16th Sunday 2020
Wisdom 12: 13, 16-19; Romans 8:26-27; Matthew 13:24-43
Once again we have three powerful readings, and again there are links joining them all, and including the Psalm (85). The underlying theme is, I would suggest, God’s concern for us, His willingness to forgive us, and His dependability in every aspect of our lives.
That dependability is expressed in the first line of the First Reading: “There is no god other than you who cares for everything.” That care, combined with His power, is the source of God’s mercy and His eagerness to forgive, which are set out, not only in this extract from the Book of Wisdom, but also in the Psalm.
“O Lord, you are good and forgiving, full of love to all who call” begins the Psalm, which continues by celebrating God’s greatness, and concludes with a prayer for forgiveness, a forgiveness which arises from God’s nature as a God of mercy and compassion. This echoes the closing of the Wisdom passage, which states confidently that “you have given your sons and daughters the good hope that, after sin you will grant repentance”.
Am I overstating the case if I suggest that even the first of the three parables of the Kingdom related in today’s Gospel holds out the possibility of repentance and forgiveness? The servant wants to root out the darnel, but the landowner counsels patience: “Let them both grow until the harvest.” The reason which he states is that the wheat may be pulled up with the weeds, and it is obvious that, if we are looking at the literal terms of the parable, darnel cannot turn into wheat: it will remain as a weed until it is destroyed at harvest time.
If however, we consider that, in the parable’s underlying meaning, both wheat and weeds represent human beings, might we surmise that the landowner, the loving Father God, hopes that the people represented by the darnel may change over the course of time, thus providing a link with our closing words from Wisdom, about the “good hope that, after sin, you will grant repentance”?
The parable does seem to imply that, in the embryonic state in which it now exists, the Kingdom needs both good and bad. Indeed, when you bear in mind that each of us is a mixture of good and bad (and maybe even ugly) it is possible to see that we need that stay of execution in order that, in the course of our lifetime, God ‘s grace may achieve the impossible by turning the weeds within us into wheat.
God’s care and dependability are evident in all three of today’s parables, which serve as a reminder that the Kingdom is ultimately God’s work, not ours; that, though we have to play our part, everything does not depend on us.
Both the grain and the mustard seeds have to be sown; the woman must add the yeast (or the “barm” if she is from Lancashire) and knead the dough, but as St. Paul reminds us elsewhere, it is God who gives the growth. I remember my predecessor as school chaplain addressing a meeting of chaplains and urging us to avoid thinking “It’s a shambles, and it’s all my fault”. It may indeed be a shambles, but it is not all my fault, or yours. We do our best, we make our contribution, but we cannot make the Kingdom grow, any more than the farmer can make the seed germinate, or the woman the bread rise. In terms of the Kingdom, “it is God who gives the growth”.
This brings us to the Second Reading, and our problems with prayer. Here again, we have to remember that prayer, like the growth of the Kingdom, is God’s work, not ours. “The Spirit intercedes for us with ineffable groaning” is a more literal translation of St. Paul’s words, or “with sighs too deep for words” as another translation puts it. Perhaps our best approach is to make ourselves available for prayer—to sit, kneel, lie, or stand before God—and let the Spirit do the work. There may be need for words at times, but sometimes they can get in the way.
