Jesus tells the parable of the sower of good seed in today’s Gospel. The man sows good seed and then discovers that his enemy has sowed weeds all through the wheat so that when the crop grew and bore fruit, weeds grew along with the wheat. When his servants ask if they should cut down the weeds, he says no…that doing so might uproot the good wheat. Thus they should wait for the harvest and collect it all, burning the weeds and gathering the wheat in his barn.
The simplistic interpretation is: don’t worry, at the end of the day the bad guys will get their due. They will get pulled out and burned as they ought.
But perhaps what Jesus was trying to convey is that while they are growing, we don’t always do a good job identifying the wheat from the weeds. We often draw conclusions about people based on our observations, which are partial at best and which don’t afford us the opportunity to see into another’s mind and soul. What appears as weeds may very well be wheat. So perhaps we ought let God take care of sorting things out at the end of the day…especially since unlike a weed, which will always be a weed, people grow and change and can be pruned by God (directly and through others) to bear beautiful fruit.
Creo en Dios! 