GOOD AND EVIL MIXED TOGETHER

XVI SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME: Mt 13:24-43

Time and again, we hear people complaining about this world and the people who live around us. It is a rotten world, which needs cleansing - they say. It is a world in which the moral values have been turned upside down;, needing someone to put it straight and get rid of all the rottenness that makes it stink. And there are people who assume this task and organise themselves in order to carry it out. There are radicals, like the Al-Qaida or the Boko-Haram, who see themselves as righteous people who have been called to cleanse the world; and in doing so, they commit horrendous crimes, feeling proud about it.

People who are unable to accept those who are different from them, seeing them as enemies that should be eradicated, cannot have a true experience of God, even though many of them claim to do it in the name of God. God is the Other, the Different, who challenges us in all circumstances. The difference of the other reveals us to ourselves, and the destruction of the other will lead to our own destruction.

This Sunday’s parable shows us clearly how the attitude of self-righteousness that leads to an effort of annihilation of the perceived enemy, in order to cleanse the world, is the wrong attitude, because it leads to the uprooting of many innocent people. Indeed, in times of conflict and war, the innocent are the ones that most suffer.

How can you understand that an airline plane from Malaysia, carrying people from many nationalities, is shot down by people whom they have nothing to do with, just to affirm their power. Nothing is sacred, even though many people claim to do their wars in the name of what is most sacred.

As Church, we must examine ourselves, since we are made of the same stuff of all those radicals who are ready to kill and destroy. Human history and also Church history is full of blood, shed on all sides. Personally, many of us have no blood in their hands, but we must remember that we come from a bloody past and we are part of a society that is violent in many aspects. 

In the parable, Jesus told his disciples: “Let them both grow till the harvest”. Then, it will be the time for the selection, for reward or punishment. Meanwhile, we live together, side by side, good and evil, and we cannot judge the other, because each one of us carries good and evil in his heart and in his life, making a daily effort to strengthen the good and reduce the evil.