must increase, but I must decrease.” (Jn 3:30)
In his book, “Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life,” the Franciscan spiritual writer, Richard Rohr, writes that we spend the first half of our life building our False Self, and the other half finding our True Self. He boldly asserts that the True Self that wishes to emerge in the second half of life is no other than God himself who lives within each of us. He identifies the False Self as our ego and the True Self as our soul. He qualifies our soul as “who [we] are in God and who God is in us.”
The True Self is the image of God we are born with which often is trapped within us and hardly sees the light of day. It refers to the King who resides in the innermost chamber of our “Interior Castle” of which Teresa of Avila wrote. The Beauty ever ancient ever new which Augustine searched all his life, only to find out that “you were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you.” It is the Son of God who became human so that we may become divine. The True Self is what Paul laboured so hard to happen in himself and in his faithful “until Christ is formed in [me] (Rm 8:35), so I can finally say, “It is no longer I that live, but Christ who lives in me.” (Gal 2:20)
A young author once visited an old hermit and asked, “Father Makarios, do you still fight with the devil?” The saintly man replied, “Oh no, my son, the devil and I are old, and we are both tired. But I still wrestle with God.” “Are you winning?” asked the astonished youth. “I hope not. My bones are old, but they still resist.”