Homilies & Thoughts

One element of Jesus’ parables that often stands out is their compression of time. This is especially true of the agricultural parables. In just a few sentences, an entire growing season passes before us. The seed is scattered, birds arrive, shoots spring up, the sun scorches them, thorns choke them, and the good plants bear fruit.

Every gardener knows that this is not how we experience these things. Seeds do not grow and fail in a matter of moments. Roots develop beneath the soil where we cannot see them. Plants may endure several days of intense heat before withering. Thorns grow gradually around them. Fruit takes time to ripen.

I think today’s Gospel can initially be unsettling. It can sound as though the Lord is intentionally withholding his message from certain people. But we have to look more carefully to understand what he is really saying.

Our lectionary says, “Gross is the heart of this people.” Other translations say, “[T]his people’s heart has grown dull.” NRSVCE The word behind “gross” and “dull” literally means “to make fat” or “to fatten up.” Gk pachyno The image is of a heart that has grown heavy and sluggish—a heart that can no longer move as freely or respond as readily as it was meant to.

The Lord tells Mary Magdalene, “Stop holding on to me.”

At first, we can understand this simply as a very human moment. Mary thought Jesus was dead, and suddenly he is standing before her. Of course she runs to him. Of course she embraces him and holds on, perhaps a little too tightly. We can imagine doing the same thing if someone we loved had been gone for a long time—someone we thought we would never see again—and then suddenly appeared before us. We would not want to let go.

Ordinarily, when we think of family, we think of a natural relationship. We are born into a family, and its members are who they are. We may not always like them. We may even sometimes wish we could get rid of them. But they remain our family.

That natural bond shapes our customs, our affections, and the way we respond to one another. When family arrives, we acknowledge them and attend to them. Somewhere deep within us, we know that this is simply what we ought to do. Hopefully we do it willingly, out of love—but even when we do not feel like it, we still sense the obligation.

Many Gospel passages challenge the way we see the world. Often, the difficulty lies in the demands of Jesus. He calls us to perfection, and we know how far short we fall. At other times, however, the challenge comes from the Gospel’s perceived harshness. It can appear to divide the world neatly into good and bad, leaving little room for ambiguity or change.

The parable of the wheat and the weeds can sound this way. The Lord seems to declare that some plants are wheat and others are weeds, with nothing anyone can do about it. When this text is preached, there is often a tendency to rescue it by making those categories more fluid.

A field choked with weeds looks like failure. We question the sower and the seed. We question the care that was shown. Then we propose the obvious solution: rip the weeds out. Jesus responds with a startling command: “Let them grow together until harvest.”

We struggle with the parable of the weeds among the wheat because we do not see the world with the mind of Christ. We tend to see the world through the lens of purity. Something in our fallen nature urges us immediately to separate the worthy from the unworthy, the good from the bad. We do this as nations, as communities, and even within our parishes. We decide who belongs at the table and who should be kept at a distance. We long to be surrounded only by wheat.

As someone who has to work on the Sabbath, I find it reassuring to hear the Lord say that those who serve him on that day are innocent.

But those words also shed light on what Jesus means when he calls himself “Lord of the Sabbath.” We can hear that title as though it meant only that Jesus is the Sabbath’s rule-giver: he is in charge, so he can decide what is or is not permitted. But Jesus means something much greater. He is not merely the one who regulates the Sabbath. He is the reason for it and the fulfillment of everything it promises.

When we hear this Gospel, which comes to us several times throughout the year, our first thought may be that, through grace, Christ lightens our burdens. And that is certainly true. His grace gives us the strength we need to accomplish what he has called us to do.

We may also think that love itself makes a burden feel lighter. That is true as well. When we do something difficult for someone we truly love, we do it much more readily than we would for someone toward whom we felt no love at all. Love changes the way we carry a burden.

“You have hidden these things from the wise and the learned and revealed them to the childlike.” In these words, Christ calls us to simplicity—not ignorance, but simplicity of heart.

I think of a letter St. Francis Xavier wrote while serving as a missionary in India. He had encountered whole communities eager to receive the faith, but there were not enough priests to teach them, administer the sacraments, and satisfy their hunger for God.

“For if the mighty deeds done in your midst had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would long ago have repented.”

When we hear these words, we might wonder: Why did the Lord not perform those mighty deeds in Tyre and Sidon, if they would have repented? And why perform them in Capernaum, where they were met with unbelief? The Lord knew how the people would respond. So what is he teaching us?

The Lord’s parable and his stated reason for speaking in parables are mutually illuminating. Which is to say, the parable draws us into the logic of parables and reveals their purpose. A parable is not a mere story or a moral lesson. It is an invitation to step inside a symbolic world and meditate. Every object within the symbolic cosmos is polyvalent and saturated with meaning. Understanding, then, is not reducible to “figuring out the message,” as if one were solving a puzzle. Understanding is discovered through participation in the parable.

A person who tells a lie must carry the weight of both the truth and the lie. First comes the story. Then comes the detail that has to match the story. Then more details. The mind has to work faster than the conversation constructing a more and more elaborate façade.

Jesus knows that hidden labor. He uses the word “burdened,” a verb. We are actively being weighed down and carrying something. He is speaking about the work of carrying the weight that stays with a person after a choice has been made. It is what stays with us after the moment has passed.