Are you a weed?
Wisdom 12:13, 16-19; Romans 8:26-27; Matthew 13:24-43
We are back to that period of the liturgical year where parables garnish our spiritual menu. It is a time in which we need to struggle to understand what God says to us in metaphors and images. Above all, the parables of Jesus meet us where we are at individually.
With parables, Jesus does not spare anybody. Each human being finds his or her place—the good, the bad, and the ugly. The messages of the parables are not uniform for everybody; that is the joy of the parables. Those who think that only good things should be said about them and never should any criticisms be addressed at them, such people find the parables interrogating their baseless security. And, those who think that they are holier than angels discover that they are only basking in human platitudes and not in the holiness and perfection of God.
Just imagine God saying that some of us will be bound together and set ablaze like useless and stubborn weeds. In fact, Jesus declares that some of us have not been sown by God but by the Devil or Satan himself. Imagine moving from God the Sower of good seeds last Sunday to the Devil the sower of weeds this Sunday! It cannot get any worse, because it is serious enough for Jesus who came to die for human salvation to talk about the burning up of some of us who keep imagining that we are already in Heaven and that a good God cannot punish or that Hell does not exist!
I hear God saying to us to stop looking for God and the Devil all around us. Rather, we are to concentrate on looking for godly and devilish actions and deeds as the manifestations of either God or the Devil. God and the Devil are seen in what people do. No wonder Jesus, in Matthew 25, places final judgment on people’s actions: I was hungry, and you gave me nothing to eat; go burn in Hell with the Devil your Father.
God and the Devil are revealed in our deeds. Running around looking for prophets and seers to tell us about where to find God shows that we’re candidates for Hell, because it is the Devil who spends his time roaming the whole world tempting others to commit sin. A child of God makes everywhere he/she is Heaven because he/she makes everybody feel at home—feeding the hungry, attending to the sick, clothing the naked, etc. When we cannot see and attend to the needs of those around us and need to travel around to find the needy, the Devil will find and provide jobs for us and qualify us for Hell, his domain!
How can one fail to see the kingdom of the Devil around us when there are so many thieves usurping common funds for their selfish purposes? How can we fail to see apprentice-devils when people go to worship thieves because they want to be favored by them? What stops us from naming and shaming the devils in and around us who lie to us, and we clap for them because we are waiting for the opportunity to replace them and do worse than they are doing?
Perhaps the message today is to ask ourselves what we are sowing because the weeds and darnels around us are sown by some of us! The children of God and the Devil are ourselves, depending on our deeds. The battle is between those sowing good seeds and those sowing weeds. It is a matter of calling oneself out either as sowing the Devil’s weeds for him or planting God’s justice and peace.
Are you a weed? This question is imperative because peace is eluding us, and some of us are actively sowing troubles wherever we are. The good news of today’s gospel is that the good, the bad, and the ugly are already given a long rope to perfect their deeds—good or bad. Judgment is not now, not until God says it is time! Wait for judgment. It will come in due course! Doubt not, some will surely burn like weeds, whether they believe in Hell or not—their opinion does not count, but their deeds do.
Assignment for the Week:
Could you set aside one hour every day of this week to go do some concrete good for some needy person?