Why God Waits to Pull the Weeds

Today the Church celebrates Blessed Stanley Rother, an Oklahoma farm boy turned missionary priest, shot dead in his rectory at Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala, on this date in 1981. He knew the killers were coming. He went back anyway, writing home that a shepherd cannot run at the first sign of danger. His story presses the question both of today’s readings force on us: if God is good, why does he let the wicked keep working the field? Jeremiah stands in a land full of corpses and asks it through tears. Jesus answers it in the house at Capernaum, and his answer is harder than we want: the weeds stay until harvest. The delay that offends us turns out to be the mercy we live on. So before you demand that God start pulling weeds, ask what would happen to you if he did.

The Readings

First Reading: Jeremiah 14:17-22

“You shall say to them this word:
‘Let my eyes run down with tears night and day,
and let them not cease,
for the virgin daughter of my people is smitten with a great wound,
with a very grievous blow.

If I go out into the field,
behold, those slain by the sword!
And if I enter the city,
behold, the diseases of famine!
For both prophet and priest ply their trade through the land,
and have no knowledge.’”

Hast thou utterly rejected Judah?
Does thy soul loathe Zion?
Why hast thou smitten us
so that there is no healing for us?
We looked for peace, but no good came;
for a time of healing, but behold, terror.

We acknowledge our wickedness, O Lord,
and the iniquity of our fathers,
for we have sinned against thee.

Do not spurn us, for thy name’s sake;
do not dishonor thy glorious throne;
remember and do not break thy covenant with us.

Are there any among the false gods of the nations that can bring rain?
Or can the heavens give showers?
Art thou not he, O Lord our God?
We set our hope on thee,
for thou doest all these things.

Gospel: Matthew 13:36-43

Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples came to him, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” He answered, “He who sows the good seed is the Son of man; the field is the world, and the good seed means the sons of the kingdom; the weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the close of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the close of the age. The Son of man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.”

Scriptural Analysis

Jeremiah 14 opens with the words “concerning the drought” (Jeremiah 14:1). The land is dying of thirst. Nobles send their servants to the cisterns and they come back with empty vessels; farmers cover their heads in grief; even the doe abandons her newborn fawn because there is no grass (Jeremiah 14:2-6). And the drought lands on a nation already bleeding. Babylon struck Jerusalem in 597 BC and carried off the first wave of exiles, so everything Jeremiah had warned about was coming true, and the drought made the misery worse.¹ Today’s verses sit in the middle of a long dialogue between God and his prophet about this catastrophe.

Notice who is speaking in the first half. God commands Jeremiah, “You shall say to them this word,” and the word is a lament: let my eyes run down with tears night and day (Jeremiah 14:17). Jeremiah’s tears carry God’s own grief. The Lord who is about to judge Judah weeps over Judah through his prophet. In the field lie those slain by the sword; in the city, the diseases of famine (Jeremiah 14:18). And the bitterest line comes last: both prophet and priest ply their trade through the land and have no knowledge. The religious professionals kept collecting fees and reciting formulas while the covenant died around them. Jeremiah has already told us what they were selling. The court prophets promised, “You shall not see the sword, nor shall you have famine” (Jeremiah 14:13), and God calls their message a lying vision and the deceit of their own minds (Jeremiah 14:14).

Then the people answer, and their prayer is one of the great penitential texts of the Old Testament. It moves in three steps. First the questions: Hast thou utterly rejected Judah? Does thy soul loathe Zion? (Jeremiah 14:19). Second the confession: “We acknowledge our wickedness, O Lord, and the iniquity of our fathers” (Jeremiah 14:20). That phrase about the fathers matters. The nation is owning the accumulated guilt of generations, sin compounding across centuries until it stands before God as a single corporate debt.² Third the appeal: do not dishonor thy glorious throne, remember thy covenant (Jeremiah 14:21). The throne is the temple, where the Lord sat enthroned above the cherubim, and the argument is bold: our ruin will look like your failure, so save us for your own name’s sake.³ The prayer closes where the chapter began, with rain. None of the nations’ idols can bring showers; the Baals of Canaan were rain gods, and this drought has exposed them as nothing. “Art thou not he, O Lord our God? We set our hope on thee” (Jeremiah 14:22).

Saint Thomas Aquinas, commenting on this chapter, wrote that “the prophet includes here a prayer to God on behalf of his chosen people, so that having punished them he will also show them his mercy.”⁴ That is the whole shape of the passage: judgment falling, mercy begged for, and both held together in the one God. But we should be honest about what comes next. In the verses right after today’s reading, God answers that even Moses and Samuel standing before him could not turn back the sentence (Jeremiah 15:1). Judah’s time to repent had run out. God’s patience is real, and it has a term. Hold that thought, because the Gospel is about the term.

Matthew tells us Jesus “left the crowds and went into the house,” and there the disciples ask him to explain the parable of the weeds (Matthew 13:36). Aquinas sees a lesson in the setting itself: if we want to search out hidden things, we should enter into a hidden place with the Lord. The crowds got the parable; the ones who came to him and asked received the meaning. Come to him, and be enlightened (Psalm 34:5).⁵

The explanation Jesus gives is a lexicon of seven terms. He who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world; the good seed, the sons of the kingdom; the weeds, the sons of the evil one; the enemy, the devil; the harvest, the close of the age; the reapers, angels (Matthew 13:37-39). Aquinas notes that Jesus names himself Son of Man out of humility, and to cut off future errors about the reality of his humanity.⁶ And the devil sowing in the night is real; through the devil’s envy death entered the world (Wisdom 2:24), and he has been overseeding God’s field ever since.

The farming behind the parable is exact. The weed is darnel, a poisonous plant that in its early stages looks almost identical to wheat, and whose roots intertwine with the wheat’s roots as both grow. Sabotaging a rival’s field this way was common enough in the ancient world that Roman law specifically forbade sowing darnel in another man’s crop.⁷ So the householder’s restraint is agronomy before it is theology: pull the darnel now and you tear out wheat with it. The two must grow together until harvest, when the difference is finally visible and the roots no longer matter.

And harvest, in the prophets, is the fixed image for the last judgment: “Put in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe” (Joel 3:13); “for you also, O Judah, a harvest is appointed” (Hosea 6:11).⁸ Jesus paints that judgment in Old Testament colors. The furnace of fire echoes the furnace of Daniel 3:6; the weeping and gnashing of teeth repeats his own warning at Capernaum (Matthew 8:12); behind the burning stands Gehenna, the smoldering refuse dump outside Jerusalem’s walls that Jesus uses as the picture of hell (Matthew 5:22).⁹ Then the reversal: “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matthew 13:43), which takes up Daniel’s promise that the wise “shall shine like the brightness of the firmament” (Daniel 12:3). Aquinas says the just will have a twofold brightness: in the soul, which will see God (“in thy light do we see light,” Psalm 36:9), and in the body, which Christ will conform to his own glorified body (Philippians 3:21).¹⁰

So why the delay? Saint Isidore of Pelusium, one of the Church Fathers, gives the answer that the Catholic tradition has made its own: God forbids the angels to gather the evildoers now “so that the sinner may not be cut off while in his mind there is yet a possibility of repentance.” God did not slay Matthew at his tax booth, lest he lose an evangelist. He did not destroy the harlots, lest the Church lack models of repentance. He did not avenge Peter’s denial, because he already saw the tears. He did not strike down the persecuting Saul, “lest the ends of the earth be deprived of salvation.”¹¹ Every one of those weeds became wheat. That is what the field looks like from inside God’s patience, and it is why the Church in this age is holy while clasping sinners to her bosom, already sanctified yet always in need of purification (CCC 827).¹² Jeremiah reminds us that patience has a term. The parable tells us what patience is for.

Daily Application

Start with the demand you and I make almost daily, even if we never say it out loud: Lord, weed the field. Remove the corrupt cleric, the mocking co-worker, the relative who wrecks every gathering, the public liars who prosper. Jeremiah looked at the sword and the famine and asked God the same thing from the other side: why have you struck us with no healing? Both prayers assume we know the field well enough to sort it. Jesus says we don’t. The roots are intertwined; darnel looks like wheat until the heads form, and zeal with a sickle tears out God’s crop. Judgment is coming; it is certain, and it belongs to the Son of Man and his angels. It has never once been delegated to you. Keep correcting error, protecting the innocent, and calling sin what it is, as Jeremiah did at full volume. Then surrender the timetable and the sorting to the only one who can read roots.

Then turn the parable inward, because the honest reader eventually notices that the line between wheat and weeds runs through his own plot of ground. The field is the world, but there is a version of this field in every heart, and the weeds I should lose sleep over are the ones growing there. This is where Jeremiah’s prayer becomes a daily practice. Pray it in the first person: I acknowledge my wickedness, O Lord; do not spurn me, for thy name’s sake. Then take it to confession, where the Lord does what the servants in the parable could never do: he pulls the weeds without tearing the wheat, because he alone can tell them apart. The whole reason for the delay of judgment is to give sinners time to repent. The delay is measured in your remaining days. Spend some of them in the confessional.

And when the field seems lost, look at today’s saint. Blessed Stanley Rother worked thirteen years in Santiago Atitlán while Guatemala’s civil war grew up around his parish like darnel. His catechists disappeared. His deacon was murdered in front of him. Warned that his name was on a death list, he went home to Oklahoma, then returned, because his people were still in the field. On the evening of July 28, 1981, three masked men shot him in his rectory, and it looked for all the world like the weeds had taken the harvest. Rome has since declared him a martyr, the first born on United States soil. The righteous will shine like the sun. Pope Benedict XVI once warned catechists against what he called the “temptation of impatience,” the insistence on immediate success and large numbers, when God’s way is the way of the mustard seed and the slow-ripening field.¹³ Rother never saw his harvest. He only stayed faithful in the growing season, which is the season you and I are in.

So keep the sickle out of your hands and the confession on your lips. Tend your own soil, be patient with the weeds beside you the way God has been patient with you, and trust the Harvester to bring in the wheat.

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Notes

1. ↑ The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets (New York: Scepter Publishers, 2005), 361-62.
2. ↑ John Bright, Jeremiah, Anchor Bible 21 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), 102.
3. ↑ Bright, Jeremiah, 102.
4. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Postilla super Jeremiam, 14, 1, quoted in The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, 361.
5. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, chap. 13, lect. 3, nos. 1176-1177.
6. ↑ Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, no. 1179.
7. ↑ Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 180.
8. ↑ Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 204-5.
9. ↑ Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 181-82.
10. ↑ Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, no. 1185.
11. ↑ Isidore of Pelusium, PG 77:184-85, as translated in M. F. Toal, ed., The Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1957), 1:339-40.
12. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 827.
13. ↑ Benedict XVI (then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger), “The New Evangelization: Building a Civilization of Love,” address to catechists and religion teachers, Jubilee of Catechists, December 12, 2000.

Books Cited

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• Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, Doubleday / Image, 2003
• Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2010)
• Daniel J. Harrington, SJ, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Liturgical Press)
• John Bright, Jeremiah, Anchor Bible 21 (Doubleday, 1965)
• University of Navarre, The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, Four Courts Press, 2005
• St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew 13-28, Latin-English Opera Omnia (Emmaus Academic)