Sunday/A Parable and Christ's Commentary

                                Sunday/A Parable and Christ's Commentary

A week after the Parable of the Sower comes today's gospel, the parable of the wheat and the weeds. A farmer sows his wheat and, in the night, an enemy oversows the field with weeds. The farmer decides to wait and harvest them all together for fear extracting the weeds will harm the good wheat as well. Christ, in an unusual move, then explains the parable. A hard reading of it should be very alarming.

This is a significant insight into Christ's message. There is a Good. But there is also an Evil. And that Evil is sown by an Enemy, an active Enemy of the Good. The Enemy is surreptitious and the Evil he sows is inextricably interwoven with the Good so that separating them is injurious to the Good. There are incidental slaves in this parable--without comment--and the eventual harvesters are Angels. Angels.

This is a battlefield, a struggle over the soul of man. Good and Evil are real, are hard to separate, but separation will happen. 

This is the picture of a religion, not simply an abstract philosophy. And the weeds are darnel, strangely a name taken by football players and actors. Its historical meaning is "disorder."

Sowing Seed

As my hand dropt a seed
In the dibbled mould
And my mind hurried onward
To picture the miracle
June should unfold,

On a sudden before me
Hanging its head,
With black petals
Rotting and tainted,
Stood a flower, dead;

As if all the world's hope
Were rotting there,
A thing to weep for,
Ripe for burial,
Veined with despair.

Yet I cannot prevent
My ignorant heart
From trust that is deeper
Than fear can fathom
Or hope desert.

The small twy--bladed
Shoot will thrust
To brave all hazards.
The seed is sown
And in Earth I trust.

ROBERT LAURENCE BINYON

1869-1943 / England