Dealing with the Darnel
Sixteenth Sunday of the Year. Fr Andrew Brookes finds great hope in parables of mission.
The Parable of the Darnel follows hot on the heels of the Parable of the Sower, last Sunday’s Gospel. This provides context and helps indicate immediate issues that Jesus is addressing in this parable. Both are about mission or evangelisation and the work of preaching and the response to preaching.
Both parables point out and then explain that the response to the work of Jesus is mixed: not everyone responds positively to Jesus. These parables about mission explore and explain this and so educate the disciples in how to conduct their own mission from Jesus.
Evangelisation is a divine initiative, and its central potency is the Word of God, ultimately and centrally Jesus, who is the Word made flesh. Both parables make plain that the Son of Man starts the activity of sowing (ie evangelising). He freely offers himself to all, and humans make a free response, to receive Christ and then keep him at the centre of their lives.
The Parable of the Sower has looked at human response regarding freedom and obstacles to saying yes to Jesus and obstacles to persevering in that ‘Yes’; and in making that ‘Yes’ bear fruit.
The Parable of the Darnel makes plain that another person is at work too: the ‘enemy’ who Jesus explicitly identifies as the Devil. It is important to assert that the Devil and his minions have been decisively defeated by Jesus through his death and resurrection. Jesus asserts here that, despite that defeat, the Devil has ongoing influence and uses that to tempt souls away from Jesus, something that, to be successful, also requires their own free will and bad choices.
We can consider evangelisation as principally a human educational endeavour, and/or about cultivation of Christian culture but Jesus makes plain that at its heart it is a spiritual interaction between God and human souls, with Satan seeking to influence matters negatively too. We can call it a battle, but it is one in which Jesus fights with love, and respects human freedom and human beings and their freedom at all times.
Jesus introduces here a bigger perspective too: mission plays out across time until the return of Jesus when people will be judged decisively and finally to be for or against him.
Where does this teaching leave the disciples and us, called in our own generation to continue the mission given by Jesus to the Church?
For sure, we are to avoid rash judgement and condemnation for that endangers our own souls. At a supernatural level, wheat can become weeds. We can rip out and destroy our own life of grace, killing off our loving relationship with Jesus and God. That relationship begins with mercy and if we step into condemnation of others we step outside of mercy, risking its loss for us too.
But we are limiting the parable if we simply say we are not to judge. Indeed, the parable presupposes that the servants can tell the difference between emerging wheat plants and darnel (weeds). Discernment of where a person is regarding God – done with some caution – matters to helping people move forward. Evangelisation is commitment to spiritual mercy, and this includes work to help the ignorant, the confused, the doubtful, the afflicted etc. We need to be able to make diagnostic distinctions to offer the appropriate remedy.
What we are not to do is to write people off or condemn them as being beyond redemption. Only God can do that and will only do as a last resort, respecting in a final way their determined free choice to reject God’s salvation. God wills all to be saved and will do all he can to save them. Indeed, that is why God has ‘delayed’ the Second Coming – to give more people the chance to be born and then born again from above.
I think in this parable Jesus is also opening up positive space and opportunity for darnel.
The spiritual nature of evangelisation stressed here by Jesus means that we need to begin it with prayer and always look to God and trust in God to do what only God can do. Jesus frequently stresses the role of the Holy Spirit, later called by St John Paul II ‘the principal agent of evangelisation’. We are merely servants of God in this work: we announce Jesus, trusting in the power and beauty of his Person, truth and loving work, and trusting also in the inner work of the Holy Spirit in human souls to solicit a free and ongoing yes to God.
Jesus urges patience, because, although at a natural level darnel cannot become wheat, at a supernatural level it can happen: sinners can become saints, and God wants to maximise the time for this to happen.
We should also not lose hope or be worried by lack of response or even decline in the numbers of Christians, or the apparent small size of the Church in parts of the world today. The parable of the Mustard seed addresses this: the Church will become the greatest tree in the new creation, and even before that, as the parable of yeast makes plain, it has an influence beyond its size. We too, more locally, have an impact on others through our works of love and our words of witness, though we may not see the impact immediately.
So let us commit ourselves to evangelise, seeing the darnel as an opportunity, not a threat. Let us pray and even fast, trusting in God to do what only he can do, and witness by our own growth in love and by words of witness, so that the final harvest may be all the greater.
Readings: Wisdom 12:13,16-19 | Romans 8:26-27 | Matthew 13:24-43
