Sunday, 17 July 2011 Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Gladioli alias Glad!
in the sanctuary 

  http://www.simnet.is/e.booth/english/16Sund11.htm

Fr. Edward OP
Homily

16 Sunday 2011

•                The parable of the tares sown amongst the wheat, as also the sequel of the woman introducing leaven into the bread-dough follow on naturally from the parable of the sower. One feels the presence of the tidy mind of Matthew bringing them together as thematically linked.
•                The problem of finding tares sown amongst wheat is a more complex problem than those with the terrain. Wind-blown tare seed must be a common hazard, but more intense when some farmers seek to keep their fields in cultivation when a neighbouring field has been neglected after cultivation in it ceased. I am always conscious of the close and luxuriant growth of very large weeds together in the patch of land just under the hotel here, as one turns towards the swimming pool. I believe that with genuine tares it is not immediately evident what they are as they germinate along with the wheat. The lack of experience and intelligence of the labourers is very evident as they propose to pull and dig out the weeds immediately. That would have meant the impossible task of separating out the root systems, with the consequent halting of growth for the wheat. The field-owner had much more experience, and rightly rejected their suggestion instantaneously. Let them grow together and separate the tares from the wheat at the harvest-time, before the tare-seeds had fallen and, like the wheat-seeds, were still on the stem. They can be burnt. They would add a little potash to the soil to increase its fertility. And so a toleration of the presence of weeds as an everyday phenomenon, gains a universal knowledge of a much more significant field of human action which is the need under certain circumstances to tolerate the presence and even the development of evil in the short term, with extension into practical ergonomics in the area of the economising of human effort. Actually the amount of more than common sense which is called for to solve the questions is virtually zero.
•                But the consequences can be extrapolated to the divine tolerance of evil, and the divine power of bringing good out of evil. But in dealing with evil from a divine point of view there must be more than abstract principles. There must be a connaturality with the divine as such which has grown with that special activation of spiritual gifts rising to the contemplation of God which is the heart, the source, the appropriate atmosphere which is better when the contemplative atmosphere is widespread, leading to the gaining of perhaps only a little of the immense wisdom of God.
•                Then Our Lord contemplates the incredible energies present in the growth of a mustard seed, leaving us with the birds, whose song delights us, feeling secure in the nests which they build amongst the foliage of its branches. That the woman bakes her own bread coincides with a present day trend for people who are rightly suspicious of the use of low quality ingredients. In previous times bakers have been described as the most honest of men. According to a shrewd Catholic writer, half- English and half-French, it is because they have to get up earlier than other men and so they can contemplate the beauty of a slow sunrise which other  men miss as they swallow a little unnourishing breakfast, and then are subjected to the stress of road traffic, or hide themselves behind the pages of the early editions of the newspapers  in their stop-start commuter trains and buses, arriving in no fit state to apply their tired judgements to a pile of routine work.
•                Again Our Lord says nothing extraordinary. But his own contemplative capacities were enormous, and through these lines the contemplative search is passed on to us as listeners or readers. There is a repetition of the allusion to the "mysteries of the Kingdom" as it is found in the parable of the sower. He says "I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world." The secret of tare-growth and its treatment? The growth of the mustard tree? The introduction of yeast to bread-dough - when he has omitted the addition of warm sugar solution which can spur the yeast-growth to a far higher degree?
•                But when these images are applied with a sensitive and experienced knowledge of what is obtained in prayer, then curtains are drawn and closed doors are opened, as the cutting-edge of the mind is applied both to the mind itself and through the mind itself cuts through to the knowledge of the Tri-une God at its enormous depth, working always at its own rate, with defined purposes, as it removes the rust in our own souls, renewing us through and through. Amen.