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Saturday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time

  • gospelthoughts
  • Jul 22, 2016
  • 5 min read

Entrance Antiphon Ps 54 (53):6, 8 See, I have God for my help. The Lord sustains my soul. I will sacrifice to you with willing heart, and praise your name, O Lord, for it is good.

Collect Show favour O Lord, to your servants and mercifully increase the gifts of your grace, that, made fervent in hope, faith and charity, they may be ever watchful in keeping your commands. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever.

Scripture today: Jeremiah 7:1-11; Psalm 83; Matthew 13:24-30

Jesus proposed a parable to the crowds. “The Kingdom of heaven may be likened to a man who sowed good seed in his field. While everyone was asleep his enemy came and sowed weeds all through the wheat, and then went off. When the crop grew and bore fruit, the weeds appeared as well. The slaves of the householder came to him and said, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where have the weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ His slaves said to him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’ He replied, ‘No, if you pull up the weeds you might uproot the wheat along with them. Let them grow together until harvest; then at harvest time I will say to the harvesters, “First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles for burning; but gather the wheat into my barn.” (Matthew 13:24-30)

The Weeds One of the most interesting phenomena within the emerging Catholic community of England in the late 1840s was the founding of The Rambler periodical by a convert Anglican clergyman, John Moore Capes. It brought into prominence Capes himself, who is an interesting instance of one who at great sacrifice to himself and his interests left the Anglican Church, embraced Catholicism, and then in due course abandoned Catholicism and returned to Anglicanism. As a returned Anglican, he wrote his book, To Rome and Back (1873), and in it he extols the broad liberty of opinion and dogma which is allowed in Anglicanism. The Catholic Church, he came to think, was impossibly repressive, tyrannical, and resistant of the claims of reason. One feature of his circuitous journey was that as a young Anglican clergyman he became disillusioned with the divisions and strife especially in matters of doctrine among his Anglican confreres. He began to think that because of this disunity (together with matters of doctrine) the Anglican communion could not be considered as the Church founded by Christ. But when he entered the Catholic Church (in 1845, not long before Newman), he gradually discovered that it too was marred by internal arguments and strife. It was all too human, and (together with other doctrinal difficulties he had, including the Catholic doctrine on the certainty of faith) he began to reconsider the validity of Catholic claims. He went on to reject the Catholic notion of religious faith, its doctrine on the Eucharist and the Sacrament of Penance, and many other things besides. The interesting thing is that a catalyst for all this was his disillusion with arguments and strife among both the clergy and laity of the Church. There were, we might say, so many weeds in the field. How could this be the Church that Christ founded! One cannot help but think that in his search for the Church Christ founded, he failed to notice the import of our Gospel text today.

In our Gospel passage today (Matthew 13:24-30), our Lord speaks of the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of God and of heaven was the goal of the entire Scriptures and of the history of God’s chosen people. All the nations of the earth would be blessed, Abraham had been promised. There was One coming to whom would pass the sceptre of Judah. In him, God intended to rule and to overcome evil. The Kingdom of heaven was the concrete ideal to which history was moving, and the Messiah would be its Agent. Now he had come in the person of Jesus. In another passage of the Gospels our Lord entrusts to Simon Peter, the Rock on which he would build his Church, the keys to the Kingdom of heaven. So the kingdom of heaven was present in his Church. How marvelous ought be his Church, then! How free of imperfection his Church must be, for this was the goal of God’s providence in history. How it must be the perfect home of man, the epitome of all his aspirations. But no — ultimately it will be so, but not yet. Our Lord explicitly says that the kingdom of heaven “may be likened to a man who sowed good seed in his field. While everyone was asleep his enemy came and sowed weeds all through the wheat, and then went off. When the crop grew and bore fruit, the weeds appeared as well.” Now, if this is how the kingdom of heaven is here on earth — prescinding, of course, from this kingdom as it will be hereafter — then in many respects the experience of it will be like our experience of any “kingdom” or body of people. Anywhere we care to look there are good things and bad. There are pleasant, courteous, generous and helpful people, and there are people who are a painful burden. Our Lord is saying here that in his Church, the locale and seed-bed of his kingdom here on earth, one will encounter a similar situation. The good that is there comes from God, while the evil that is most certainly there and that will be experienced, comes from the Evil one. The Church is the Temple of God and the body of Christ, but it is also the abode of his very human and fallen children.

Why does not God get rid of the evil, and allow us to experience just the good of which he is the cause? Would this not make it much easier to believe that the Church is indeed a divine institution, indeed that it is the mystical body of Christ her divine head? It would have saved Capes! We do not know, but we do know that God has judged that this is best, for in our parable the master of the field says, “if you pull up the weeds you might uproot the wheat along with them. Let them grow together until harvest; then at harvest time I will say to the harvesters, ‘First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles for burning; but gather the wheat into my barn.’” It is at the Judgement that all will out. After that, there will be no weeds, but God will be all in all.

(E.J.Tyler)

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A Second Reflection: (Jeremiah 7:1-11)

The Temple of the Lord The prophet Jeremiah spoke forthrightly to his own people in God's name, accusing them of seriously mistreating their fellow men, of worshipping other gods, and then, despite all this, of coming to worship in the Temple of the Lord without changing their lives (Jeremiah 7:1-11). They were treating the Temple as if it were a robbers' den: "Do you take this Temple that bears my name for a robbers' den?" We remember how our Lord cleansed the Temple, saying to the buyers and sellers that they were using the Temple as if it were a robbers' den — the very words of Jeremiah so long before. He accused those frequenting the Temple of not recognising its sacred character and its requirement, therefore, of repentance when entering it.

How much more do our own churches, graced as they are with the real presence of Jesus in the Tabernacle, require that we recognise — by our whole demeanour, our behaviour and attitude of heart — the all holy Presence abiding there, and that we resolve to turn away from sin. Let us take warning from Jeremiah’s words, and from the action of our Lord in cleansing the Temple.

(E.J.Tyler)

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