You Might Uproot the Wheat
Taking the book of the covenant, he read it aloud to the people, who
answered, “All that the LORD has said, we will hear and do.” Then he took the
blood and splashed it on the people, saying, “This is the blood of the covenant
which the LORD has made with you according to all these words.” Exodus 24:7-8
…” If you pull up the weeds you might uproot the wheat along with
them. Let them grow together until harvest; then at harvest time I will say to
the harvesters, “First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles for burning;
but gather the wheat into my barn.”
Matthew 13:29-30
Piety
Ah, you know it
yourself, Lord, through having borne the anguish of it as a man: on certain
days the world seems a terrifying thing: huge, blind, and brutal...At any
moment, the vast and horrible thing may break in through the cracks—the thing
which we try hard to forget is always there, separated from us by a flimsy
partition: fire, pestilence, storms, earthquakes, or the unleashing of dark
moral forces—these callously sweep away in one moment what we had laboriously
built-up and beautified with all our intelligence and all our love.
Since my human
dignity, O God, forbids me to close my eyes to this, teach me to adore it by
seeing you concealed within it.[i]
 |
| Pierre Teilhard de Chardin |
Study
In the reading from Exodus, we encounter a scene shortly after the
first Transfiguration. Moses and many of
his elders went up the mountain to meet God.
Moses alone was allowed to approach carefully and have an intimate
conversation with God.
When they went down the mountain in possession of God’s laws, Moses
went about immediately to build an altar and place of reverence for the
tablets. Similarly, after the New
Testament Transfiguration, Peter offered to build a structure to protect God,
Moses, and Elijah. All that busy work proved entirely unnecessary.
The tablets held the kinds of lessons that the later-day Apostles would
learn directly from Jesus. While Jesus (in the Gospel) is addressing “weeds,”
these obstacles to healthy growth might personify natural and man-made
disasters and other evil forces unleashing trouble on us. While the people want
to pull up the weeds, Jesus restrains them. As we learn in the notes to the
NABRE, Jesus wants to let people continue to grow.
The refusal of the
householder to allow his slaves to separate the wheat from the weeds while they
are still growing is a warning to the disciples not to attempt to anticipate
the final judgment of God by a definitive exclusion of sinners from the
kingdom. In its present stage, it is composed of the good and the bad. The
judgment of God alone will eliminate the sinful. Until then there must be
patience and the preaching of repentance. [ii]
Action
Despite the evident troubles (weeds), Jesus wants to let people
continue to grow naturally. As Cynthia Bourgeault notes: “For many of us, the concept of a forward
evolutionary journey may feel like false hope. Perhaps it seems that such
hope is bought at the cost of all sensitivity to individual suffering and pain,
by setting the scale at so vast a magnitude that human lives register as no
more than tiny pixels.”[iii]
What if the weeds
choke out the new growth?
She notes that the
“haunting” prayer woven into Teilhard’s reflection on faith in The Divine
Milieu makes clear that it is no cheap optimism he is dispensing here, but a “wrenchingly
honest acknowledgment of our human predicament and unfailing fidelity to seeing
God in every aspect of the earth, even in our human suffering.”
We may be
discouraged by many things these days.
Stories of the failures of our political, social, and religious leaders
abound. Fr. Teilhard lived during both the world wars of the past century. He even carried stretchers of the dead and
wounded in the First World War! He never
gave up hope. His fascinating vision represents the great hope that
faith in Christ and a scientific approach to the world can be brought together.
How can we see God
in the troubles of our times?
[i]
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine
Milieu, (Harper Perennial Modern Classics: 2001), 112. Emphasis added.
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