Lifeissues is mainly concerned with publishing thoughtful articles directly related to issues raised in Evangelium Vitae. However, from the very beginning, we have also published a few related homilies, notably by Fr. Al Cariño, O.M.I., Fr. Tony Pueyo, and others.
Please use the pulldowns below to select a homily by Liturgical Calendar date.
Even in one's personal being, one feels this struggle between the weeds and the wheat. St. Paul describes this very well." For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do" (Rom. 7:19). Everyone has a shadow side.
In her book, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, Ruth Burrows describes what it means to die a "happy death". To die in a good way, she states, is not a question of whether or not death catches us in a morally good moment or a morally bad one (dying drunk in a bar as opposed to dying in a church). Rather, to die a happy death is to die in honesty, without pretence, without the need to lie about our lives.
Why do bad things happen to good people? When there are calamities such as floods and earthquakes, we wonder why the good suffer with the bad. Couldn’t God be more selective and punish only the evil ones? Or, as the parable in today’s Gospel tells us, why are the weeds allowed to grow with the wheat?
God gives time for repentance. This is a key theme of today's readings, and it can be applied to the patience that the People of Life need to have as they build a Culture of Life.
This is the one text in the New Testament I am aware of in which Jesus clearly counsels us not to trust too readily in the way things appear to us. There is so much about people that is always outside a comfortable range of certainty. We cannot be certain whether the darnel in our hand is really darnel; it might turn out to be wheat because they look very much alike. The converse is also true: we cannot be certain that what appears to be wheat is actually so; it might turn out to be darnel, which is poisonous at the roots.
Our prayer each week, the very reason for us to gather to do this liturgy, which means "work of the people," is to create the conditions so that we, like Merton, can come to realize the fullness of the beauty of our own humanity in concert with those around us. We gather to facilitate an environment where each person shines like the sun and the kingdom of heaven becomes ever so much clearer.
What Christ is calling attention to in this parable is a very important point about man's fundamental epistemic situation. We think we know people, that we can "read them" well, but for the most part we don't and we can't. We very often rush to judgment, believing that this person is "the greatest thing since sliced bread", only to discover years later that they had us completely hoodwinked. And the opposite is true: we infer that a particular person will amount to very little in the end, and yet they turn out to be a great success.
When Jesus told the parable of the wheat and the tares, his disciples told him they didn't understand it, so they asked Jesus to explain it. He seemed to do just that in a direct way, but what if his explanation was theological "milk" because his followers weren't ready for theological "meat"?