Pulling Up Weeds at the Cost of Uprooting the Wheat

July 19, 2020

It is fascinating to hear Jesus in the Gospel parable say that it is best to let the weeds and the wheat grow together.  Weeds can take away sustenance and minerals from the grain of wheat.  It will make the harvest much more complicated.  So often when we look at the garden and see weeds we may feel that things have been neglected.  Wheat and weeds growing together challenges our standard for good gardens.  But the Lord uses wisdom to say let them grow together.  In the end, our focus might change.  A Jesuit priest wrote a reflective book on this reality.  His starting point was the premise that we do not know what our wheat is and what are the weeds in our lives.  So often we would prefer to get rid of the painful things in our lives.  We would avoid certain things.  Yet looking back over the years, they just might become the real places of growth.  His premise was that Jesus tells the workers to wait until the harvest so we could really understand what our weeds are and what our wheat is.  We say often hindsight is 20/20.

It is not easy to be patient to wait until the harvest.  We would like justice now.  We want to rid ourselves of the weeds that cloud our vision or our well-being.  At times we are not patient in the present time, we all long for things to be uprooted, to be thrown out.  Wisdom comes only at the harvest.  Jesus is asking us to give it time.  In time our perspective might change.  What truly are our weeds and what truly is our wheat?   Has it changed over time as we look back at our lives?

God sees the good in us.  God sees the potential in us.  He is willing to give us all the time to grow.  We have until His harvest.  God does not long to uproot the potential.  May we be honest about what is truly the good and what is truly the bad in our lives; about what is truly wheat and what are truly weeds.

Fr. John Ouper