The parable of the weeds and the wheat is a lesson about vigilance and about patience. It’s a lesson about vigilance because we do have to remain alert and attentive in the moral life. God is constantly sowing the good seed of Faith, Hope, and Love in our hearts and in our world. There are always positive things afoot, and the harvest of goodness in the world is plentiful. But God is not the only actor. The spiritual forces of sin and death are certainly real and certainly influential in our world; and even just the spirit of the world itself can be fairly toxic sometimes. Not everything in our culture is good; there are weeds, and if we aren’t careful they can choke out the good wheat. So we can’t be naïve to that, and we have to protect ourselves and really try to notice the patches of weeds in our lives and always be working to get them rooted out.
But here’s the thing, and this should be really encouraging to us: this parable is also about patience, most especially God’s patience with us. We might be tempted to view this wheat and weeds business in too black-and-white a way. Some people are wheat; some people are weeds. Be careful with that: that’s wrong, and that way of thinking would leave us either horribly arrogant or in deep despair, or bouncing back and forth between the two. The truth is: as a great man once said, “the line dividing good and evil cuts right through the heart of every human being.” We’re all fundamentally good, because we’re made by God out of love, in his image and likeness. We are good. But we’re all subject to sin as well; we all have darkness within us. There’s wheat and weeds in every one of our hearts, now. It’s why he says that if you pull up the weeds too indiscriminately, you might uproot the wheat along with them. He’s going to let them coexist, for now. And that’s very good news for us. We’re not permanently condemned for the weeds that are in our hearts right now. The Book of Wisdom says: “you give your children good ground for hope, that you would permit repentance for their sins.” The Lord will allow us the time for those things to get dealt with, and he will also provide us the means. That starts with a fundamental humility that we have to have: there are weeds in my heart, and I need to let the Lord pluck out those weeds and dispose of them. There’s also a fundamental confidence and a serenity that we also must have: there is wheat as well. Which is why it’s worth it to weed the garden, because of the beautiful life that is there. And the good fruit will be gathered up lovingly and tenderly by the Lord as part of his incredible plan of salvation for us and for the whole world.
The Lord gives us an almost terrifying freedom over how our life will go; he even gives us freedom about how our eternity will play out. We have a choice to make. Will we give ourselves over to the creeping parasites of sin that will slowly take over our lives and choke out everything good? Or will we humbly permit the Lord to be the sacred gardener of our souls: letting him root out the weeds and cultivate the wheat through the grace of the sacraments and through the love he pours into our hearts every day? There is a moment of truth of course, as the end of today’s Gospel reminds us in no uncertain terms. There’s a justice involved here, and so we do have to make the right choice. The Lord will give us what we want, what we choose every day by the manner of our life. But if we do give ourselves to him: if we let the Lord gradually get those weeds out, if we flood our lives with little mustard seed-sized acts of goodness, if charity is the yeast that makes our souls rise: then the promise is glorious: the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.