Fr. Michael Williams

Today’s parable is a great help to us in trying to understand why good and evil seem to flourish in the field of our world. ‘The good seed is the subjects of the Kingdom; the darnel, the subjects of the evil one’.

I suppose we have all become a bit of a mixture of the wheat and the darnel, of grace and of sin. Some really good people like Mother Teresa of Calcutta seem to be mainly wheat, some people like suicide bombers seem to be mainly darnel. Most people seem to have the wheat and the darnel, the good and the bad seed in them. We need to allow the Lord to cultivate the good seed in us. Sr Briege McKenna, who led a retreat that I went on recently, has said that Jesus is the Divine Gardener, who cultivates the virtues in souls. He also tries to remove the weeds of sin from our being. She had an interior vision of the Lord planting and cultivating beautiful flowers in a soul, which represented the virtues. But she also saw him trying to remove a very large and troublesome weeds from a person’s soul-sins. Ultimately, we need to allow the Lord to cultivate His Kingdom deep within us. Daily prayer, the Sacraments, the Scriptures, imitating the lives of the Saints allow the Lord to do this in us. They are the tools of his trade so to speak.

In the field of the world we see the wheat and the darnel growing up together is so many different fields so to speak. Take the medical profession and we can discern this dichotomy quite clearly. I was thinking about this recently when there was a TV programme on about the Women’s Hospital in Liverpool. So many skilled medics were using their expertise in saving premature babies, or at least trying to save them. They were cultivating beauty and truth in these little infants. Bringing hope to many parents and their children. It was truly amazing work. But on that same site some people use their expertise to destroy unborn life. What a contradiction! Clearly on that site, on that part of God’s field, wheat and darnel, good and evil are growing side by side.

Or think of the end of life issues. We see wheat and darnel growing side by side there too. The Palliative Care teams, and the hospices up and down the country, seek to make life as comfortable and dignified as possible, for the terminally ill, and to aid them in having a truly dignified end to their lives. And they so often succeed in this endeavour. Those people who work in these fields of Palliative Care and Hospices do fantastic work. What they do is beautiful in very difficult circumstances. It’s the good seed, the wheat growing in our midst.

But then we hear of clinics in parts of the world, who end people’s lives by giving them a poisonous injection, as if they were a dog or a cat. There is nothing dignified about. That is the bad seed, the darnel growing in our midst.

Whatever field we occupy in this world, we need to allow the Lord to sow and grow the good seed, the wheat within us; we need to allow God’s Kingdom to grow within us- the fruit of God’s Spirit which is- “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness, and self control” (Gal 5).

The Lord’s Holy Spirit transforms the wheat, the altar bread, at every Mass mysteriously into His own Self. The same Spirit can work wonders for us too! And transform us into the Kingdom of God.