As we swoop in toward the end of the liturgical year we come to the 5th Sunday (Remaining) after Epiphany. We fill in the gap between the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost and the Last Sunday with Mass formularies uncelebrated after Epiphany.
The Gospel is from Matthew 13:24-43, the parable of the wheat and the tares, or cockle, a nasty and destructive weed that looks like wheat while growing, but eventually chokes out the wheat because its roots spread out and wrap up the roots of other plants. Sowing tares, cockle in a wheat field is biological warfare. So bad was this known to be in an agrarian society that there were Imperial laws against doing this to the enemy.
There is a warning in the Gospel for those of us who see things going wrong in the Church and want to do something.
You know the main line of the parable. The servants discover cockle, tares among the wheat. Their master had sown good seed, but an enemy sowed the enemy weed while they, unwary, slept. They correctly identify the problem and offer pull it up.
The master stops them.
Lest perhaps gathering up the cockle, you root up the wheat also together with it. (v. 29)
The master doesn’t gaslight, doesn’t tell them they just imagined the cockle. He doesn’t propose a listening session about the enriching diversity of agricultural expressions. He correctly surmises “An enemy has done this” (v. 29). The evil is real. Nevertheless, their remedy could damage the crop they want to protect.
That ought to give us pause, especially online.
Liturgical abuses, doctrinal confusion, and clerical stupidity, even downright persecution for simply wanting to live a traditional Catholic life can warrant indignation and rightly ordered anger. Those responsible for correcting them or perpetrating them will answer to God. Moreover, there are times when we must stand up for ourselves. In those cases, it is good to remember the principle aims of forensics, of rhetoric, that is, docere (to teach), delectare (to delight) and movere (to move). For example, a good preacher will seen to help people to understand some point of the Faith, to welcome it, and then to act upon it.
You can be right all day long and on weekends about the appalling things are certainly are going on. But in our reacting in our interacting with others we remember, with the three principle aims also the imperative of charity, that is, sacrificial love that seeks the true good of others. Not a false, chimeric, ephemeral good. The true good, which inevitably involves salvation of souls and the love of God.
Hence, tailoring the message is of critical importance because the point is to move, to stir the affections and the will of others toward a judgment or an action.
Sometimes concise explanation is enough to do this. Sometimes it requires carefully constructed arguments. Sometime a gentle style is needed and sometimes what must be applied is scorn for the sake of opening eyes and ears. Certainly St. Francis de Sale was right in saying:
“Soyez toujours le plus doux que vous pourrez, et souvenez-vous que l’on prends plus de mouches avec une cuillère de miel qu’avec cent barils de vinaigre… Always be as gentle as you can and remember that one catches more flies with a spoonful of honey than with a hundred barrels of vinegar.”
On the other hand, as St. Augustine says about God’s corrections, “Clamas: sed adhuc secat… You scream, but He keeps sutting.” The image is from ancient medicine before anesthesia. The doctor doesn’t stop cutting just because the patient is screaming for him to stop. (Tr. on John 7.12 and Exp. Ps. 33, s 2, 20.)
Sometimes the scalpel is the honey.
Why did I says that the parable of the wheat and tares is cautionary? Why underscore the masters correct solution was not immediately to tear us the tares and risk also the wheat?
Being right about a problem doesn’t justify every word we issue in reaction. Being right doesn’t automatically mean that however we respond is the right response, as if some response is better than no response. Tearing up the tares, with their roots entangled in the wheat would lose the whole point of the wheat field: the harvest by which they would not starve to death.
By the way, St. Augustine used this parable during the Donatist controversy, explaining that the Church was like the wheat field permixtum malis et bonis… mixed through with people both good and bad. It belongs to the Lord of the Harvest to sort them.
But it also belongs, for the sake of good order here for us to tend our fields, entrusted to us.
I am going to answer to the Master for what I did to His wheat. Please, God, let my scale tip in favor of the wheat.
We can become so pleased with our denunciations that we scarcely notice the souls within range. Of course, sometimes we vent our frustrations without being pleased at all. Sure, there is a time and place for venting. Venting can be a good thing. And yet, too much of a good thing is too much.
Someone is out there who is confused and may need instruction. For sure there is out there a beginner finding his way toward Tradition who may need TLC or who might carry considerable baggage. We – I – can make his next step easier or harder.
The wheat has roots we cannot see.
Hence Saint Paul’s instructions in the Epistle for this Sunday from Colossians 3 about mercy, humility, meekness, patience, and forgiveness. Charity requires us to seek our neighbor’s conversion and salvation, which means considering what will actually help him.
Sometimes a sharp word will help. Sometimes it merely satisfies our appetite for delivering one. Great care is required.
This is why, in the “Internet Prayer” which I wrote so many years ago, I included the petition that we might:
“treat with charity and patience all those souls whom we encounter.”
Souls. Even behind an anonymous username, beyond even to the anonymous “lurker” who observes but does not comment, there is someone who will face judgment and whom God desires to save. Hence, “Think before posting.”
The tare of pride flourishes quite happily beside the grain of sound theology and reverent liturgy. While inspecting everyone else’s tares, we can neglect what is taking root in ourselves.
For my part, I resolve to – more than I have lately – to return to the spirit of that “Internet Prayer” which I admit to have neglected. I need to make sure that my scalpel is honey and not just pain.
I’d ask for readers and commentators here to pray before going online. Then let the prayer govern where your eyes take you what your fingers tap out.
Greg Hlatky on Some notes for your Sunday Mass in the Vetus and the Novus Ordo: ““By pursuing perfection we will achieve excellence.” – Vince Lombardi”
