July 23 Mt 13:24–43
This Sunday’s parable tells us about the beginning, the middle, and the end of evil. It first tells us how evil had its beginning. The servants notice the weeds in the field and ask, “Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where have the weeds come from?” He answers, “An enemy has done this.” Evil is not from God. Everything he sowed was good; he sowed nothing evil. Only later, the enemy came and sowed weeds in the same field. This is the devil, who rebels against God and tempts others to do the same, trying all he can to destroy the goodness of what God has made. Notice that the devil has no field of his own to sow his weeds in. All the devil can do is take the good that God has made and try to distort it.
Jumping ahead to the end, we see what will eventually happen to evil. At harvest time, the master will say to the harvesters, “First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles for burning; but gather the wheat into my barn.” In the end, good and evil will be separated definitively, never to be mixed together again. We eagerly await this final end of evil when evildoers will be thrown into the furnace and “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”
But for now, we live in the time in between. It is really the “middle” that is the focus of the parable, the time during which good and evil are allowed to grow side by side. This next question in the parable is a question we know well: “Do you want us to go and pull them up?” We wrestle with it too. We ask this question because it’s hard to live in a fallen world. We want everything to be perfect, just the way we like it. And the answer is not always what we want to hear: “No, if you pull up the weeds you might uproot the wheat along with them.”
The anger and indignation of fallen man is prone to doing more harm than good. When we see something we don’t like, our tendency is to crush, destroy, exterminate, dismantle. In our effort to uproot the thing, at the very least we usually end up destroying whatever good or potential for good there was. This is called “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” Or worse, we create a greater injustice than the one we sought to correct. We may seek “progress,” presumably with good intentions, but we end up only projecting our own interior brokenness out onto the world we sought to fix. As Francesca Aran Murphy, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, once remarked, “If you’re messed up inside, you’ll have a messed up relation to progress.”
When we try to take the place of God and do the uprooting ourselves — our own way — we make things worse. “The wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God,” says St. James (1:20). In part, this is because our anger and indignation is all directed at the evil that is “out there.” Meanwhile, we fail to see the evil in our own hearts. We tend to come up with our own criteria for who is good and who is evil, and thus who needs to be exterminated or whose system needs to be dismantled. Funny enough, we always seem to craft those criteria in such a way that we ourselves come out on the “good” side. It is not only that we want to condemn others, but even more we want to justify ourselves.
Within ourselves, there is an admixture of good and evil. It’s a good thing that God allows good and evil to grow side by side. A world in which good and evil can grow side by side is a world that has space for you and me.
Fr. Oetjen works in the diocesan tribunal with residence at St. Agnes Church in Arlington.
Stuck in the middle
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July 23 Mt 13:24–43
This Sunday’s parable tells us about the beginning, the middle, and the end of evil. It first tells us how evil had its beginning. The servants notice the weeds in the field and ask, “Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where have the weeds come from?” He answers, “An enemy has done this.” Evil is not from God. Everything he sowed was good; he sowed nothing evil. Only later, the enemy came and sowed weeds in the same field. This is the devil, who rebels against God and tempts others to do the same, trying all he can to destroy the goodness of what God has made. Notice that the devil has no field of his own to sow his weeds in. All the devil can do is take the good that God has made and try to distort it.
Jumping ahead to the end, we see what will eventually happen to evil. At harvest time, the master will say to the harvesters, “First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles for burning; but gather the wheat into my barn.” In the end, good and evil will be separated definitively, never to be mixed together again. We eagerly await this final end of evil when evildoers will be thrown into the furnace and “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”
But for now, we live in the time in between. It is really the “middle” that is the focus of the parable, the time during which good and evil are allowed to grow side by side. This next question in the parable is a question we know well: “Do you want us to go and pull them up?” We wrestle with it too. We ask this question because it’s hard to live in a fallen world. We want everything to be perfect, just the way we like it. And the answer is not always what we want to hear: “No, if you pull up the weeds you might uproot the wheat along with them.”
The anger and indignation of fallen man is prone to doing more harm than good. When we see something we don’t like, our tendency is to crush, destroy, exterminate, dismantle. In our effort to uproot the thing, at the very least we usually end up destroying whatever good or potential for good there was. This is called “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” Or worse, we create a greater injustice than the one we sought to correct. We may seek “progress,” presumably with good intentions, but we end up only projecting our own interior brokenness out onto the world we sought to fix. As Francesca Aran Murphy, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, once remarked, “If you’re messed up inside, you’ll have a messed up relation to progress.”
When we try to take the place of God and do the uprooting ourselves — our own way — we make things worse. “The wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God,” says St. James (1:20). In part, this is because our anger and indignation is all directed at the evil that is “out there.” Meanwhile, we fail to see the evil in our own hearts. We tend to come up with our own criteria for who is good and who is evil, and thus who needs to be exterminated or whose system needs to be dismantled. Funny enough, we always seem to craft those criteria in such a way that we ourselves come out on the “good” side. It is not only that we want to condemn others, but even more we want to justify ourselves.
Within ourselves, there is an admixture of good and evil. It’s a good thing that God allows good and evil to grow side by side. A world in which good and evil can grow side by side is a world that has space for you and me.
Fr. Oetjen works in the diocesan tribunal with residence at St. Agnes Church in Arlington.
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