This week’s Daily Meditations focus on Jesus’ parables as teachings intended for our spiritual transformation. In this homily, Father Richard Rohr describes how Jesus’ parable of the weeds and wheat offers insight into becoming compassionate, “both-and” people instead of “either-or” people. Click here to read the Gospel passage (Matthew 13:24–30).
This Gospel is not only extremely insightful, it’s also very realistic and compassionate. With injustices and crises in every part of the world, many of us are asking ultimate questions about good and evil. “Where do the weeds come from? Where does evil originate? Why do people do such harmful things?” I ask this about a dozen times every day. This world doesn’t make sense. How can people be so malicious, so unkind, so uncaring? It’s like we don’t know how to care anymore, as though we don’t know how to access our own hearts, our own souls, and our own spirits.
For those of us who grew up as Christians, we may have heard this parable when we were younger. We may have been told to pull out the imperfect weeds and get rid of our faults. But since we really couldn’t get rid of them, we covered them up and pretended we didn’t have them. And that just doesn’t work.
To accept this teaching doesn’t mean we can say, “It’s okay to be selfish, violent, and evil.” It simply means that we have some realism about ourselves and each other. We have to name the weed as a weed. We can’t just pretend it’s all wheat, all good, because it isn’t. We’re not perfect. Our countries are not perfect. The Church is not perfect. The project of learning how to love—which is our only life project—is quite simply learning to accept this. If you really love anybody, and I hope you all do, then you have learned to accept a person despite, and sometimes even because of, their faults.
What love means is to say, “I know your faults, I see your weeds, and I care for you anyway.” Only God’s heart, only the mind of Christ in us, really and fully knows how to do that.
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