Homily for the 7th Sunday after Trinity (16th week of Ordinary Time)

Just last week we heard the parable of the sower, where the seed is the word of God and the soil is the people who receive it. Today, though, in the parable of the wheat and the tares, we are not the soil but the seed.

In one interpretation, this parable can appear disturbing, because whatever we are — wheat or weeds — we are simply what either Jesus or the devil planted. Seeds have no free will; they just live out their nature as seeds. This was how many of the Gnostic heretics would have read the parable, as a deterministic description of those who are capable of enlightenment and those who are not.

But this is to read the parable as a story about the seeds rather than a story about the field. This is easy to do, as modern Christians, because we think that the Bible must be all about us as individuals. But this is a parable, at root, about the Church, about the whole field of Christ’s work in planting the kingdom here on earth.

Classically, the field that contains both wheat and weeds has been interpreted as the Church, which contains both good and bad. The Church is, to use St. Augustine’s phrase, a “mixed Body.” In the present age, the wheat and the tares are mixed. And this mixture goes all the way up and down the Church’s hierarchical constitution. Those who follow Church news of late will know of a sad recent schism which has been justified on the grounds that the Church is in a “state of emergency.” Without downplaying the many scandals of the present, the Church has been in a state of emergency and will be in a state of emergency for its entire existence. One of the key lessons, and hard lessons, from the parable is that it will never be possible, in this age, to separate the wheat from the tares. We will never find, in other words, the perfect, pure Church, made up only of the saints. And this is not just because all saints are nothing more than sinners redeemed by God. The “mixed Body” implies that there will always be those in the Church who are not, despite all appearance, really part of the Church: those who have not actually given themselves to Christ, those who come to the Church for misguided or selfish reasons, those who are self-deceived.

For Augustine, in the early 5^th century, it was necessary to say this at a time in which Christianity had only recently become a large, socially accepted way of life. After Constantine consolidated power in the Roman Empire in the early 4^th century and made Christianity a legitimate public option for his citizens, people came to the Church in droves. But many of those who had been in the Church during the persecutions resented these new members and questioned their purity of motives.

More so, there had been those in the persecutions who in fact did renounce their faith in Christ. These were the traitors, the traditores, who literally handed over the Church to her enemies. And the controversial thing in Augustine’s time was that many of these “traitors” had, after the persecution, come back and reclaimed a Christian identity once it was safe to do so.

A whole group of people, known as the Donatists, claimed that these people could not be accepted back, and that any sacraments performed by their ministers would be invalid. And so, for Augustine, and for those who followed him in the centuries afterwards, the parable of the wheat and the tares was a strong message from Jesus that any attempt in this age of making a total separation between the wheat and the tares will be damaging to the whole Church. The presence of the unfaithful among the faithful is a humiliation that must be suffered.

We are still, today, unsure quite what to make of all this. I know of no church that does not, at some point, draw clear lines and limits in regard to its membership and its standards. Even Augustine would not have suggested that the traitors in the 4^th century should have been simply accepted as they were. The point for him was that there is always room for repentance. And we cannot presume too readily that we have a clear view of men’s souls — at a certain point we have to leave the final judgment to God.

For Augustine, and for us, the key thing is that the Church’s purity — her holiness — like her oneness, her catholicity, her apostolicity — those four marks of the Church that we affirm each week in the Nicene Creed — all of these marks of the Church are marks of the Church’s union with Jesus Christ. The Church is holy because Christ is holy, not because the Church is able, in her own strength, to maintain some kind of inner purity among her members.

While this is a true and important affirmation about Holy Church, whether in the whole world or in a small parish, it is perhaps a little too easy for us to run with it as individuals. Many Catholics today seem to have imbibed a sensibility that will seem quite familiar to those of us who used to be Anglicans: the notion that the Church should not pry too deeply into individual conscience. There are those who actually celebrate the idea that the Church is not pure, because we do not want to be like those people, those Puritans and other exclusive types who dare to, gasp, declare that certain behaviors are wrong, or dare to suggest that you ought to have some kind of ongoing relationship with Jesus beyond Sunday morning.

For those who think like that, there is this pesky question that the parable of the wheat and the tares seems to ask. Are you wheat, or are you a weed?

It is easy to affirm the “mixed” or impure character of the Church today because we do not really want to believe that the distinction between the wheat and the tares exist. Surely, we think, this is just a man-made category; surely all of us are really wheat, deep down. But the parable makes clear that the weeds will be burned. They will be separated at the end of all things, when the Son of Man comes in glory. So the question remains: Are you the good grain, or are you the weed?

If the Church is a mixed body, so are we all individually: even within our own selves we are a mixed lot. Any honest person knows this. In the same way that we should be hesitant about attempts to create the Church of the pure, so should we be hesitant to declare ourselves pure. Just as in a real garden, it’s just when you think the weeds are gone, when you sit back and relax and think all the hard work is done, that they come back with a vengeance.

There’s hope, though. Even if you are a weed, you can be converted. There is time, before the final harvest. If bread and wine, in God’s marvelous economy, can become the Body and Blood of the divine Savior, is it too much to imagine that weeds might become wheat? That the false believer might become true? This God, who both sows us into the world and sows his word into our hearts, is able to give us even those things for which we cannot, in our blindness, know to ask. He can open our eyes to see the truth about ourselves, and the truth about his power to transform us.