27 July 2021
Tuesday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time
Why are the weeds gathered and burned? Because they threatened the wheat that the farmer desired to grow and harvest, competing for the field in which the farmer desired to grow only one thing. Similarly, God plants each of us here, intending to harvest a crop of soul to join Him in Heaven; thus those “weeds” who “…cause others to sin and all evildoers…” will be cast into the fire, not because God hates them, but because they hated God and His children. Those who cause others to sin commit sin far more grievously than those who simply do evil, for does not Jesus teach that the entire Law and the prophets are summed up in two commandments: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind,” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The person who commits a sin breaks both commandments, assuming they sin against another; a person who causes another to sin entices a stalk of God’s wheat to become a weed, stealing from the Son of Man not by theft, but by corruption, as Satan steals and kills. Satan’s fate is the fire: those who live as he, go as he, not because God is cruel, but because He honors our choices and if we choose to live as weeds, then we die as weeds, too.
Be as wheat; as God planted you at baptism, so let Him harvest! For He who planted you says, “It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain…” (John 15:16).