Sixteenth Sunday of the Year A

I read an interesting article recently about a plant that is causing huge problems. To an English  this plant botanist was an attractive curiosity and what became a beautiful display - Japanese knotweed was unknown in this part of the world in 1900 - now it has all but taken over, the war is lost!

What was attractive has proved to be a pest and a liability. It is impossible to control because it can take root up to five feet underground. Above ground its tendrils choke other plants, it wins out.

To me it is an instructive parable on the attractive allurement of sin. Something that appeals to the senses and curiosity is succumbed to and it takes root to the detriment of everything else.

Today in the Gospel the darnel is deliberately chosen as a symbolic weed to us but it was a real threat among farmers and a means of exacting revenge from an enemy. It was impossible soon enough to detect to prevent infiltration because it has all the appearances of the good crop of wheat.

The enemy is the devil, and he acts surreptitiously, maliciously, in silence, at night, like a burglar or graffiti artist, awaiting the opportunity to pounce, and to escape undetected, but having accomplished in evil design.

The harvesters are the angels. The crop is actually ourselves and is symbolic – of our hearts, of society, of opportunities to repent, the need to extricate ourselves from evil as an apparent good

The good harvest, like the mustard tree and good wheat point to the virtuous – we are called to be virtuous people and to perform practical good deeds of mercy, the darnel is what attracts to follow a very different path.

Externally it points too to the mystery of the co-existence of good and evil in our world and God’s apparent patient non-intervention.

There is a reckoning however, and the consequences are final. We must decide to avoid as far as possible the evil tendrils, the temptations and occasions of sin, the company of those who commit vice,  of those who would lead us astray by their seeming appealing and plausible arguments – that what is harmful to us and to society through the false gods of ‘choice’ and ‘live and let live’. We must act to rid ourselves of evil influences and make all the right choices to do the greatest good to the greatest number while the opportunity is ours. We have the examples of the canonised saints to lead us by example as to what are the virtues necessary to live a good and holy life to render ourselves admissible as wheat for the harvest and for the granary that is our heavenly home.