HOMILY - 16TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME -A - July 20, 2008

The gospel today is another section of St Matthew's gospel that consists of Jesus' teaching about the kind of outlook his followers should have and how they should conduct themselves in terms of their everyday moral behaviour.

And this Sunday the passage has a practical application to Christian believers both as individuals and as the community of disciples, as the Church.

Christ warns his followers not to fall into the trap of cultivating an exaggerated sense of purity about themselves, an exaggerated sense of their own righteousness. He warns them to expect the Church community to be made up of all sorts of people, the good the bad and the indifferent. Realistically, we see the weeds, not just in the world out there, but "up close and personal."

Such vistas of evil, so obvious to us, make us want to get about the business of ripping out the weeds. They are the work of the enemy, we say and we want to purge evil from our world, our country and the church. Yet, the parable cautions us and it advises us about the dangers of rushing to judgment. We could destroy what is good in our attempts to rid the world of the bad. Jesus knew from his own experience that you can't always tell from initial signs how things are going to turn out.

In the beginning Judas showed promise, early initiative and administrative skills--- he was in charge of the purse. He seemed like excellent disciple material, a "keeper." If you were Jesus, wouldn't you have thought about eliminating Peter, Thomas or Martha? They didn't show initial signs of discernment and understanding of what following Jesus would entail. They were slow to catch on to Jesus' message. But Jesus was patient, he let the good work itself out in their lives. He gave them a chance to grow and bear fruit.

And what about St. Augustine, St. Francis of Asissi, St. Ignatius of Loyola? They were not saints material during the early stage of their lives, but they turned out to be one. What about your idols in life, people whom you looked up? We all struggle, we all fall but are given the chance to rise up again.

Have you ever had a friend whom you disliked upon first meeting, yet, over time, he or she turned out to be your best friend? The parable says, "You never know." The parable is a story of grace for us.

The world is not only neatly divided into good people and bad people. The division goes down to the centre of our hearts too: As individual believers, in our own relationship with God, in our moral attitudes and our motives for doing things, we're all made up of a mixture of the wheat and the darnel, the good crops and the poisonous weeds of light and darkness, sin and grace.

This gospel story says that we grow slowly, with God’s grace. God is patient with us. In our growth, we become aware of certain unacceptable ways in us and we accept ourselves the weeds as well as the wheat as loved by God. When we begin to do that, sometimes our weeds begin to disappear without any violent uprooting. As we look into our own lives and recall the mistakes we have made and the wrongs we have done, aren't we glad we have had some time to change and work things out? Aren't we thankful we had the space to let the wheat grow and bear the rich harvest it has? Suppose we had been judged on the spot. Suppose God moved in quickly to judge and rip up?

The fact that on occasions we tell a lie, or we say something hurtful or take somebody's dignity away in some way; the fact that circumstances can make us closed-in on ourselves and indifferent to the welfare of other people - or much worse things than that - doesn't mean for Christ that human beings are a lost cause. It means that we're not perfect, that we're flawed, and that we're capable of both great generosity and great selfishness.

St Paul in the second reading presumes that we are all a mix of wheat and weeds and assures us that even when we do not know how to pray, God’s Holy Spirit cries out within us. Hence our weaknesses and limitations are not really a burden or a trouble. Our self acceptance then helps us accept others. Knowing our frailty makes us less judgmental and compassionate towards others, and less pharisaical and more trusting in God’s grace and mercy.

Human beings don't start out at their full stature, morally and spiritually. They mature gradually, the way the wheat develops, from the original planting of the seeds to the final harvest of the fully-grown crop.

Jesus, of course, wants his followers to carry on growing and forming their characters under God’s influence. But he also wants us to recognize that we'll do that a lot more easily if we have a realistic picture of ourselves and a realistic picture of our frailty and weaknesses.

In Jesus' teaching, holiness doesn't come from cultivating the sort of moralistic attitudes that the Pharisees held, no matter how upright the might have been in their religious observance. It comes more from a deeper understanding of human nature and human relationships, that help to make us lenient and mild the way God is.

It was a favourite idea of St Paul's, hinted at in the second reading, that it's only when we acknowledge our own imperfections, and give up the pretensions that we often have of being in control and directing our own lives that God can find an opening and start to get to work on us and change us.

That's how the imagery of this parable of Christ's applies to us as individuals. But of course even more, the parable applies to the Christian community as a whole, and not just to the individuals that belong to it. In the Church as a whole, the darnel grows up alongside the wheat as well, and to think otherwise, Jesus is saying, is to fall victim to a dangerous illusion.

That kind of tendency is the essence of fundamentalism - defining our own group as the only true, pure community of the saved, while everyone else is corrupted and compromised and somehow un-saved. What's wrong with it is that it's too ready to apply God's holiness and perfection to a collection of human beings. It's too ready to take over the job that only belongs to God - the job of making judgements about who's saved and who isn't.

Despite the tactics of his enemies and his opponents, Christ never gave into bitterness or the desire for revenge. He was completely confident that at the end of time, God would reverse the existing order of things, and welcome the virtuous into his company, and remove the evil.

So his advice to his disciples was to show the same confidence - not to take the place of God and try to anticipate his judgement. Christ's advice is a change in attitudes. Like Jesus, let us too embrace the attitudes of patience and forgiveness. Justice rests in the hands of God and will surely come at the time appointed by God.