Our 1st Reading today (Wisdom 12:13-19) comes right at the end of Old Testament times, only 50 years before the birth of Jesus, and gives us an image of God as lenient and merciful, far removed from the somewhat biased and even violent God that we meet in earlier stories. You can see and hear me give this Homily on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea94mpfi5FM
That’s the problem with the Old Testament. It’s important, because it is the Bible that Jesus used and commented on, so we cannot understand him without it; but he was always selective in what parts he quoted from and what he contradicted. And that seems to me to be a link with our Gospel today (Matt 13:24-43) because the Old Testament is very like that field he talks about, full of wheat and weeds - I prefer the word “weeds” to the word “darnel”. And like the bread after the yeast and the flour have been mixed together. Let me remind you of a few examples. The great Jacob who has the vision of God’s angels on a ladder from earth to heaven is the man who cheats his brother. His sons sell their brother Joseph into slavery. Moses, who leads his people out of slavery after a vision of God in a burning bush and later on a mountain, is the same man who murders an Egyptian and later encourages his people to slaughter a whole tribe of people who get in their way. David, inspired by God to defeat a giant of a man with a slingstone, and who becomes the great King of Israel, is also the man who steals another man’s wife and has the man killed.
The stories in the Old Testament also show how this people gradually discovered the true God of love and mercy as revealed in Jesus; but in order to do this we have to read first of a god who they think of as fierce and violent, and who like the pagan gods supports his own people and destroys anyone else who gets in their way. Only gradually, do we see their view of God changing, particularly as their nation faces defeat and most of their people are driven away into foreign lands. Then they have to realise, with the help of their great prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, that God is not simply on their side however they behave, but is a power that transcends national and ethnic boundaries. And so we get back to our 1st Reading today, where God is addressed with the words, “Your justice has its source in strength, your sovereignty over all makes you lenient to all.” Thus we understand, that although we humans would like to tear up the weeds in the world and just leave the wheat, God knows better that this division cannot easily be made. Similarly, once the dough has been mixed there is no way one can separate the flour from the yeast
For this Old Testament story of a mixture of goodness and evil is also what the world is like today isn’t it? We despair as we see the violence at the moment between Russia and the Ukraine, or in the Sudan. We are horrified by how some people cheat and steal and mess up our world with their violence and their greed and their pollution and their immorality; and we might well say to God, as the servants say to their Master in the Parable, “Why don’t you go and root it all out and destroy it?” But Jesus says to us that it isn’t as simple as that, for as gardeners and farmers know only too well many weeds look just like the good plants that they are growing with; and what’s more they are very clever at growing right next to the roots of these plants, which makes it incredibly hard to pull them out without damaging the good plant as well. Destroying all the baddies may work well in films and fairy stories, but it doesn’t work in real life. And of course, it is not just the world that is this mixture of good and evil but each one of us is too. We too would like to have all the things we regret about ourselves taken away - the anger, the over-eating or drinking, the lies, the bad thoughts, and all the other immoralities. St Paul knew this from the struggles in his own life and shares them when he writes “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate….. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing… Wretched man that I am”. (Romans 7:15-19) He even finds it difficult to pray, and so says in our 2nd Reading today, to comfort himself and us, that “The Spirit helps us in our weakness.” (Romans 8:26-27) It is a wonderful reminder that God “Knows everything in our hearts”, and so as we struggle, not just in prayer, but in every other part of our lives, God is with us, supporting us and encouraging us in all the good that we try to do.
This takes us back to what God is like, not any god but the God that Jesus shows to us, God that is a power of love and mercy, not of fierceness and threat if we put a foot wrong. I meet too many people who have lingering views that God is like the horrific God of the early parts of the Old Testament, or the God who is like a magic force that if you pray hard enough to might put all things right, or of a God who demands perfection and will punish terribly all those who sin. Sadly, some of these views in Catholics are there because of bad teaching and preaching when they were younger, where they were threatened with hell if they did not behave. Even more sadly, many people reject the faith because they think that this is what the God of the Christians is like. How often do I meet people who say they don’t believe in God, and when I ask them what god they don’t believe in, I discover that the god they do not believe in is the God of the Old Testament, not the God as revealed to us in Jesus, a God who offers himself to us in love and compassion, who accepts taking the lowest place and the hardest path of suffering, and so understand where we are and works in us all the time as the Holy Spirit to inspire us to greater things.
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