Archbishop of Sydney

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time

St. Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney
Wis 12:13,16-19; Rom 8:26-27; Mt 13:24-43

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
17 July 2005

Today we have three parables of Our Lord on the nature of the kingdom of heaven.  Some would see their ultimate messages as being different; some believe that they all move in the same direction.

Our Lord was a marvellous story teller, and he told these stories not in a lecture hall, much less a classroom, but at public meetings attended by friends, enemies, the curious and the bored.

Jesus had to win attention, as his listeners were not attending a compulsory class in religious education.  They could leave at any time in protest or through boredom.

Primary school children usually cannot grasp what the parables are about, but the parables are open to all adults of varying levels of education.  Following Christ is not forming a philosophy class, but coming to know the Son of God and his teachings about God’s love.

The message of the parables is often uncertain beyond a particular point and is sometimes disconcerting e.g. when Jesus praises the dishonest steward.  They require good will to be understood; sometimes even to spend the time trying to discover the meaning.

Like a good TV advertisement the parables can provoke and irritate, bringing opponents out into the open and so helping the uncommitted but interested onlookers.

Scholars have also claimed that we should not make Jesus’ parables into allegories, because a parable has only one general point and all the details or persons involved do not have to have exact equivalents in real life.  Where there are such equivalents, as we have in Our Lord’s explanation of the weeds in the field and their final separation from the wheat, signifying the separation the good from evil at the last day, we have an allegory.

The three parables all speak of the kingdom of heaven and there is considerable debate about what constitutes this kingdom.  Is it to be found only in the next life?  Or does it refer to God’s work in the world, inside and perhaps outside the community of believers?  Or does the Kingdom refer both to this world and the next?  Where does the Catholic community stand in relation to the Kingdom of heaven?

The image of the mustard seed would have caught the listeners’ imagination because it is tiny, but we should not make the mistake that I made for many years in imagining that the mustard bush was a huge tree.  In fact while it does grow to be something more than three metres high, it is nothing like the mighty cedars of Lebanon or the apocalyptic tree of Daniel.  In some ways it is a provocative down-grading of God’s work, quite consistent with the comparatively small numbers of Christian followers in the Lord’s lifetime.

It was also provocative for Our Lord to compare the Kingdom of heaven to the yeast or the leaven in bread.  We all know that the Jewish Passover was celebrated with unleavened bread, bread without yeast, which is a symbol of holiness.  For Judeans at Passover leaven or yeast was a symbol of corruption!  The amount of flour Our Lord was talking about is huge.  He was not talking about baking a single loaf or two!

In both the parable of the mustard seed and the leaven the Kingdom of heaven is a mighty transforming power; such power is hidden from view and it is mysterious, not understood by most people.  Indeed in Our Lord’s time 2000 years ago no one would have had a clear scientific understanding of the way bread rose, much less of the growth of a large bush.

The parable of the enemy sowing weeds in the wheat obviously reflects the good and evil that are found in every human society.  There is a clear indication that personal decisions and actions have mighty consequences, even consequences for the final judgement and therefore for eternity.

The rub comes for all those who insist that God must or will save everybody at the final judgement; that God will grant a universal amnesty on the last day.

Unfortunately the gospel texts cannot merit such a simple uncomplicated assertion, which understates the reality of evil, the sometimes terrible evil found in human history, perpetrated by individuals as well as mobs.

I have just completed a marvellous novel by the Canadian Catholic writer Michael O’Brien entitled “Sophia House”.  It is set in Nazi Poland and tells the story of a Catholic artist and his long struggle to find faith and heroic goodness and a young Polish Jew whom he shelters.  It is a masterpiece, a dramatic conflict between good and evil, of different approaches to the one true God.  An attentive reader could not trivialize evil after reading it.

A superficial understanding, which rejects any possibility of damnation, also devalues the freedom and importance of the human will.  We are different from the animals because of our will and intelligence, and humans can decide to reject God and man and persist in this rejection.

Many victims of injustice do not receive Justice in this life, but the scales of justice must balance out in eternity.  There has to be punishment for moral monsters such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot.

I do not like the idea of anyone being punished forever, but Jesus’ teaching points to that possibility.

We have to remember that any person with deep hate in his heart would ruin heaven.  It is not a coincidence that some of the closest places to hell on earth are high-security jails for the worst criminals.

Neither do I believe that God would coerce the free will of sinners to compel entry into heaven.  Even the pains of purgatory could only encourage a purification of the will.  As far as we know God coerces no one.

God is all loving and merciful, as well as just.  It is best that we leave all the judging to him!

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.