Saturday, July 28, 2018
16th Week in
Ordinary Time
1st Reading: Jr 7:1-11
Gospel:
Matthew 13:24-30
Jesus told his disciples another parable, “The kingdom of hea ven can be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field. While everyone was asleep, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and left.
When the plants sprouted and produced grain, the weeds also appeared. Then the servants of the owner came to him and said: ‘Sir, was it not good seed that you sowed in your field? Where did the weeds come from?’
He answered them: ‘This is the work of an enemy.’ They asked him: ‘Do you want us to go and pull up the weeds?’ He told them: ‘No, when you pull up the weeds, you might uproot the wheat with them. Let them just grow together until harvest; and at harvest time I will say to the workers: Pull up the weeds first, tie them in bundles and burn them; then gather the wheat into my barn.”
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the Assimilated Life Experience)
If it were beneficial to kill all bad people, God would have done it long ago. But God did not do it, and is not doing it for many good reasons. Foremost is that bad persons help good people grow deeper in the spirituality of love. This is very important to Christianity because its core teaching is love. “By this they shall know that you are my disciples,” Jesus declared, “if you love one another” (John 13:35).
Bad people provide us the opportunity to practice the commandment of love concretely. The family setting is rich in such opportunities. Consider a family that is about to break up because of irreconcilable differences, such as when the wife is so religious while the husband is so vicious. The two will benefit more if they stay together. If they separate, the family break up will hurt the children for life. If they stay together, the religiosity of the wife stands as constant reminder to the husband to reform. Meanwhile, the husband is one big chance for the wife to exercise her spiritual muscles.
One disadvantage of this co-existence, though, is the risk that good people are drawn to the bad side. But if the good ones are sincerely allowing themselves to be used by God to convert the bad ones, God’s grace will sustain them and they will persevere.
We must hasten to add at this juncture that God is not putting up with bad people for the pragmatic reason that they help good people grow deeper in the spirituality of love. Such scheme reduces bad people into mere tools to enhance the spirituality of those who are already good. What we are saying is that society gets a bonus in loving even bad people because in the process they grow in the art of love. – (Atty.) Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., D.M. Email: dan.delosangeles@gmail.com.
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