Pentecost+7/Proper 11A (Matthew 13:24-30,36-43)

Reflecting on the parable of Jesus in today’s gospel lesson, it is quite tempting to think that there’s a clear line between good and evil people. We may focus on “Who is going to be thrown into the furnace of fire?” This question can easily become “Who will be burnt in hell?” This is a naive understanding of good and evil. As I half-jokingly mentioned my favorite saying of Jesus, “wise as serpents and innocent as doves in the midst of wolves,” we need to be wise to get the nature of good and evil. 

I may have in the past quoted Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s saying in one of my homilies regarding good and evil. I think it’s worth mentioning again: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” 

Looking deep inside our hearts, we see both good and evil are tangled up. We experience ourselves doing something kind for others at times and doing something unkind at another. St Paul himself seems to struggle with growing the wheat and the weeds together in him. He agonizes, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15) This internal struggle is not just moral but essentially spiritual in its nature. It is something we all struggle with and don’t really understand why our minds are so fractured. We so desire to do good but do the very thing we hate. Our attempt to get rid of the evil inside us usually fails. Since both good and evil are already part of us, our attack on evil can turn into self-hatred, creating unnecessary guilt and toxic shame. This self-hatred can then turn into depression. You cannot beat yourself up too long. 

Jesus thinks our spiritual struggle is caused by the devil. Since we are so influenced by the images of the devil depicted by Hollywood movies, we might immediately imagine the devil with two horns sowing weeds among wheat at night. Well, that actually didn’t happen. No devil would look like that and do that. We can, of course, personify our created image of the devil but that’s still imagined, not real. One of the more helpful ways to understand the devil is to look at the word itself. The word “devil” originated from the Greek term, “diabolos” whose literal meaning is the one who divides. Whatever divides our mind is in us. Whatever divides our minds also divides our relationship with one another and our world. Grab any newspaper. It is filled with social divisions and fractions that are already happening in our minds. That’s it. It’s part of our human nature which we must accept. In the parable, this division happens when everyone is asleep. No one knows when this division has begun.

Instead of trying to demonize our human nature of dividing and discriminating things and to fix it, we want to focus on two aspects in the parable of the sower: 1) Someone already sowed the good seed before the devil came at night and sowed weeds and 2) let both the wheat and the weed grow together until the harvest. 

1) Before whatever starts dividing our minds, which means before any evil comes to our minds and our way of judging one from the other to be good or evil takes place, let’s keep in mind that good seeds are already sown in our hearts. We already have something good, something divine, something godly in us before we judge good and evil. This goodness already planted in our hearts is not the opposite of evil. We don’t begin from something completely vacant and void but with God’s goodness that is in and of itself perfect. (Please note that it is not our perfection but God’s!) This divine goodness goes beyond our perception of good and evil in a moral sense. This special goodness should be considered more as the very source of love, grace, mercy, and forgiveness. This is why Jesus the sower of the good seed committed his entire life to preaching this type of God’s goodness rather than rigid moral rules that the Pharisees were all about. To put it more simply, God’s goodness is not equivalent to our understanding of moral goodness. It has the power to embrace both good and evil and transform evil into something beautiful because nothing evil or corrupt can exist in the goodness of God. 

2) Waiting for both the wheat and the weeds to grow until the harvest can sound like we can do whatever evil we want to do since the good seed, the goodness of God is already planted in our hearts. Well, you know it just doesn’t sound right. The point of the parable is never to allow us to indulge but to pay attention to the harvest time. This harvest time can be traditionally interpreted as the day of judgment that the weeds will be thrown into the furnace of fire. I would rather look at this differently this time that every night we end our day can be seen as the harvest day. Monastics consider their sleep as a symbol of death and understand “Compline” (which means the completion of the day from the Latin term completorium or the night prayer) as a prayer for a happy death. It’s countercultural and striking that the blessing from this Compline directly mentions death: “May Almighty God grant us a restful night and a happy death.” This time of compline before we go to bed in a symbolic sense is the harvest time for us. At this harvest time, we contemplate on the goodness of God. We let the living flame of God burn the weeds, whatever evil thoughts, volitions, behaviors, and words I had throughout the day. Rather than judging myself, gaze upon the goodness of God and let our naked being seen by God whose love can purify our hearts. 

As I invite all of us to see the good seed is already planted in your hearts and every night is the harvest time, St John of the Cross shares with us how we can start harvesting: “I abandoned and forgot myself, laying my face on my Beloved; all things ceased; I went out from myself, leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.” (The Dark Night of the Soul, #8)