Tuesday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time
In today’s Gospel, Jesus explains the parable of the weeds among the wheat. Earlier, he told his disciples that the kingdom of heaven is like a farmer who sowed good seed in his field. But during the night, while everyone was asleep, the enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat. When the servants noticed the weeds, they wanted to pull them up immediately, but the farmer stopped them, knowing that doing so could uproot the wheat as well. Instead, he instructed them to let both grow together until the harvest.
I don’t know about you, but my gardening knowledge is limited. I’d struggle to tell you with confidence what’s a weed and what isn’t. Some weeds look enough like the plants around them that I’d hesitate before pulling anything. And maybe that’s part of what this parable is asking us to sit with. We are not always as good at distinguishing wheat from the weeds in our lives as we’d like to think. There is good and bad within us and in our world.
However, there is an invitation buried in this parable that doesn’t require us to wait until harvest time to start paying attention. We can examine our lives now and see what is life-giving and what is choking out something good. Fortunately, like the farmer who allows both the weeds and the wheat to grow together, God is patient and merciful. We can identify the "weeds" in our hearts and habits that keep us from growing closer to God and ask for the grace to grow in goodness.
—Sr. Emily Sandoval, FMI (Marianist Sister)