“An enemy has done this.”

Sunday’s Gospel in the Vetus Ordo… read for many hundreds of years so that we would know it well, so that it would be part of our Catholic marrow….

Another parable he put before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field; ²⁵ but while men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. ²⁶ So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. ²⁷ And the servants of the householder came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then has it weeds?’ ²⁸ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ ²⁹ But he said, ‘No; lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. ³⁰ Let both grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’” (RSV)

To get at the serious nature of this parable, which would have made Christ’s listener’s blood run cold, we have to grasp the nature of the crime, the sowing of “tares” in an enemy’s field.

Above ground they look just like the wheat.  Below ground they twine around and suffocate other root systems.  Above – benign.  Below – deadly.

A field sown with tares, darnels, cockles, zizania, a rye grass Lolium temlentum … call them what you will… would be useless for a long time.  That would be financially devastating because of the loss of crops.  It could endanger people with famine.

The sowing of tares was so serious that the Romans made it a crime to sow them in enemy fields.

You can sense the desperate conversation that might have taken place amongst the servants until the master of the house makes the call.

“How could be?  Isn’t our field good?  Isn’t our seed wonderful?”

“How could this have happened?”

“We were just asleep for a little while and look what happened!”

The householder hearing it all, including that part about them being asleep says:

“Asleep?  An enemy has done this.”

On a micro level, we must consider vigilance.  We note with Gregory the Great that, “If by habit we become acquainted with venial sins, we shall afterwards not be afraid of falling into great ones.”  It doesn’t take long for sins to root and choke.  An examination of conscience is critical in getting out of this mess.

On a macro level, we must examine – the Church.  The Church is in the state that it is in… why?  Clearly “we” were not vigilant.  We were asleep. Athenagoras, addressing the problem of false teaching which contradict true doctrine said, “false opinions are an aftergrowth from another sowing.”

An enemy has has sown deadly seed in the fields of the Church.

It has always been so.  St. Augustine used the image of the wheat and the tares when dealing with the Donatist controversy.  The Church is a “corpus permixtum malis et bonis… a body mixed-through with good men and evil.”

It has always been so.  Out of the Twelve, there was one.

The Church today?  An enemy has done this.  An enemy has always done this.

And it seems like we always always always go to sleep and let him sow.

We can’t go back in time, only forward.  We can bring the correctives of the past forward to the future.  The tried and the true must be the starting point, the reference. Corrections are needed.

Harvest time will come. The reapers will one day reap.  There will be gathering, separating and, without question, burning.

Gathering, separating and burning is what we do in an examination of conscience and a good confession.  That which is burned is gone.   Sins confessed and absolved are GONE.

Gathering, separating and burning is what we are going to have to experience in the Church for it to pass from its present state.  An enemy is planting weeds that choke off the good.

It is no small matter to be asked to stand by and watch as the wheat struggles in its battle with the enemy, in the form of suffocating, life thieving tares.

There is only so much that can be done as individuals except in one’s one sphere of weeding, and then with great care for the wheat.

Do not sleep.  Be vigilant.  Examine your conscience.  Weed your plot.  Gather your tares.  Take them to the fire, the raging and unquenchable fire of God’s love.

GO TO CONFESSION.

___

Here’s a great image of this Gospel parable. The background in the building are various figures of different walks of life.  In the privileged place is someone with a three-fold tiara.  There is a man behind with a cardinal’s galero.  There are a couple of bishops and a Mass with a scholar’s cap, like a Dominican friar, there are a few lay men.  Everyone’s hanging out, lying down, leaning on things, snoozing.

Meanwhile, the ugly figure going about, clearly demonic, is a parody of all of them, with its two miter like horns, the religious tonsure.