The kingdom of heaven may be likened to a man who sowed good seed in his field. While everyone was asleep his enemy came and sowed weeds all through the wheat, and then went off” (Mt 13:24-26).
The enemy in the parable we attribute to being Satan. In Hebrew, śā-țān means adversary or one who opposes. Satan is not a god or Demi-god, nor did God create Satan. He created a high arch-angel named Lucifer, just as he created the arch-angels, Michael, Gabriel, and Rafael. Lucifer opposed the will of God and took the stance of being his adversary. Satan seeks to bring about division, isolation, despair, and death.
God seeks to bring about communion, expansion, hope, and life.
God did not nor does he create evil. Evil is not a thing but a deprivation of the good. God did not create but he does allow evil. God allows distortions of the good he promotes and invites us to participate in all that is good true and beautiful. Our Father loves us so much, angels and humans alike, that he is willing to risk that we will reject him. God is not a tyrant nor dictator. God loves us and wants us to choose him freely. Even when evil and the wicked may seem to flourish, God can still bring about a greater good.
There are times when we have turned away from God because of the pain we have witnessed and/or suffered. In our sin, we seek an apparent or disordered good, but miss the mark of intimate union with God. There are also times we say yes to our Father and his will, will follow those little nudges of the Holy Spirit, and allow Jesus to forgive us and love us in places where we feel unlovable and alone. The hope is that over time we will say no less and yes more.
Jesus shares the parable of the wheat and the weeds with the intention of helping us to see this reality of living in a fallen world where God has created all that is good and yet, in so many ways, bad things happen. God allows the wheat and the weeds to coexist. Jesus is relating a common agricultural application of his time. “The weed here is darnel, a poisonous plant whose roots would become intertwined with the rest of the wheat crop” (Mitch and Sri, 180).
As humans, unlike wheat and weeds, we can change, we can mature, we can repent from our times of saying no and choose to say yes and walk a little closer with our God. The wicked are allowed to exist along the good until the final judgment. Disciples are to “watch and pray that [we] may not enter into temptation; the spirit is indeed willing but the flesh is weak” (Mt. 26:41).
Prayer is the most important thing that we can do every day and the enemy knows this. He will do whatever he can to divert, distract, or dissuade us from praying. If that doesn’t work then he is going to tempt us to pray in as functional or anemic a way as possible. For if he can keep us curved in upon ourselves, isolated, shaming or shoulding all over ourselves, then we are separated from our Father’s forgiveness, mercy, consolation, compassion, and love. I have been led astray in my life and earlier years walked away from God, but he never left me.
Through small ways, God continually reached out and during my late teens, I started to say yes to his invitations. Building on the early stability from my mother and her parents, a moment of prayer with my father, following the nudge of the Holy Spirit to purchase a Bible, to read and pray with the Bible, to return to church and teach Sunday School, when I hadn’t a clue about what I was doing. God led me with his tender chords of love, gently and slowly, and with each successive yes, I experienced his love and our relationship was strengthened.
God encourages and invites each of us, just like a parent invites his or her child to walk. A mother or father encourages their small child to come to a wobbly stand and then encourages them to begin to take those first steps. If the child resumes to a crawl and then crawls away, the parent will go around and again meet the child, help to lift he or she up and then encourage them to walk again. In this intimate dance of love between the two, the child will eventually learn to walk. Sometimes, they will walk away and sometimes walk into their parent’s loving embrace. The parent is always close, to pick their child up when they fall as well.
So, it is with our relationship with God. He has sent his Son to be one with us in our humanity so that we can become one with him in his divinity. Slowly and steadily, Jesus guides us, to crawl, take baby steps, and walk into the loving embrace of the Father to share the infinite love between them who is the Holy Spirit. God is ever patient and ever-present. Yet, we often do not experience him in our lives, because we are preoccupied. We are distracted and diverted by so many other things or we are let down and disillusioned. Instead of bringing our pain, struggles, and sufferings to God, we believe the lie of the enemy that we have to be self-sufficient and stand on our own or we are weak.
God invites us to bring our worst to him. When we first received the diagnosis that JoAnn, my wife, not only had pancreatic cancer but that it had spread throughout her abdominal region. The prognosis was not good. There was a flashback to the earlier days of turning away from God. Not this time.
This time I turned to God and trusted in whatever was coming. JoAnn and I both received the grace of his peace and the closeness of his presence because we did not turn away from him, even though the outcome was not what either of us wanted or prayed for. Even though this was not fair any way you looked at it, no matter JoAnn was in perfect health except for the cancer… We accepted the devastating reality and decided not to take the time we were given for granted. Knowing our time was limited we decided to get things in order and make the best of the time we had left.
From this experience and others, I have realized that there is very little that we are truly in control of. But we can decide how we are going to live no matter the internal resistance or external circumstances. “He who sows the good seed is the Son of Man.” God has created us good. We are invited to grow where we have been planted, to mature, and to bear fruit that will become the seed to be sown in the lives of others. By our willingness to will the good of each other, we love as God loves us.
There is evil and those who live wicked lives among us. We can choose to react in kind and be weakened by the poison of evil and other’s wickedness, we can give into despair, and we can curve in upon ourselves and/or bury our head in the sand. Jesus invites us to choose another way. We can be more intentional with the time we have been given. We can allow ourselves a prayerful breathe and pause before we choose to entertain each thought, before we speak each word, and choose instead of reacting, to act in ways that promote a patience and peace that surpasses all understanding.
Healing for ourselves and those we hold close to our hearts is possible, even in situations that appear to be hopeless. When we choose to abide in God’s love, the Holy Spirit will help us despite our wounds and weaknesses to heal and become whole again. Abiding in God’s love we will flourish where we have been planted, we will overcome the temptations that seek to undo us, and we will experience hope and joy.
Photo: On Rosary walk and then stopping to pause and breathe.
Spiritual Stepping Stones 