{"id":4349,"date":"2023-07-22T08:47:00","date_gmt":"2023-07-22T07:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/?p=4349"},"modified":"2023-07-10T14:26:40","modified_gmt":"2023-07-10T13:26:40","slug":"commentary-on-16th-sunday-of-the-year-a-23-07-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/commentary-on-16th-sunday-of-the-year-a-23-07-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Commentary on 16th Sunday of the year (A), 23.07.2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

Commentary by Donagh O\u2019Shea OP, www.goodnews.ie <\/a><\/h3>\n

Mt 13:24-43 (shorter version: Mt 13:24-30)<\/b><\/p>\n

Jesus put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away.\u00a0 So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well.\u00a0 And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’\u00a0 He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’\u00a0 But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.\u00a0 Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.'”\u00a0 <\/em>
\nHe put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”\u00a0 <\/em>
\nHe told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”\u00a0 Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing.\u00a0 This was to fulfil what had been spoken through the prophet: “I will open my mouth to speak in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of the world.”\u00a0 <\/em>
\nThen he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples approached him, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.”\u00a0 He answered, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels.\u00a0 Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age.\u00a0 The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.\u00a0 Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!<\/em><\/p>\n

For \u2018Kingdom of God\u2019 you can say Presence of God.<\/em>\u00a0 In this Sunday\u2019s gospel reading Jesus is telling us what God is like, or how we are to think of God’s presence.\u00a0 He could have used any images in heaven above or on earth below, but he picked these.<\/p>\n

The Presence of God is like a seed<\/em> in the ground, he said; or it is like yeast<\/em> in a batch of dough.\u00a0 Seeds are small, many of them almost invisible, they are the beginnings of things, they are unimpressive to look at, and they are thrown into the ground as if they were being thrown away.\u00a0 Yeast becomes invisible in the lump of dough, it is never seen again.\u00a0 Seeds and yeast: these are realities that don\u2019t draw attention to themselves; if you could credit them with virtues you would have to say they are as humble as dirt.\u00a0 (You could say similar things about another image that Jesus used: salt.)\u00a0 This, he said, is what the Kingdom (the Presence) of God is like; this is how God’s presence makes itself felt in one\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe field is the world,\u201d the text says.\u00a0 This phrase led to one of the biggest debates in the ancient Church.\u00a0 The Donatists were a rigorist sect in the 4th and 5th centuries, who claimed that the good seed in this parable referred to the members of the Church, and so by definition there could be no \u2018tares\u2019, no sinners, in it.\u00a0 According to them, the Church was composed entirely of good people, and the rest of the world was simply evil.\u00a0 This was a kind of Pharisaism come back to life.\u00a0 The one who engaged them definitively was St Augustine, who wrote several books against them.\u00a0 Not only the world, but the Church itself, he said, is a field in which there is good seed and bad.\u00a0 \u201cHow very many sheep there are outside it, and how very many wolves within!\u201d\u00a0 And soon after, St Gregory the Great (c. 540-604) wrote, “In this present Church there cannot be bad without good, or good without bad. They are not good who refuse to endure the bad.”\u00a0 The human race is not divided into children of light and children of darkness; nor is the Church.\u00a0 Every one of us has light and darkness in him or herself; the good grain and the tares grow together.\u00a0 The Church is not a club for the elite, it is a place in which sinners can grow and change by God’s grace.\u00a0 That growth in grace may be agonisingly slow, like the growth of a grain hidden in the soil.\u00a0 But in that very slowness it imitates the patience of God.<\/p>\n

There is no need to suppose that all the Donatists died out.\u00a0 There are some Christian sects that seem very exclusive (\u201cAre you saved?\u201d).\u00a0 By contrast with them, the Catholic Church was consciously non-elitist; there was room in it for everyone, good and bad alike.\u00a0 It was a kind of hospital, or a convalescent home.\u00a0 St Augustine said it was the inn in which the man who fell among robbers was being taken care of.<\/p>\n

Remember the tax-collector in Jesus\u2019 story, who hardly dared to lift his head, but prayed, \u201cGod, be merciful to me, a sinner\u201d (Luke 18:13).\u00a0 How unlike the other, the Pharisee, whose prayer was a recital of his own virtues.\u00a0 The tax-collector was no saint, and he knew it.\u00a0 But the seed of God\u2019s presence was stirring in his heart; the yeast was invisible in his downcast appearance, but it was real.\u00a0 Jesus put him before us as the very model of how we should pray.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Commentary by Donagh O\u2019Shea OP, www.goodnews.ie Mt 13:24-43 (shorter version: Mt 13:24-30) Jesus put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away.\u00a0 So when the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2704,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4349"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7900,"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4349\/revisions\/7900"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}