It wasn’t an easy summer, but at the top of the list of difficult things to endure was learning that in that hospital, there was nothing I could fix. I was in the middle of three months of chaplaincy as part of Clinical Pastoral Education following my first year of seminary. And, oh, how I wanted to fix so many things, but above all, I desperately wanted to fix people.
My chaplain supervisor, on the other hand, constantly urged me and my fellow interns not to try to fix anyone or anything. His advice was to say little and be present more when visiting patients. Sit and listen. Don’t try to make the patients feel better. Just be with them. Don’t try to fix them or tell them what to believe. Above all, don’t try to dole out vapid assurances of comfort when someone is suffering. Trying to make patients feel better is usually about our own need to make ourselves feel better. If we can make cancer patients smile, then we don’t have to face their pain.
Although I understood this, I just couldn’t let go of the need to fix. I was perhaps a bit arrogant and too confident that I would help them in their suffering by bringing a generous understanding of God to their bedsides. I sat in the rooms of patients who were convinced that their suffering was God’s punishment. And I was only supposed to listen, not fix? I longed to correct their bad theology. After all, if I knew what was good for them, why couldn’t I share it with them? Why couldn’t I help them see a God of love instead of a vindictive God of wrath? So, I became quite adept at threading the needle of obedience to my supervisor’s instructions. I refrained from telling people what to believe but tried to suggest that there was another way of looking at the situation. Maybe your heart condition is not because God is angry with you. Maybe your cancer is not because you sinned.
And so, when I shared one of those bedside experiences with my supervisor, I could see his face fall. He became a bit exasperated when he pointed out that I was trying to fix things and that wasn’t our job as interns. Just be with people, he said. That’s all. So, I sighed and wept a bit inside.
My experience in that summer of hospital chaplaincy reminds me of the parable of the wheat and weeds, or to put it more traditionally and eloquently, the parable of the wheat and the tares. I can readily identify with the servants of the householder who spot weeds in the wheat field and instinctively want to root them out, because like me, they are fixers. When I see bad theology, I want to beat it down like the devil under my feet, to borrow the words of the Great Litany. In pastoral ministry, if there’s a hint of a bad seed being sown amid the parish, I want to root it out. And especially when I’m standing in the middle of a field of good seed, ready for ample wheat to be produced, I’m usually mystified and disturbed when I realize that weeds have been sown among the grain. How did they get in? Who sowed them? And isn’t it my job to get rid of them?
But my own knee-jerk reactions, perhaps like yours, are probably the mark of an impatience with views different from our own. The householder in Jesus’s parable is much more like my chaplain supervisor in clinical pastoral education. Let it be, he says. The sorting and reaping are not to be done by us but by God.
This approach doesn’t immediately sit well with me. We’re habitually trained by both our culture and sometimes by others in the Church to sort people into good or bad, moral or immoral, valid or invalid, bound for heaven or condemned to hell, worthy or unworthy, sinful or redeemed. And every parable that Jesus ever told, like that of the wheat and the tares, confounds our easy binaries. If we’re not unsettled by this, then we probably don’t have ears to hear.
But the householder in Jesus’s parable is wiser than his servants. He knows that leaving the sorting to the reapers at harvest time is best for everyone. If you’re a fixer like me, it would seem, at first glance, that it’s a very poor decision. The weeds will destroy the health of the field. They’re vile and unattractive. But the householder knows something that the servants don’t know.
At first, in the initial stages of growth, those pesky weeds look an awful lot like the wheat growing alongside them. In fact, they grow together, intertwined with one another, good and bad, wheat and weed. And if the supposedly bad weeds are pulled up too soon, they will uproot some of the wheat as well. The householder is concerned about the health of the wheat. But that’s not all. I suspect that the householder is also concerned about the well-being of the weeds, not because they’re weeds but because they might not be weeds after all.
Let them grow up alongside the wheat, the householder advises. Their lives are mysteriously bound together for a time. And at harvest time—God’s time—what once seemed to be a weed might be revealed as wheat. At harvest time, it will be clear what’s to be kept and what’s to be burned up. The reaper knows better than the servant. And the householder knows best of all.
It’s not much of a leap to see how God is like the householder. God knows how to lovingly temper our overzealousness for his sake. We want to think that we’re always the wheat in the good field of God’s planting, and it’s utterly satisfying to do our own mental sorting from a place of superior comfort. But it’s not harvest time yet in this life. Any final assessment of good and evil is too soon. Any premature sorting into final eternal destinations is irresponsible if not downright harmful.
God knows that it’s best for us to stop trying to fix others and focus on faithful, compassionate, and godly living. The less time we spend sorting others into categories and trying to fix them, the more time we have to grow by God’s grace into wheat bearing much fruit. Go to Mass, say your prayers, love your neighbor, serve the poor, act charitably, turn constantly to God in repentance, seek relationship with others. All of this is our Christian vocation. Leave the sorting and reaping of others’ souls to God and his angels.
While our culture and even parts of the Church are inordinately concerned with extirpating the weeds among us, God is concerned with the growth of the wheat. And God is concerned, too, with the weeds. At some point the image of weeds falls short as a metaphor. In God’s astounding providence, who’s to say that the weeds we’d like to root out couldn’t learn from the growth of the wheat? Can a grain of wheat teach weeds to bear fruit? Do weeds remain weeds for eternity?
When humans meddle in sorting and reaping too soon, it’s not just the weeds that suffer. The wheat suffers, too. Think of the souls fleeing the Church at the damage done by premature reaping. Think of the Church’s tarnished reputation because grains of wheat tried to do their own sorting and reaping. Think even of bundles of wheat and weeds in parasitical relationship all because of hasty reaping when the wheat itself has gone astray. If the time isn’t right—if the time is not God’s time—irreparable harm is done to both wheat and weeds.
In that hospital eight years ago, I sat at the bedside of people who would probably have put me in with the weeds had they known me better. And I cringed at what I perceived as their bad theology. I thought I needed to fix them, to make them more open-minded and generous. But what did I know? Wouldn’t it have been better to let God be the custodian of their souls and for me to simply live faithfully and honestly as a follower of Jesus Christ? Is there any better way to testify to the good? Is there any better way to ensure that abundant, precious fruit will be borne?
Whether I truly know what’s good or bad theology, and of all the things I don’t know, I do know some astounding good news from the parable of the wheat and the tares. I know that God is the only one who can sort and reap. I know that none of us is compassionate, discerning, or wise enough to sort and fix others. And I also know that the fullness of God’s kingdom is realized not by placing people into categories or making facile judgments but in courageous and faithful living as Jesus taught us. And above all, a strong dose of humility and a great deal of godly patience will teach us that in the kingdom of God, wheat and tares growing together can yield the most abundant harvest imaginable.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
July 23, 2023