Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jan 15 2025

The Patience and Power of God

Our experience of the world is often an experience of opposites: truth and lies, goodness and evil, beauty and ugliness. They are found in intimate proximity, often on the same page of the newspaper or in the same half-hour news report, and intertwined in the same human heart. Their existence is connected to human freedom as well as to the power of sin and evil in our world.

Jesus tells a parable that makes the same point as the author of Wisdom: God’s exercise of power is tempered by leniency and mercy; God’s justice is balanced by loving-kindness. Our desire to pull up and destroy the weeds prematurely could destroy the good wheat. While the interpretation in the Gospel applies this image to different groups in a community, we can also hear this parable as referring to the weeds and wheat, the evil and goodness residing in the heart.

Jesus says God’s active presence in the world is something as small as a mus tard seed and as fragile as a pinch of yeast, yet each contains a power that, when released, will bring about growth and expansion.

In the meantime, the challenge is being as patient with others as God is, while working with God to purify our own hearts. Last week Jesus warned about the sluggish heart; today he pictures a contaminated heart, good interpenetrated by evil. But the power of God is stronger than the power of evil and death. Be patient, and remain open to the workings of God’s grace.

Consider/Discuss

What do you see as “weeds” in your life, in the community, in the world?
Where have you seen the power of God at work in small and hidden ways?
How can the patience and kindness of God work through you?

Responding to the Word

We respond by praying: “O God, you have given us the gift of life; continue to keep us alive in Christ Jesus. Bring us from death to grow in faith, hope, and love. We remain patient in prayer and faithful to your word, until your glory is revealed.”

Jan 15 2025

Scripture Study for

The author of Wisdom lists forceful divine characteristics. Beginning with the total and exclusive providence of God, he states that only the God of Israel exercises care over all. Because God has neither peer nor rival, God is accountable to no one for the way justice is practiced. God’s might is tempered by leniency. The righteous trust in God’s power at work in the world. However, those who do not trust this power are fearful. The people of Israel are exhorted to pattern their treatment of others after God’s treatment of them, to temper their own might with leniency, to regulate their own justice with kindness.

Paul provides us with a bold and moving explanation of prayer. He describes human limitation and how the Spirit comes to the assistance of human beings precisely in this limitation. He maintains that we do not know how to pray as we ought. Still, such weakness need not prevent us from accomplishing great things through the Spirit who works in and through us. This Spirit acts as intermediary between God and us. Since God searches hearts, God knows that it is the Spirit who makes intercession for us. God has a purpose, and though we do not know what that purpose is, the enabling Spirit of God moves us toward it.

Three parables illustrate aspects of the growth of the reign of God: the field sown with weeds, the mustard seed, and the yeast in the dough. In the first parable, good seed is sown, but weeds grow up along with the crops. This represents a community that includes both good and bad. Purging should be delayed. The time of harvest will come when separation will take place. The second and third parables address the reign’s unimpressive beginnings, its gradual and imperceptible growth, and the extraordinary yield that it will ultimately produce. Jesus’ teaching ends with a solemn admonishment: Whoever has ears ought to hear and understand this.

Jan 12 2025

Scripture Study for

It was early spring. The master gardener was really busy. A kind friend offered to weed her perennial garden while the weeds were still small. She was very grateful. He was an expert on tulips. He knew what tulip leaves looked like. So he diligently weeded that garden clean. When he was done, the tulip leaves proudly stood out from the bare soil that surrounded them. As spring unfolded in the garden, though, there were no forget-me-nots. The coreopsis was gone. There were no more buttercups. The tulips grew strong and died back. The next year, that same friend offered to help. “Let me do the weeding,” the master gardener said.

We really don’t know what we don’t know. Sometimes we assume that we know ourselves and others. The research, however, reveals that we create stories in our minds based on partial pieces of information. We do not have all the evidence on anything. If you and I had the job of weeding out the good and the bad in a group of people, we may see the acts that a person does and judge accordingly. But moral theologians tell us that moral blame is based on act, circumstance, and intention. We can and must judge acts as morally wrong or right, but we do not have enough information to pass further judgment on a person. Only God knows the circumstance and intentions behind an act.

Why doesn’t God ask us to do the weeding? Little leaves that come up in early spring do not look like the flowers they will be when they are mature. We would often pluck out the wrong things if it were up to us. We don’t know what we don’t know. Jesus offers today’s parable so that we will practice mercy, not judgment.

“Let me do the weeding,” the Master Gardener says.

Consider/Discuss

The most beautiful flower in a garden may look like a dead stick in early spring. Think back to some of the ugly things you may have done in your life. How has God helped you to grow so that you mature and blossom?
We tell stories about people in our minds. Have you ever had an “aha!” moment when you’ve said, “How could I have been so wrong about that person?”

Living and Praying with the Word

Good Gardener of us all, sometimes we look just like dead sticks or tiny weeds. But you have a vision of what we can become. Affirm our strengths. Challenge our weaknesses. Never let us stop growing. And today, assist us in revising our story about someone. Reveal to us where we are impatient or unmerciful or unkind or uncharitable, for we want to see others as you do.

Jan 12 2025

Who Knows?

Because of God’s unparalleled and unchallenged power, the wicked are given opportunity to repent; divine forgiveness is not coerced (“Neither out of fear for anyone did you grant release for their sins” [Wisdom12:11]). God’s sovereign power ensures that God does not need to explain or justify either condemnation or forgiveness, and is “lenient to all.” There is no divine ego at stake, giving God freedom to act generously. This divine mercy is a lesson to God’s people, who learn that God’s justice is not opposed to kindness, but actually manifests itself in kindness. God’s absolutely free justice is ground for hope in God’s mercy.

Paul reminds the Romans that through the Spirit they have been adopted as God’s children and now “groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:23). The guarantee of this hope is the gift of the Spirit, who not only leads and transforms the faithful, but also helps them pray. Human beings, as the agents of God’s redemption of all of creation, are called to intercede with God, but as they are (for the time being) subject to corruption and death, they are weak and do not know exactly how to intercede. The Spirit dwelling in each believer makes up for this weakness by expressing the groaning of creation and “the holy ones,” and is heard by God.

Three parables illustrate the kingdom of heaven. At least on this side of eternity, it is a mix of the good and the bad. Readers have taken the weeds and the wheat to represent either individuals or the tendencies within each heart. In the first case, the warning is to let God sort out the sinners from the saints; judgment is God’s prerogative (Matthew 7:1–5). In the second case, the assurance is that while there are within us both the good and the bad, God is patient and, in God’s way, removes that which needs to be removed. The other two parables reflect the biblical insistence that God’s greatest works have small, hidden, unlikely beginnings. The kingdom (God) works in ways that we often cannot appreciate.

Dec 17 2024

Crossing Boundaries

It is instructive to look at the maps found in most Bibles. You get a sense of how “man-made” (here meaning “made by males”) boundaries are. The boundary lines of the biblical world at the time of the Exodus yield to those at the time of King David and then again to those of the world at the time of Babylonian ascendency, and on to the time of Jesus and the early church. The shifting boundaries are a constant over the centuries.

The two stories today reveal a seismic shift in boundaries between God and us. Up until this time in the story of Abraham, God had spoken with Abraham, but now God comes for a home visit. A boundary of intimacy is crossed. Abraham provides a meal and waits on the Lord. In response, God tells Sarah that, after a quarter of a century of hearing the promise, she will have a son by next year.

When Jesus said to Martha that Mary had chosen the better part, he was also approving a shift in boundaries. There were physical boundaries in the Jewish home, “male space” and “female space.” By sitting at the feet of Jesus, Mary had crossed the line. Only a disciple of a teacher would do this and only a man could be a disciple. When Martha notes that Mary is not where she belongs, helping in the kitchen, Jesus makes clear where he stands—and where Mary can sit. All part of a new creation, and not yet a finished one either.

Consider/Discuss

What boundaries have changed in your lifetime?
What boundaries still need to be changed, opening up more shared space?

Responding to the Word

Loving God, you set the boundaries of earth, sky, and sea. In doing this, you provide a place for us to live responsibly and work happily in your creation. Direct our efforts to be as hospitable as Abraham was to passing strangers and as innovative as Jesus was with his friends Martha and Mary.