I know you are but what am I

JMJ
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The Readings for the 16th Saturday, Tempus per Annum (C2)

• Jeremiah 7:1-11
• Matthew 13:24-30

He replied, “No, if you pull up the weeds you might uproot the wheat along with them.”

Matthew 13:29

ONE MIGHT BE TEMPTED to worry if one is a weed. Likewise, one may be equally tempted to imagine one is wheat. On the internet, at least, the diagnosis is in the second person and they are usually the weeds in question: something like “bogus ordo weeds”. Yet, consider this as the seed is all sown in the field of one heart?

Notice first that the sower sows good seed. After the good seeds start to grow the bad seed also shows up. So the bad seed came in later.

The good seed is the Logos, the Word of God, sown in every human heart by God who is the heart of every heart. If we could but listen to that Word fully and only we would be drawn to God-wards at every moment as assuredly as a comet is drawn back to the sun. But the enemy (more on that in a moment) has sown weeds or, as the more common reading would have it, tares. Tares look like wheat, but most certainly are not wheat! If you feed them to animals the tares are poison. Tares will ruin your flour if you do not get rid of them before grinding the wheat! Imagine losing an entire flour harvest because you missed a few tares on the way to the mill.

This is to suggest that both the wheat and the tares are in one’s own heart and so we need to be careful: careful to discern which is which and careful to not destroy the good. No heart we meet is all wheat nor is any heart all tares.

This applies both in the first person and in the second person. It applies both before and after conversion.

On our way into the Church (especially as adults) we may bring with us many tares from our past or from odd moments on the internet. We may find ourselves one day thinking “this ‘Christian’ thing actually wasn’t very Christian at all…” It could be theological or devotional, it could be moral or political. Just one day the Holy Spirit moved you to see that it was time to let this go. But how would it have been if someone – a few years ago – had reached out and tried to uproot those tares back then before you were ready?

Could it have possibly caused you to give up entirely?

If you were just coming into the Church and someone was pointing out all the tares, would you not have bothered at all? You know the sort: you have to stop that and that and that and that other thing too. You have to stop all this before we’ll even consider letting you into the Church. Or how would you feel if you had to adhere to a dress code before coming to communion? I knew an Orthodox priest who suggested a new convert needed to see a therapist because she had a nose ring. (This was literally the reason I never joined ROCOR nor had anything to do with them.)

As Aquinas says, God’s grace perfects our nature. This is often mistranslated as “Grace builds on nature”. No. Grace perfects. Sometimes grace will tear us down and start over again. The things in us that are of God will grow stronger if we encourage them. Dietrich von Hildebrand begins his wonderful Transformation in Christ with the call to change: “All true Christian life, therefore, must begin with a deep yearning to become a new man in Christ, an inner readiness to ‘put off the old man’ – a readiness to become something fundamentally different.” The things we think we are today become something new in Christ. What if everything we think we know about ourselves is wrong?

Jeremiah makes it clear that God’s concern both moral and theological: deal justly with your neighbor and don’t worship idols. God requires right worship and right action. (St James says this too. We need to be doers of the word, not just hearers, but we do need to be hearers…) If you don’t do the worship right you’re not doing the justice right either – and vice versa. Our God requires of us both a proper love of Him first and then also a love of neighbor.

So the question of wheat and tares becomes important as we navigate through our daily lives. Can we find ourselves in places where an admixture of wheat and tares leaves us wanting to run away? Where would we go? The Word of life is here. How do we treat others on the same path?

Again this is not you wheat me tares. In the end, the final division of what is useful in God’s kingdom and what is not useful at all will be in Purgatory: the good and the bad will flow through the fires of God’s love, the latter to destruction, the former to bread.

What we are called to do right now may be literally nothing but being faithful. Don’t stress when you find a tare, let God’s grace go to work.