Homily for the Sixteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time (A)

A few nights ago, I had dinner with a couple whose grown children have stopped practicing the faith. They wondered aloud what they could have done differently, and what they might still do to help bring their children back to the practice of the faith.

Earlier this week I had a conversation with a parishioner who felt scandalized by the public lives of professed Catholics whose personal behavior, or political and business activities, contradict their Catholic faith. This person wondered how we can even consider ourselves to be part of the same church.

Finally, I had a conversation with a group of my classmates from CUA about the huge number of Americans who identify themselves as “former Catholics” – it’s the second largest religious group in the nation! And we talked about what we might do to bring some of these people home, and keep other young people from falling away.

Friends, our Gospel this week from St. Matthew picks right up where we left off last week, and Jesus continues to use nature images to describe the growth of God’s Kingdom in our lives and in the world. The three images used in today’s parables each speak to the worries contained in these conversations I had this week – and together the parables answer with the same basic point: God is patient and forgiving, and His kingdom spreads gradually, almost imperceptibly, but it does indeed flourish beyond our wildest hopes.

Let’s look briefly at each of these three parables to ascertain their deeper meaning.

First, Jesus compares the growth of the Kingdom to a field of wheat that is infested with weeds. He explains to His disciples that the weeds are the children of the Evil One, the wheat, the children of the Kingdom. Still, the weeds are not plucked out on sight – the weeds and wheat are left to grow together until the harvest at the end of time. Then and only then will Jesus Himself judge which ones shall be burned in the fire and which shall shine like the sun.

Those who doubt the Kingdom of God entirely are quick to point to the existence of evil in the world as proof that their skepticism is warranted. Closer to home, even those of us who do believe in the Kingdom are sometimes scandalized by the fact that God allows both wheat and weeds to exist side by side, even within His Church!

And if we’re honest, we recognize this reality not just in the world around us, but within ourselves as well: we see a mix of weeds and wheat in our own decisions and actions. “Why do I always seem to be confessing the same sins, struggling with the same temptations? Why doesn’t God answer my prayer to be rid of such evils once and for all?”

Jesus’ parable makes clear that it is part of God’s mysterious plan that good and evil be allowed to exist together until the end when Jesus Himself will sort the weeds from the wheat. And this is because, despite our thinking to the contrary, we simply would not be able to perfectly tell the weeds from the wheat! Even in our attempt to keep good wheat safe, we’d end up pulling some of it up along with the weeds.

Brothers and sisters, we have to learn from this parable that Jesus has patience with the seeds He has planted in human hearts. We heard in the first reading, that God’s mastery over all things makes Him “lenient to all” and that He judges “with clemency and with much leniency.” God wants to give the seeds He has planted their full chance to become the good wheat He intended.

This lesson should also help us to have patience with ourselves. None of us are purely weed or purely wheat, and we won’t be marked as one or the other until the full course of our life has been run.

Now please don’t mishear me: we certainly must do our best to avoid evil, and to fight against evil in the world – and in our second reading St. Paul promises us that “the Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness” – but we have to recognize that in His deeper wisdom, Jesus sometimes chooses to allow some evil to remain in our lives while more good wheat grows alongside it.

Perhaps it is some lesser sin that we struggle with, and continuing to struggle against it keeps us from falling into some worse sin, or the worst of all sins: the sin of pride.

Whatever the reason, this parable recognizes that evil does still exist. More importantly, it assures us that evil does not keep the good from growing as well, and that evil’s fate has already been determined: it will be utterly destroyed in the end.

The two shorter parables that Jesus speaks bear out similar themes. Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to a mustard seed, the smallest of seeds that when full-grown produces a large tree that gives shelter to all the birds of the sky.

Here too we are given an image of God’s patience and the Kingdom’s gradual but definitive growth. We might ask why God made the seeds of His Kingdom so small and fragile, or why He didn’t plant His Kingdom in the world in much bigger and stronger batches of grace?

But no – it is part of God’s mysterious plan that the Kingdom of God starts small and grows slowly while hidden away from human perception. Like all good things in life – a great meal, a fine wine, a beautiful piece of art – the Kingdom can’t be rushed: it takes time to grow. Its growth may be silent and hidden – we might even doubt that’s it there sometimes – but we must trust that God is in fact causing the Kingdom to grow in us and in the world – and when it is mature it will provide a home for all the peoples of the world.

That’s precisely the faith and hope that parents must have as they plant the seed of faith in their children. They certainly water and nurture those seeds as best they can, but they also pray and trust that it is God who will really bring them to fruit in His own time.

Finally, Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to the yeast that a woman mixes with wheat flour to make dough. Bakers know well that it takes only a small measure of yeast to make much larger amounts of flour rise, because the yeast is so strong and it works from within the batch to leaven it.

The Kingdom of God works in quite the same way. First, it doesn’t take an abundance of the Kingdom to produce amazing results. I think we’re sometimes held back from doing more good in the world, from growing in holiness more, because we somehow think that only the Mother Theresa’s of the world are really able to accomplish such things.

No, the Kingdom grows and spreads, it changes us and the world, not mainly through monumental acts but by little bits of yeast – small everyday decisions that each and every one of us can make to do the good. It’s these little decisions, these little moments of grace that make a life of holiness and ultimately change us completely.

And just like the yeast in the flour, we make these choices for the good in the midst of the world . . . not merely among people who have already risen with Christ, but among any number of skeptics and agnostics. Our good living in their midst not only changes us, it influences others from within and ultimately helps them to rise as well.

That’s why our pursuit of holiness and our daily attempts to more perfectly live the life of the Gospel is the single most important way that we can call fallen-away Catholics to come home, and help keep young Catholics from drifting away!

Friends, all three of these parables should fill us with great hope and confidence. Despite our fears to the contrary, despite the evil we see growing around us from time to time, despite the presence of an occasional weed in the soil of our own souls, the Kingdom of God is in fact planted in our hearts and growing in our midst.

We have the assurance of our Lord that He is the Master of the Harvest, that the Evil One’s plot will not succeed, and that the harvest of the Kingdom will indeed produce a unfathomable yield. In the words of our opening prayer, it is only for us to remain “watchful in prayer,” and to remain “true to Christ’s teaching,” until God’s “glory is revealed in us.”