In today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus has been speaking to the crowds in parables from a boat at the seaside. Then He discusses with the disciples the reason for using parables. He gives them another parable to help them understand the implications of choices we make, but more importantly the potential for repentance and the depths of God’s patience and mercy. The message is not unlike the parable of the prodigal son, which would seem to signal how critical this theme is to what Christ wanted to get across to us during his time on Earth.
Tares
Jesus tells the disciples about an enemy who, while men slept, sowed “tares” (weeds resembling wheat) among the good seed in the field. He advises the tares to be left to grow with the wheat until the harvest.
Jesus thus leaves open the door for us to respond to God’s grace in the face of life’s challenges and temptations until the very end. To do otherwise would be to deny God and human potential to repent and grow.
St. Augustine points out there are good reasons for the good seed to be mixed with the bad. Proximity to the bad seed may cause some to “be drawn to a better course.” A rush to condemn and destroy the wicked may result in destroying “the rest who would turn out good and would deprive the good of the benefits that could “accrue to them even against their will from mixing with the wicked.”
Time Will Tell
George Leo Haydock, an English priest, and Bible scholar writing in the mid-1800s, said,
“The prayers of repenting sinners are never despised. We are taught also by this example not to cut off too hastily a fallen brother; for, whatever he may be today, tomorrow perhaps he may see his error and embrace the truth. (St. Jerome). Jesus Christ exhorts us to bear with infidels and heretics, not on our own account only, as wicked men are frequently of use to the virtuous, but also on their account; for sometimes the persons who have been corrupted and perverted, will return to the paths of virtue and truth. Let, therefore, both grow until the harvest, i.e., to the day of judgment, when the power of rectifying another’s error shall be no more.”
Individual Soul
Writing in the twelfth century, Thiophilic of Ochrid, an Eastern Orthodox archbishop, wrote about this parable in the twelfth century. It is a slightly different way, viewing the wheat and the tares as aspects of an individual soul:
“The field, then, is the world, or each one’s soul. The sower is Christ. The good seed is good people, or good thoughts. The tares are heresies, or evil thoughts. The one who sows them is the devil. The men who were sleeping are those who by their indolence give entry to heretics and evil thoughts. . . Likewise, neither does God wish to cut down a man on account of his evil thoughts, lest the wheat be destroyed along with them. If, for example, Matthew had been cut down while he was a tare, the wheat of the word which was later to spring up from him would have been cut down with him. Similarly with Paul and the thief. While they were tares, they were not cut down but were permitted to live so that later their virtue might grow. So it is with the evil thoughts which Paul had when he persecuted: they were burnt in the fire which Christ came to light upon the earth, while the wheat, that is the good thoughts, was gathered into the granaries of the Church.”
If Matthew and Paul could have been tares God permitted to become wheat, what of you and me?
