This blog follows the daily bible readings of the Catholic Church

Reading 1,  Jeremiah 14:17-22

17 ‘So say this word to them: May my eyes shed tears night and day, unceasingly, since the daughter of my people has sustained a fearsome wound, a crippling injury.

18 If I go into the countryside, there lie those killed by the sword; if I go into the city, I see people tortured with hunger; even prophets and priests roam the country at their wits’ end.’

19 Have you rejected Judah altogether? Does your very soul revolt at Zion? Why have you struck us down without hope of cure? We were hoping for peace — no good came of it! For the moment of cure — nothing but terror!

20 Lord, we acknowledge our wickedness and our ancestors’ guilt: we have indeed sinned against you.

21 For your name’s sake do not reject us, do not dishonour the throne of your glory. Remember us; do not break your covenant with us.

22 Can any of the nations’ Futile Ones make it rain? Can the heavens of their own accord give showers? Are you not the one, Lord our God? In you is our hope, since you make all these things.

Destroyed City, Ossip Zadkine, Rotterdam

This is a lament for the defeat of Israel and the destruction of its temple by the Babylonians. Corpses lie unburied, people have no food. Jeremiah attributes this defeat to the people’s sinful unfaithfulness to God and his commandments. He seems unable to envisage a defeat which does not come as punishment for sin. Nothing happens without God, so what happens is intended by God, and disaster can therefore only be punishment. This is precisely the kind of reasoning rejected by Jesus when he refers to people killed by a falling tower and asks if they were more evil than anyone else.

The roots of the wrong reasoning are in the faith that rain does not fall without God sending it. That gives us the clue to the nature of the wrong reasoning: it leaves no distance between God and creation: everything that happens is directly willed by God. In the New Testament Jesus is reported as saying that the gifts of rain and sun are for good and bad alike, and that accidents happen, like the falling of the tower. This allows more space in the relationship of God and his creatures.

Modern theologians say that one of the fundamental characteristics of creation is that God has abdicated direct control of it and allows it freedom to develop according to its own dynamic, which includes human freedom to do good and evil.  They acknowledge some secular space, in which God’s writ does not run openly; and that seems true to our personal and social experience. This way of thinking about the relationship of God and the world may, however, be no better than Jeremiah’s. Perhaps we gain the self-determination of the world at the cost of losing the presence of God.

Gospel, Matthew 13:36-43

36 Then, leaving the crowds, he went to the house; and his disciples came to him and said, ‘Explain to us the parable about the darnel in the field.’

37 He said in reply, ‘The sower of the good seed is the Son of man. 38 The field is the world; the good seed is the subjects of the kingdom; the darnel, the subjects of the Evil One; 9 the enemy who sowed it, the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; the reapers are the angels. 40 Well then, just as the darnel is gathered up and burnt in the fire, so it will be at the end of time. 41 The Son of man will send his angels and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of falling and all who do evil, 42 and throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth.

43 Then the upright will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Anyone who has ears should listen!

I noted last week that the explanations of parables, supposedly given by Jesus, are actually misinterpretations given by the writers of the gospels. Matthew especially has cloth ears when it comes to parables. He turns the parable of the sower into the parable of the soils and he turns the parable of the wheat and the weeds into the parable of the burning of the weeds. The parable is originally a story of God’s wise patience which lets good and evil grow together, so close together that the life of one is bound up with the life of the other. Only at harvest can they be disentangled. This is God allowing the world some space to be itself (see above)

The time of the burning of weeds

In this explanation the parable (story with a moral) has become an allegory (a story where every character stands for something else, good seed=subjects of kingdom etc) about the separation of good and evil at the last judgment. It speaks of the threat of punishment for the evil and reward for the good, a clean “Yes” and “No” which satisfies our sense of justice and reassures us that at the end of the movie the goodies will win. Well, yes, I hope they will. But where will I be?