The wheat and the cockle: sermon on the twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost
By a Dominican Friar | 6 November 2024
“Suffer both to grow until the harvest …”
In the missal, it is always worth noticing, the introductions with which a gospel begins. Often it will be, “Jesus said to his disciples.” Sometimes it says, “Jesus said to the Pharisees …” But today, we have, “Jesus said to the crowds …” Who are the crowds? They are composed of people who like to listen to our Lord, but who have not given up their possessions and left their homes to follow Him. They represent all those down the ages who will believe in Christ but whose attention will be directed for the most part toward things of this world. This may help us to understand why our Lord tells this parable of the wheat and the cockle to the crowds, rather than to His disciples or the Pharisees.
What is the meaning of the parable? It is “a tale of two seeds”. The first seed, as Christ says elsewhere, “is the word of God”. The word of God means the truth revealed by God, which was declared in part in ancient times by the prophets and patriarchs, and in the fullness of time, was declared in full to the apostles by the Son of God. This is the good seed which is preserved in the Church, sown in the souls of our children by holy baptism, nourished by the careful teaching of parents and parish priests, and which bears fruit in the knowledge of God and a life lived according to His commands. If wheat sown in good soil and nourished by sun and rain bears fruit in due season, how much more does the word of God, sown in an obedient heart and nourished by teaching and good example, infallibly bear these fruit of eternal life. The fixed laws of nature, which God has established, are at the service of the laws of supernature.
But there is another seed, called in Latin and Greek by the strange-sounding name of zizania, and in English known as tares, darnel or cockle. The botanists tell us that this seed produces a crop that in the early stages of its growth looks like wheat, except to a well-trained eye. It only becomes obvious that it is not wheat later on, when it is well grown, and when its roots are thus now entangled with those of neighbouring plants. The botanists also tell us that this crop is slightly poisonous.
What does cockle represent? Clearly, if the good seed is the word of God, this bad seed must be another kind of teaching: not just any other kind, such as arithmetic or geography, but a teaching that claims to tell us the meaning of life, but falsely. This teaching counterfeits the word of God, as the cockle counterfeits the wheat.
Christ tells the disciples later on that “the field” in this parable “is the world”. And the world is certainly full of religions and philosophies that claim to reveal the purpose of life, but which are false. Is it worth mentioning some of them, from the present and the past? Buddhism, Mormonism, Marxism, Islam, Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, Shintoism … God did not sow the seeds of these doctrines in His field. “Whence then hath it cockle? And he said to them: An enemy hath done this.” Literally, what the goodman of the house says to his servants is, “An enemy man hath done this.” He is referring to the devil, of course. If he calls him “a man” it is perhaps to humiliate him, and to remind us that the devil is just a creature. Perhaps, also it is to show us that the devil uses human instruments in sowing his bad seeds. But, ultimately, it is the devil who confuses human beings: and he does not mind which religion or philosophy they embrace, so long as it is not the one that comes from God and that leads to happiness.
All false doctrines have some points of truth in them. If they didn’t, they would hardly be attractive to the human mind, which is made to embrace the truth. But when the darnel is fully grown, that is, when a false doctrine has fully manifested itself, we can see how different it is from the wheat of Christ. That is true also of the societies that they produce. How different is a genuinely Catholic society, from one ruled by Islam or by paganism!
But what does the goodman of the house say to his servants? When they ask him if they may go and root out the weed, he replies, “No, lest perhaps gathering up the cockle, you root up the wheat also together with it. Suffer both to grow until the harvest.” This is why I pointed out at the beginning that our Lord tells this parable to the crowds. Those who believe in Christ, but whose way of thinking is still rather worldly, may be tempted to want to root out all the false religions with violence. But that is not what God asks. When Charlemagne, king of the Franks, began to send his soldiers to convert the pagan Saxons by force, he was rebuked by the English monk, Blessed Alcuin of York; and he humbly accepted Alcuin’s correction.
Now sometimes people apply these words of the householder wrongly. We are not meant to understand that Catholics should remain passive if men of other religions try to take over their lands by violence; the nations of Christendom had the right to fight back when Islamic armies invaded. Nor does the householder’s order imply that bishop and others with spiritual authority should allow heresies and other disorders to spread among those over whom they are keeping watch, and for whose souls they will have one day to give account to the Lord. The field in the parable represents the world, not the Church. But his words do mean that we may not use violence to free the world of all religions but the true one.
What is the reason for this? The householder gives a very practical one: you may harm the wheat, he tells his servants, in trying to root up the cockle. And isn’t it true that Christians would harm their own souls if they sought to convert the world by force? But perhaps we may understand the householder’s words in another way too. We might harm the householder’s wheat in trying to take out the cockle, because some of the cockle is destined one day to become wheat. By the laws of nature, that is impossible, for a poisonous plant to turn into a life-giving one. But by the laws of supernature, nothing is more reasonable. So the householder sends his servants back into the field, not to pull up the cockle but to preach to it, as St Francis once preached to the birds.
We know, in fact, that the whole world will not be converted. Both wheat and darnel will “grow until the harvest”, that is, until the day of judgement. Then Christ Himself will clear the field of all encumbrances, on the day He delivers up the kingdom to God the Father. But in the meantime, miracles of conversion take place each day. The Holy Ghost uses many kinds of instrument to produce them: preaching, prayer, penance, example, miracles — sometimes even visions and dreams. One day, please God, we shall be safely gathered into His barn. And I think that it will not be the least of the joys of heaven, to discover the often strange and circuitous paths by which our friends will have reached there.