Weeding

Sunday’s parable tells us a lot.

Servants ask whether they should pull out the weeds that have been woven in with the wheat. “No,” the Master says. “If you pull up the weeds you might pull out wheat as well. Let them grow together until harvest” (Gospel).

The point: God steadily forgives our weeds and lets us develop and grow without uprooting us. It is not that he wants to encourage the weeds—it would be better if they were not there. But he is careful not to pull out our life along with our faults.

This is a radical idea, because you and I think we will be completely condemned if we have sins or faults. Entire ancient cultures based themselves on such a principle: sins cannot be forgiven. If someone harms me or my family then I have the right and duty to annihilate them, since they are bad people. Nothing can be too severe.

To put it another way, go ahead and uproot the entire garden in order to get rid of the weeds.

The heroes in adventure movies illustrate this principle. They fight, man to man (and increasingly, woman to woman), somersaulting across skyscraper tops, dispensing bare-knuckle blows to the face and spinning kicks to the head, wielding secret weapons and ever-new skills. Finally the bad guy plummets over the awful edge of a building, entertaining us with magnificent slow-motion shots of his terrified face as he heads for the inevitable splotch. Everyone is relieved and happy.

Except, of course, the bad guy. And maybe the good guy too, since there remains a thing called conscience, and brutality might interrupt his sleep that night.

Just for an exercise, pretend that you are the villain in the above scene. Is there a reason you are committing crimes that merit such punishment? Is it possible that one part of you is going haywire but that there is also much good in you, much that could be brought back to life? Maybe deep down you have a voice whispering, “I wish I could stop this ugliness and be a good person”?

If so, then you have stumbled upon the point of Sunday’s Gospel. The crimes you commit don’t really agree with your real, God-given self. Yes they are bad, like the weeds in the good garden, but they are only a fragment of who you are. Your urge to impress others falsely, to get what you want no matter what, to be lazy, petulant, to steal, or … (please fill in your kind of sin), these are never the full description of who you are.

And this is why God does not rip out the weeds in people. Mixed in with all the crab grass there is handsome pasture land that God loves very much.

How about showing some kindness to the mean voices within you that itch to do wrong? Maybe they will settle down if you just love them as you would a naughty child, love them into goodness.

Imagine Jesus saying from the cross, “Father, damn these people to Hell forever because of what they are doing to me,” thus tearing out both weeds and wheat. But instead he leaves the weeds alone and says, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”

John Foley S. J.