Saturday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time
The good wheat and the weed
He proposed another parable to them. “The kingdom of heaven may be likened to a man who sowed good seed in his field. While everyone was asleep his enemy came and sowed weeds all through the wheat, and then went off. When the crop grew … the weeds appeared as well. The slaves of the householder … said, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? … He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ His slaves said to him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’ He replied, ‘No, if you pull up the weeds you might uproot the wheat along with them. Let them grow together until harvest … He proposed another parable to them. “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that a person took and sowed in a field. It is the smallest of all the seeds, yet when full-grown it is the largest of plants. It becomes a large bush, and the ‘birds of the sky come and dwell in its branches.'” He spoke to them another parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed with three measures of wheat flour until the whole batch was leavened.” Mt 13,24-30
Always more often, when turning over the pages of the newspapers and listening to some news broadcasting, we are hit by the ugly things, by the violences, by the falsenesses and by the vanities which rage in the world. We feel discouraged or, mostly, frightened. To overcome the loss of the confidence in the neighbor which would assail us, we generally are looking, in the context of our life experiences, to some examples of goodness, of generosity, of altruism as remedies to the evil which seem to dominate us. It is enough to start this path on the tracks of the good which we have received or which we have seen to have been received by others, to discover an infinite sequence of good actions, it may be unknown to the most of the people, anonymous, as the ears in a field of wheat, which are mixing up one to the other, but which, all together, at last give us the daily bread. The wheat is grown, despite the weed which has been sowed by the enemy, as the seeds of charity which, with the help of the Lord, are growing stronger than the evil which attempts to choke them. Due to that, when the mass media try to assail our desire to live in a good and right world, let’s give to them only a glance and let’s make recourse to the TV remote control or to the bin of the waste paper, which Oscar Wilde rightly defined as the best friend of the man after the dog. We will therefore anticipate the end of all these realities which are out of the God’s grace and we will be able to serenely resume our daily commitment.