16th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Matthew 13:24-43
One of the most frustrating things for a farmer is to have weeds in his fields. They steal whatever nutrition is there for his grain. Sometimes, whenever I’m in my garden here in Santa Teresa, this is really a headache and I try my best to remove them and be careful that it won’t affect the other plants. Otherwise, I just have to leave it.
The gospel for today is a continuation of a series of parables of Jesus describing the kingdom of heaven. Of course, in an ideal world, there should be no weeds but only fruitful grain that will yield a bountiful harvest. However, an enemy has sown weeds on a good and fertile field. No matter how the farmers wanted to remove the weeds, the master told them not to because they might pull out the wheat as well and harvest nothing in the process.
Unfortunately, in each one of us, we have both wheat grains and weeds. Both of them are growing in us. So the question is what do we want to grow in our hearts? Whenever we do good deeds, it shows the presence of wheat in our hearts and whenever we do bad deeds, it shows the presence of weeds in our hearts. Whatever we want to grow in our hearts, it is all up to us. We can let the weeds grow and we will find ourselves with nothing but weeds during harvest time and we’ll be tied in bundles and burned. Or we can let the wheat grow and find ourselves being fruitful and be inside the barn where we will enjoy the Master’s happiness.
So if we find weeds growing in our heart, we can pull them out by going to confession and transforming our lives for the good. When we have wheat growing in our hearts, we should nourish that by continuing to do good and to pray to the Holy Spirit to help us in keeping the weeds out and so preserve the wheat until harvest time.
We live in a world where we sometimes think that the weeds are winning and threatening to overrun the field. We live in a world where it seems that every kind of evil is always upon us and we’re powerless to do anything. We can even find ourselves asking where is God in the midst of all this. Yet, Jesus, ever patient and respectful of our free will, has allowed this to happen for fear that the wheat might be pulled and nothing will come out of the kingdom. If we have found ourselves with sin, Jesus is giving us many, many chances to reform our ways and to follow him. It is not too late. Jesus is giving us a second chance, a third chance, and so on. Yet, we should not feel complacent that we’re going to leave this to the last minute for it may come and over take us and we don’t have anything to show during the harvest time.
So as we continue to live with all the challenges that we have at the moment like the COVID-19 pandemic, violence and wars, poverty and corruption in governments, etc. Let us ask for strength in order to root out the weeds in our hearts and let the wheat grains grow and for us to produce a bountiful harvest.