Not Yet Time for the Harvest

This Sunday's Mass readings:

This Sunday's Mass readings: First Reading: Wisdom 12:13, 16-19 Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 86:5-6, 9-10, 15-16 Second Reading: Romans 8:26-27 Gospel: Matthew 13:24-43

A farmer plants a field of wheat. That night, while everyone sleeps, an enemy sneaks in, plants weeds in the same field, and disappears. Nobody notices right away. It isn't until the wheat grows and starts producing grain, much later in the season, that the weeds finally show themselves — mixed in so completely that even now, it's hard to tell which is which.

The workers want to fix it right away. Pull the weeds now, they say, before they spread.

The farmer tells them to wait. "If you pull up the weeds you might uproot the wheat along with them" (Mt 13:29, NABRE). It's still too early to sort. Pulling now would destroy good plants along with bad ones.

Later, Jesus tells his disciples who actually does the sorting, and when. Not the workers. Not today. The harvesters do it, and only at the very end.

That's worth sitting with for a moment. The sorting wasn't refused. It was just given to someone else, and to a different time.

God has all the power there is. Nothing holds God back. Nothing makes God unsure. And even so, God waits. God judges with clemency (Wis 12:16). God governs with patience, on purpose, "to teach... that the just must be kind" (Wis 12:19).

There's another detail in this parable worth noticing. While the wheat and the weeds are still growing together, nobody's rationing the rain. The farmer doesn't water the plants he trusts and starves the ones he's suspicious of. Everything in that field is still being tended, all the way up to harvest.

Jesus says almost the same thing plainly, a few chapters earlier in this same Gospel: God "makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust" (Mt 5:45). Not once things get sorted out. Now, while nothing is.

God has every reason to be certain and still chooses patience. We have every reason to be uncertain, yet we still act like we're certain. That's the difference. God's power comes wrapped in mercy. Ours, too often, comes wrapped in speed and stereotype.

Right now, that costs immigrants and refugees across this country everything. Fathers. Workers. Neighbors. A man who looks a certain way or fits a profile someone decided on ahead of time doesn't get asked his name before his hands are put behind his back. He's stripped of his dignity before anyone's said a single word to him. A family finds out what happened from a news alert, not a phone call. Decisions get made in seconds by people who don't wait, don't ask, and don't need to be sure before they act.

Wisdom doesn't say God ignores wrongdoing. God "judges" (Wis 12:16) — the word is right there in the reading. But God's judgment never once skips the kindness. Judgment without kindness isn't justice. It's just force, wearing justice's name.

None of us gets to bring in the harvest early. That was never our job.

There's a difference worth being exact about. Calling the sorting unjust — the raid, the force, the profiling — is one kind of judgment. Wisdom already lets us make it, plainly.

Deciding someone is a weed is a different judgment. That one was never ours to make. We don't get to classify a person that way. We don't get to treat anyone as if they don't matter.

They matter to the farmer. Every stalk in that field. They have to matter to us too.

Let us pray. Lord, you hold all the power there is, and still you choose mercy. Look with love on immigrants and refugees being sorted unjustly right now, and on the families waiting for someone to say their names instead of their case numbers. Teach us that judgment without mercy is not justice at all. Amen.

Glossary

Clemency — Mercy shown by someone who has the power to act harshly, but chooses gentleness instead.

Dignity — The inherent worth every person has simply by being made in God's image; nothing anyone does, or where anyone is born, can take it away.

For Further Reading

A note on sources — Scripture quotations use the New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE), the translation used at Mass in the United States. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) is available free at vatican.va.

Catechism — On the coming of the kingdom, see CCC 2632. On God's power displayed "at its height" through mercy — the theology behind clemency — see CCC 270. On respect for the dignity of every person, a core principle of Catholic Social Teaching, see CCC 2477 and the USCCB's Seven Themes of Catholic Social Teaching, "Life and Dignity of the Human Person."

Points to Ponder

For Group Discussion

Where have we let a label stand in for a person's name? What would it look like for our own parish to be a place where every immigrant and refugee is welcomed instead of sorted?

For Individual Discernment

Where has silence felt safer than speaking up? What would it cost you this week to say a name instead of a category?