At 12 noon today, the Holy Father Francis looked out the study window in the Vatican Apostolic Palace to recite the Angelus with the faithful and pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square.
These are the words of the Pope in introducing the Marian prayer:
Dear brothers and sisters, good morning!
In today’s Gospel (cf Mt 13,24-43) we still meet Jesus intent on speaking to the crowd in parables of the Kingdom of heaven. I focus only on the first, that of the tares, through which Jesus makes us know the patience of God , opening our hearts to hope .
Jesus tells us that in the field where the good wheat was sown, weeds also emerge, a term that summarizes all the harmful herbs that infest the soil. Among us, we can also say that even today the soil is devastated by many herbicides and pesticides, which in the end also hurt both the grass, the earth and health. But this, by the way. The servants then go to the master to find out where the tares come from, and he replies: “An enemy has done this!” (v. 28). Because we have sown good wheat! An enemy, one who competes, has come to do this. They would like to go immediately and tear away the growing weeds; instead the owner says no, because one would risk tearing the weeds together – the tares – and the wheat. You have to wait for the harvest time: only then will they separate and the tares will be burned. It is also a story of common sense.
A vision of history can be read in this parable. Next to God – the master of the field – who always and only spreads good seeds, there is an adversary, who spreads the tares to hinder the growth of the wheat. The master acts openly, in the light of the sun, and his purpose is a good harvest; the other, the opponent, on the other hand, takes advantage of the darkness of the night and works out of envy, out of hostility, to ruin everything. The adversary to whom Jesus refers has a name: he is the devil, the opponent par excellence of God. His intent is to hinder the work of salvation, to ensure that the Kingdom of God is hindered by unfair operators, scandal sowers. In fact, the good seed and the tares represent not the good and the bad in the abstract, but we human beings, who can follow God or the devil. A lot of times, we heard that a family that was at peace, then wars, envies began … a neighborhood that was at peace, then bad things started … And we are used to saying: “Someone came there to sow weeds”, or “This person of the family, with small talk, sows weeds”. It is always sowing evil that destroys. And this always does the devil or our temptation: when we fall into the temptation to chat to destroy others.
The intention of the servants is to immediately eliminate evil, that is, wicked people, but the master is wiser, he sees further: they must know how to wait, because the enduring of persecutions and hostilities is part of the Christian vocation. Evil, of course, must be rejected, but the wicked are people with whom one must use patience. It is not a question of that hypocritical tolerance which hides ambiguity, but of justice mitigated by mercy. If Jesus came to seek sinners rather than the righteous, to cure the sick even before the healthy (cf Mt 9,12-13), the action of us his disciples must also be addressed not to suppress the wicked, but to save them. And there, patience.
Today’s Gospel presents two ways of acting and living history: on the one hand, the gaze of the master, who sees far; on the other, the gaze of the servants, who see the problem. Servants care about a field without weeds, the owner has good wheat at heart. The Lord invites us to take on his own gaze, that which is fixed on good wheat, which knows how to keep it even in the weeds. Those who seek out the limits and defects of others do not cooperate well with God, but rather those who know how to recognize the good that grows silently in the field of the Church and of history, cultivating it until maturity. And then it will be God, and only He, to reward the good and punish the wicked. May the Virgin Mary help us understand and imitate the patience of God, who wants no one to lose himself of his children, whom he loves with the love of the Father.
[00894-IT.02] [Original text: Italian]
Taken from the Vatican News – The Pope’s words to the Angelus recitation, 19.07.2020
