A green thumb I am not so my knowledge of plants is rather limited. I know that certain plants, like dandelions, are weeds; obnoxious eyesores that ruin the beauty of any lawn. Some plants, however, (e.g., foxglove) have fooled me into thinking they are beautiful wildflowers rather than weeds.
The weeds Jesus mentions in this parable were not wildflowers or the kind of weeds we would find in our yards. They were known as darnel, a noxious, poisonous weed that closely resembles wheat until it ripens. Only then can a farmer tell the difference between them. Wheat stands tall and golden while darnel is shorter with gray heads of grain. At harvest, the farmer would then separate the weeds from the wheat, using darnel for fuel and wheat for food.
The point Jesus is making is this: God isn’t judging us now but he does intend to judge us on the Day of Judgment. Jesus cautions, “all who cause others to sin and all evil doers” will be thrown into the furnace while “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”
As unnerving as his warning may be, many Christians tend to treat Jesus’ dire warnings about eternal damnation in much the same way smokers regard the warning from the surgeon general that appears on tobacco products. Such a fate may happen to someone else but not to me.
Dare we be so smug? What condition is the landscape of our souls in? Walking around town, I notice some lawns and gardens are well maintained while others are overgrown with weeds. Consequently the flowers in those abandoned beds are overwhelmed by the presence of scraggly, unsightly weeds. As I said last week, a garden without a gardener cannot exist. By itself a garden cannot rid itself of weeds.
Likewise, without prayer, our souls cannot rid itself of its sins. Weeds and sins have much in common. Like weeds, sin often begins on a small note, taking root gradually, creeping its way into our set of values, slowly becoming acceptable and at times even preferable to what God is asking of us. Some sin may appear innocent enough, like the blooms of certain weeds, so enticing and seductive, that we fail to see certain choices we make, like skipping Mass or gossip, as being wrong.
As a child, most of us were taught that sin is either venial or mortal. Every sin does harm to us and to others, but certain sins are serious enough to separate us from God because they demonstrate our blatant rejection of God’s will.
Each time we say the Lord’s Prayer, we pray that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Do we mean what we say? Are we doing God’s will? C.S. Lewis once observed, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘They will be done,’ and those to whom God says in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in hell choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no hell.”
Lets not kid ourselves. Hell does exist, not because God wants to exclude anyone from heaven but because out of love, God gives us the free will to choose our destiny. So what is hell? The Catechism of our Church defines hell as “the state of definitive self-exclusion, from communion with God and the blessed.” In other words, when we choose to exclude ourselves from God, which we do whenever we commit a mortal sin, we are choosing hell over heaven.
We commit a mortal sin when we consciously and freely choose to do something grave against the divine law and contrary to our final destiny. There are three conditions for a sin to be mortal: grave matter, full knowledge, and deliberate consent. A sin that is mortal destroys the loving relationship with God that we need for eternal happiness.
On the last day, God will judge us with mercy and clemency. Until then, God will patiently and lovingly encourage us to weed sin out of our lives, alerting us to how damaging the weeds of sin can be to our well being and our relationships with others. Like a parent trying to get a message across to a stubborn child, God will speak bluntly as he did in the gospel and yet be compassionate as we heard in today’s psalm, “You, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in kindness to all who call upon you.” That message should be as refreshing to us as a cool breeze on a hot muggy day.
As any gardener well knows, we do not live in a weed-free world. Both evil and good coexist. We could let the weeds grow rampant and take over the yard or we could strive to get rid of them. The choice is ours. The same is true for sin. We cannot live in a world free of temptation and sin. We must not deny that sin and evil exist and are part of our lives. They will find their way into the garden of our souls for all of us are a mixture of good and bad. Mark Twain put it this way, “Everyone is a moon and has a dark side, which he never shows to anybody.”
Seeing ourselves as both good and bad, yet loved unconditionally by God, we have good ground for hope. What we do is up to us, but if we do God’s will, which includes rooting out the evil in our lives through the sacrament of reconciliation and prayer, then our souls will be radiant on the day of the harvest like fields of amber wheat shining like the sun. As our opening song proclaimed, may we dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of our life.