Saturday, Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time

We are all familiar with weeds in our gardens. We have a tendency to root them out immediately. However, sometimes the weeds are so close to the shrub or flower that to take out the weed risks disturbing the plant. We sometimes have to let the weeds be for the sake of the plant. We are also aware in recent times that the flowers which weeds generate can be great pollinators for our bees. We are now being told not to be rooting out our dandelions so quickly and ruthlessly. Weeds are making a comeback! In the parable that Jesus speaks in today’s gospel reading, the servants of the landowner wanted to pull up the weeds that had appeared among the wheat. However, the landowner himself was a more patient man. He was aware that pulling up the weeds could pull up some wheat as well and he advised letting both weed and wheat grow until harvest time, and then they could be separated. There is always a deeper meaning to Jesus’ parables. He wasn’t primarily talking about gardens or fields of wheat. After all, he began the parable with the words, ‘the kingdom of God may be compared to…’. Jesus was really talking about God and how God relates to us. He is suggesting that God can be patient with our weaknesses because God recognises that they are often closely aligned with our strengths. An angry person may have a passion for justice; a lazy person may be a great listener; an overly anxious person may be very dutiful and conscientious. God recognizes that we are all a mixture of wheat and weed, of good and evil, of strength and weakness and he is patient with our mixture. We need to be patient too, with ourselves and with others. In striving after a perfect garden, a gardener risks doing harm as well as good. In striving too hard to make ourselves perfect or, more worryingly still, to make others perfect, we risk doing as much harm as good. We need to learn to live with the mixture we and others are, while celebrating and working to enhance all that is good there.