The Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Cycle A 2019-2020

Wisdom 12:13, 16-19 | Romans 8:26-27 | Matthew 13:24-43 or 13:24-30

Show favor, oh Lord, to your servants and mercifully increase the gifts of your grace that, made fervent in hope, faith and charity, they may be ever watchful in keeping commands.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This parable is fascinating to me, because I worked with it for a long time without reading the final part of this set of readings, which is optional to read or not, which is interesting, why the church would make it optional.  But the way it’s interpreted for the people who listened to it at the time was that there were people who are good, and there are people who are bad.  God makes the good people, and the evil one makes the bad people.    And the problem is that the bad people are — the reason they’re bad is because they are caught in something.  It’s called evil, and the best description I can give you for evil is found in the Book of Genesis.  I go back to it over and over again.  When sin appeared, it appeared in a certain form, and the form was a lie. Adam and Eve were there, and they were told not to do something.  And this serpent said, “No, no.  The very thing that you’re told not to do is the very thing that you need to do, because it’s going to make you as fully alive and as strong as you could ever be.”  It fed the ego and said, “Break this rule.  Break this law, because basically, if you do, you’re going to be empowered.”  And power always is attractive to the ego, more than almost anything else.  “Tell me what to do.  Tell me what’s right, what’s wrong.  Let me figure things out.  If I can figure things out, then I’m in charge.  I’m in control.”  So the issue of sin is that it is attractive, its very nature, to the mind, to the brain, and it makes sense.  If I can choose something that I’ve been told is wrong but it’s there to give me something that I think I need and want, I’m going to go with what I want.  And so they disobeyed, and out of that action we know then that somehow, at the heart of what sin is, it is people caught in lies. 

So in a way, the simplest way to interpret this, and the way Jesus interpreted it, which is so fascinating to me, is because of his audience.  His audience is not yet redeemed.  They didn’t have wisdom poured into them.  This seed that we talked about last Sunday is this seed of God’s presence coming into a human being, and when it comes in, it comes in like fire, like a tongue of fire and enters into the human being.  And where it goes is to the heart, and the heart is the place of knowing.  The mind is the place of understanding, figuring things out, but the heart is that part of you and me where belief comes from.  Trust in something you can’t understand.  You can’t figure it out, but you believe it, because you know somehow it’s right.  That knowing comes from somehow some power given to us from outside of us is able to discern what is true and what is not true, and it destroys — it purifies us from all that is a lie.  And so we see this gift of the Spirit not yet given to these people.

And so the parable makes clear something that is very basic, and the people that were there needed this kind of information.  And it was that, if you choose a lie, it’s never going to produce fruit, and it means you’re going to ultimately not be fully who God wants you to be, which is a form of kind of death.  So to be caught in a lie is to be seen, in a sense, in your own mind, I would say, that there’s something so terrible wrong with that that, if you stay in the lie, you’re going to die.  You’re going to be burned to death, even though burning has this mysterious image of purification.  So in a way, the people that heard this parable the first time would have said, “Okay, I understand.  God is saying that there are good people and bad people.”  It’s a binary world.  That’s so easy for the brain to understand.  I understand this, two kinds of people.  We hate the ones that are liars, and we want them to be destroyed.  And even though they’ll be destroyed at the end, it means certainly we, probably in helping God in our own mind, could say, “Well, we ought to destroy them too.”  So whenever we see somebody bad, we want to destroy them.  Isn’t that interesting?  It’s kind of the way in which sometimes we think about evil people.  We think because they did something, they are that, and nothing could be further from the truth.  Human nature was created by God.  He didn’t create bad people, like the — the parable seems to imply that there’s another person that created life, and there isn’t anybody else that created life.  The evil one didn’t create people.  He gets into people and destroys who they are and clouds their vision, and so in a way, he’s created them into a being that is locked into a lie.  So what is basically being taught in this parable then is evil is destructive, and if it is, then we have a right to destroy it also.  

But then you listen to the other two readings.  They go in complete contrary to this.  The greatest thing, the first reading says, the greatest thing about the God who is is that he shows his greatness through his leniency, his patience, his love for a person even though they are caught in a lie.  He’s there to bring them out of that lie into the truth.  That’s his intention.  So what it says in the second reading, the intention of the Spirit is to enter into you and to transform you into a person who understands reality, God’s plan, and everything that chips away at that is somehow some half truth, some illusion, some lie.  And so in a sense, if you listen to those first two readings and understand that this God is absolutely 1,000 percent on our side, even though we are sinners, even though we are far, far from him — I remember as a child growing up in Chicago and getting my first communion instructions, and I was told so clearly that God hated sinners and that he would destroy them.  And then I learned in the New Testament, God loves sinners.  Jesus said, “I love sinners.  I want to be with sinners.  My whole reason for coming is to change them.”  

So how do you deal with this parable when you understand that it implies that, if you are evil from the beginning, you’re — it’s hopeless.  No one’s coming to your rescue in that image, and the only thing I can think of is that what Jesus was doing was using a parable that can be interpreted many different ways.  And the first way was interpreted for the audience — for the audience.  When you mess around with those images of lies and violence and destruction and harm to other people, it’s going to destroy you.  Okay, that is very clear and strong, but it implies that that’s fine with God.  “Doesn’t bother me to take these people that are evil and burn them, destroy them.  I didn’t create them.”  Well, nothing could be further from the truth.  So could it be that this parable was used — and it’s a parable, meaning it’s a puzzle, and you have to work with it.  The best they could do with the audience at the time was to say, “Okay, I understand that I’ve got to turn away from evil, because it’ll destroy me.”  But the truth, who God is and who he really is is that he’s really — the way I would interpret it now, with the understanding that we have and the capacity we have, because we have the Holy Spirit in us, this flame of insight and awareness and this purifying force that’s inside of us clearing our mind of the logic of the brain and moving us into hope and trust that’s in the heart, we can deal with this in its fullness, I believe, meaning that God doesn’t create bad people.  The world is filled with people who have been created by God who have a seed inside of them that is about growth and beauty and development and evolving from selfishness to selflessness.  It’s in everybody.  So if it’s in everybody, that means it has the potential of being awakened, and so in this story — let’s take it this way.  Let’s take it not to mean the world, good people, bad people, but there’s a clue that says the kingdom of God he’s talking about is inside of us also.  It’s inside of us.  So if it’s inside of us, it means it has something to do with the world that we are interiorly existing with, and it’s got good and bad in it.  The part of me that is healthy and strong is the part of me that’s been transformed by the Spirit, and I see the truth.  There’s still a part of me that’s caught in lies.  Those lies that were told to me when I was a child, they’re so hard to get over, and so much of what we can see in people who are evil, so we call them evil, that do evil things, that are caught in a lie, have been damaged by the people around them.  They’re victims.  

So let’s imagine that this parable is about the inner life of you and me, and in that inner life we have goodness, and we have lies.  And so the plan of God is that we move along as we grow, as we change, as we become who God is calling us to do the process of the Spirit entering into you and to me with its enlightenment and its power to radically change us from lies to truth is going to be successful.  In other words, at the end, everything in us that’s a lie will be ripped away from us and burned, and we’ll have this insight, this moment of truth.  That is an image I have of death.  It’s when all of a sudden you’re not there completely, but you’re going to go through this process where all of a sudden this light comes on, and you see everything. I’ve always thought, “What’s the sound people would make when they die?”  It would be something like, “Oh, oh my God.  Now I see.  Now I understand.”  What a different way to interpret the parable.  So is one right and one wrong?  No, they’re both right in a sense.  What’s different is the audience, the evolution of the audience.  And everything that Jesus said is for the world forever, but the people who heard it the first time did not have the capacity to understand it, take it in.  That’s why he said a parable is made for those who can hear, and if you can’t really hear the truth of who God is, you’re going to misinterpret a parable.  And many of us do.  The challenge is to believe first and foremost in who God reveals himself to be, a lover, one who forgives, one who’s lenient, one who desires more than anything else to save, who will not destroy.  The only people who can be destroyed in this world are the people that choose to be separated from God, and destruction is separation from God.  So he gives us the freedom to go against him, but he will always, he says, win.  He will always win us, save us, enlighten us, awaken us.  That’s the hope.  And your brain might say, “Well, how do you know that?”  Well, the brain can’t figure it out, but does the heart know it?  Yes.  I know that must be the plan, because it makes so much sense to me, and it gives me so much peace.

Father, you are mysterious, and the beauty of your love for us is that you’ve always met us where we are. You’ve always dealt with us exactly in a way that would reach us.  You presented yourself at times in the Old Testament as someone harsh and demanding and willing to destroy those who don’t follow you, and at the same time, you revealed yourself in the New Testament as the most loving, forgiving, patient, kind, desiring nothing but our transformation.  Give us wisdom to discern the truth.  It’s fundamentally in all the stories, and most especially give us the hope that is our inheritance so that our heart will always be filled with joy and peace.  And we ask this through Jesus’ name.