The author of the Book of Wisdom tries to answer the pressing question: why does God allow the bad to flourish? Why is God so patient and moderate with Israel’s enemies? He argues that God’s moderation is not a result of weakness: his justice, after all, has its source in strength. But how does God actually use this sovereign strength? The answer is that he disposes of it in favor of governing with ‘great lenience”. So God’s mercy is heaped on everyone in sight, even on traditional enemies. And in this there is a purpose: 

By acting thus you have taught a lesson to your people how virtuous man must be kindly to his fellow men, and you have given your sons the good hope that after sin you will grant repentance. 

The people are asked to share in the same spirit of God and act with kindness to their fellow human beings. The argument is that God’s leniency would give the people of Israel the good hope that when they wrong God, they too will surely benefit from his forgiveness. This same hope is enshrined in the Our  Father: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

The scandal of God’s patience and forbearance with wrongdoers appears again in the Gospel. The Kingdom of heaven is compared to a farmer who is confronted with a serious problem: his field is alive with wheat and a poisonous weed, darnel, which can only be distinguished from the wheat when the growth is advanced. The farmer’s servants want to weed out the darnel, but the farmer tells them to leave it alone; he is worried that uprooting the weeds will endanger the wheat. He orders that no premature attempt be made to separate them. Thus both the weed and the darnel are allowed to grow, and only at the final harvest are they separated.

The message of the parable is something that Jesus lived throughout his ministry. He reached out to all sorts of people, mixing with prostitutes, priests, crooks, scribes, politicians, children, and tax collectors. Religious separatism was something Jesus refused to advocate, making it his business to seek out and save the lost. The Pharisees, those whose very name means the separated ones, criticize him for associating with the wrong crowd. But Jesus knew that all communities are a mixture of the good and bad, the crooked and the cracked. And further that it isn’t always easy to tell which is which. In the end, Jesus is the one weeded out by the authorities and thrown onto the killing fields.

The message of the parable still challenges the church today. It is not the place of the church to set up inquisitions, support witch hunts, or organize purges to free the field for its own approved supporters. The church is not God. As Christians, we have no authority to pronounce the final judgement on anyone. The last word cannot be said about anyone until death, and then it is God’s part, not ours, to say it. Paul underlines the same point when he tells the church in Corinth: “There must be no passing of premature judgment. Leave that until the Lord comes” (1 Cor 4:5). 

Paul, like Jesus, was aware that we can get it terribly wrong about people. There might be another story, another perspective, another time. After all, Paul got it terribly wrong about Jesus when he went around weeding out his followers. Paul himself changed from being a real weed to a real apostle, even though some people thought that the last word had been said about him. But if the final judgment is precisely that – final - the good hope is that there will be some changes before then. And that hope should never be denied anyone, least of all by the followers of Jesus.

Unlike real plants, human hearts can change. A weed today can become wheat tomorrow through the power of God’s grace and the sacrament of reconciliation. If God cut down the field prematurely, many Saints who started as sinners would never have reached harvest time. The master’s instructions call us to holy patience. We are not called to be the judges of the field, but the fruit-bearing wheat within it. Our task is to root ourselves deeply in Christ, drawing nourishment from the Sacraments and prayer, so that we remain strong despite the surrounding weeds. Trust that God is in control and that his judgment will be perfectly just and merciful at the final harvest. 

God is good, all the time! 
Fr. Williams Abba

“The only thing that counts is faith working through love” – Galatians 5:6