Holy Mass with celebrant Fr. Thomas Leitner, OSB
Mt 13:24-30
Wis 12:13.16-19
Rom 8:26-27
Focus: God is patient with us.
Function: We, too, are summoned to be patient with ourselves and others and to leave the final judgment up to God.
Dear sisters and brothers in the faith, it has often been said that we live in a fast-paced age – of fast food and of fulfilling many of our wishes and needs with a few mouse clicks. While online shopping has even increased, understandably so, during this pandemic, many people are telling me that their life’s pace overall has become slower again. They do their own cooking at home; they are giving more time to the people with whom they live; they spend more time in nature. Even here in the monastery we feel this difference. I am devoting more time to prayer, to reading and to my brother monks. This pandemic is an opportunity to learn anew a slower pace, to lean waiting – and to practice patience.
We might say that there is a place for impatience at times, too, and this is true. When it comes to injustice in society, for example, impatience with unjust structures and practices can be a good thing. Sometimes we have to protest. At times we have to take a stand in favor of human rights and the dignity of every human person.
Because of this human dignity, because God is never done with any of us until we die, such righteous impatience must be combined with patience, however, in our various human relationships. St. Benedict says in his Rule, the monks are meant “to accept one another’s frailties of body and soul with greatest patience.” (RB 72:5)
The Scripture texts of today’s liturgy speak to us about the patience of God: “Though you are master of might,” the book of Wisdom’s author says to God,“you judge with clemency, and with much lenience you govern us.” Instead of condemning people who sin, God grants them opportunities again and again and again to repent of the sins they have committed.”
The scandal of God’s patience with wrongdoers appears also in the gospel. The kingdom of heaven is compared to a farmer who has a serious problem: His wheat is growing on his field, but there is also a poisonous weed, darnel by name, which can only be distinguished from the wheat when both plants are already tall. While his servants want to root out the weeds, he tells them to leave them alone, because uprooting the weeds will endanger the wheat.
At the final harvest they will be separated.
My sisters and brothers, God is patient also with us. We, too, are summoned to be patient with ourselves and others and to leave the final judgment up to God.
Jesus lived the message of his parable. He made it his task to seek out and to save the lost. The Pharisees, whose name means “the Separated Ones” criticized him for socializing with people whom they considered to be impure and sinners. However, Jesus knew that good and bad exist in every person and that it is wrong to label a person as a whole as bad.
This encourages each of us personally to trust that there is “good ground for hope,” that we ourselves and others can work at our weakness of body and soul and overcome them.
What today’s Scriptures are telling us is a call in the Church to believe in a person’s ability to change and to repent, even if our relationship with some folks appears to be very stuck!
This message is for us as citizens of the country, among other things, also an argument against the death penalty, for it equals a premature “weeding out” of people. In May 2018, Pope Francis changed the text of the Catechism of the Catholic Church in regard of the death penalty. It now reads, “The death penalty is [always] inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” (CCC 2267) “More effective systems of detention have been developed,” the Catechism continues, “which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.” This chance and possibility of redemption, of repentance and reform even for hardened criminals come out very clearly in the book and movie Dead Man Walking, by Sr. Helen Prejean. Patrick Sonnier, whom she accompanied to death row, did find God. He started to pray, to read the Bible; and he truly repented of his very heinous crimes.
Let us pray this morning for firm confidence in God’s lenience toward us. That’s the good news of this gospel: God is patient with us. And that’s the challenge: We are also called upon to be patient.
~Fr. Thomas Leitner, OSB