Saturday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time
The parable in today’s reading is really one of my personal favorites among all the parables. A master goes out and plants good wheat with his servants. An enemy comes along and plants many weeds. As the wheat grows, so also do the weeds. We hear again an allusion to our merciful God who continues to love the world. He does not uproot the wheat to take out the weeds. He shows patience to let the wheat grow to maturity. This is a cause for hope for us who await the harvest. We need hope to better face the adversity that leads up to the harvest. A sense of despair often arises when we appraise all the problems in the world. It seems that there is a never-ending narrative of things going wrong. We are called to hope in spite of this. The virtue of hope is beautiful. It calls us to see beyond our current state of things. This belief means we hope in God.
Thomas Merton understood this idea very well. He knew we have hope in both God and man. He writes this about hope: “The Christian knows that there are radically sound possibilities in every man… Therefore, if he has hope that God will grant peace to the world it is because he also trusts that humanity is not basically evil… that there is in humanity a potentiality for peace.” This “hope in humanity” mustn’t be naïve. However, “love and trust” must always be preferred to “hate and suspiciousness” in how we view our neighbors. In this way we do not condemn the “wheat” because of the “weeds.” We keep a constant hope in God, and we hope in our neighbor despite the inequity we see in the world. We look for the “wheat” that is found among the “weeds.”
Reflection: The fruit of wheat is bread. And certain bread is used for the hosts which are consecrated for the Eucharist. We believe faithfully that God is present in the Eucharist. Can we also believe and hope that God can transform the “wheat” of the world?
Merton’s quotations are taken from Passion for Peace: The Social Essays, edited by William Henry Shannon, Crossroads Press, 1995.
Reflection by Br. Matthew Marie, OSB
Posted in Articles for Ordinary Time, Daily Reflections