July 20, 2008

16^th Sunday of Ordinary Time

The Holy Year of Paul, the Apostle

“The Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness;” Romans 8:26

Dear friends;

In life we often focus on the negative: what needs to be improved, what I do not like about myself. In business we do SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Obstacles and Threats) analysis. We try to perfect ourselves and in the process drive ourselves crazy—because we can never be perfect. Our fear of imperfection then drives us to all kinds of bad behavior—consumerism, addiction and judgmental attitudes to those we blame for our failures.

However, Jesus and St. Paul in today’s readings give us another strategy. For St. Paul the positive side of our weakness is that it lays claim to God’s strength. It is the gift of the Spirit that allows us to pray as we should and to issue forth in acts of love. It is not some internal power of our own but God’s life dwelling in us that perfects us.

In the parable of the wheat and weeds Jesus is drawing our attention to an important reality. Good and evil live side by side in this world. To try and root evil completely out can even inflict even more evil. A wise old farmer told me that for the wheat to grow and remain stable it needs the tares (weeds) because they help to support the stocks of grain and hold them up. If you were able to remove the weeds without uprooting the wheat, the wheat would have no support to hold it up as it grows.

The point of the parable is to recognize that in this world we cannot completely separate the good from the bad. Many a utopian dream of a perfect society has declined into totalitarianism and destruction as it tries to construct a perfect world—from the concentration camps of Nazi Germany to the killing fields of Cambodia we can see the untold violence when people try to make the world perfect.

The same is true in our own personal lives. Many fail to recognize that we are all a mixed bag of good and evil. So they live in denial of their own failings, minimize them or blame others. This mentality has made many of us whining, complaining victims rather than responsible, mature adults.

Others recognize their shortcomings however they believe that through their own efforts they can root out the imperfections in their life. They can become, neurotic, narcissistic or scrupulous as if the whole universe revolves around them.

What Jesus invites us to is a healthy realization that evil, failure, and limits are part of our reality. What is needed is a healthy acknowledgement of our own shortcomings and the grace to forgive ourselves, others and creation. Then to ask for the strength of the Spirit to perfect us in a love which looks beyond the weakness. God is our strength; it is God who will separate the wheat and weeds. It is up to us to recognize our need for healing and the power of God which is not limited by our weakness.

Peace,

Fr. Ron