16th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A)

1. This is a homily for the 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time.

2. The gospel for this Sunday comes from the gospel of St Matthew, Chapter 13, verses
24-43.

3. In today’s gospel we continue reading from the third of the major discourses of Jesus in
Matthew’s gospel. This third discourse is a collection of parables.

4. Last Sunday we heard the parable of the sower going out to sow. Today we have three
parables: the parable of the wheat and the darnel, the parable of the mustard seed, and
the parable of the woman baking bread. Next Sunday we again have three parables:
treasure hidden in a eld, the pearl of great price, and a dragnet cast into the sea that
brings in a haul of all kinds of sh.
5. Let’s again consider what a parable is.

6. Our English word “parable” comes from the Greek word παραβολή (parabolē).

7. The Greek word παρα (para) can be translated as “next to”, or “alongside”. The nal
syllable of the Greek word, βολή (bolē) comes from the verb βάλλειν (ballein), which
means “to throw”.

8. So, etymologically, our English word parable means to throw next to or alongside.
What does that mean?

9. A parable seeks to give us an insight into something that we know little or nothing
about.

10. Today’s parable wants to give us an insight into the Kingdom of Heaven.

11. So let’s throw up alongside that something we are familiar with.

12. In today’s gospel three things are compared to the Kingdom of Heaven: Darnel sown
among the wheat; a mustard seed; and a woman baking bread.
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 13. New Testament scholar Daniel Harrington explains it this way: “A parable is a form
of analogy that seeks to illuminate one reality by appealing to something better
known.”

14. Let me o er this hypothetical example: Imagine a person who has never seen an
orange, and they ask you, “What is an orange like?”

15. You might ask, “Well, do you know what an apple is?” If they were to say “Yes”,
you could then say, “Well, an orange has a number of similarities with an apple.”

16. They are both classi ed as fruit; they are both spherical in shape and of a similar
size; they both grow on owering trees, and they are both edible and sweet to the
taste. Both have health bene ts, and both can be juiced. They are both a fat-free
food and both have several varieties.

17. But the comparison isn’t perfect, because there are also a number of di erences:
apples and oranges have a di erent taste; their skin texture is di erent; they grow in
di erent climates, and the texture of their inner esh is di erent. So, it’s not a
perfect comparison.
18. But, despite these di erences, there are enough similarities to give our friend a
reasonably good enough idea of what an orange is. Admittedly, it’s not perfect. All
metaphors and similes are limited in their explanatory power, and therefore parables
can only give us glimpses or helpful insights into the mystery that they seek to
explain.

19. In his book Jesus: A Pilgrimage, James Martin summarises it in this way: “The
parables are poetic explanations of spiritual concepts impossible to comprehend
fully. The reign of God is far too rich to be encompassed by any one de nition, no
matter how theologically accurate.”

20. In Matthew’s gospel Jesus talks about the Kingdom of Heaven, whereas the
gospels of Mark, Luke and John refer to the Kingdom of God. All of the evangelists
are talking about the same reality, but Matthew, the most Jewish of the Gospels,
out of respect for Jewish sensibilities, substitutes the word “heaven” for “God”, a
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 respectful circumlocution. So, Kingdom of Heaven and Kingdom of God are
interchangeable terms.

21. The word that we translate as Kingdom is βασιλεία (basileia) in the Greek text
of the New Testament. It can be translated as kingdom, but also as rule, reign,
sovereignty or dominion. The word is used 126 times in the Gospels, the vast
majority of these have to do with the kingdom of God or the kingdom of
Heaven. However, it can also refer to kingdoms of this world, such as Herod’s
kingdom, and also to the devil’s kingdom.

22. In his commentary on Mark’s gospel the New Testament scholar Joel Marcus
uses the term “dominion of God” rather than “kingdom of God.” He explains
the reason for his choice. “Most modern scholars have recognized that “the
kingdom of God” is not so much the place where God rules as the fact that he
rules or the power by which he manifests his sovereignty; hence the translation
“dominion of God.”

23. So, when we speak of the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God

24. We are not speaking of a place that we can locate on a map of the world.

25. One of the best descriptions of the kingdom of God that I can think of is found
in the prayer that we know as the Our Father, or Lord’s Prayer. One of the
many features of Hebrew poetry is parallelism. In a nutshell, poetic parallelism
expresses an idea in one line, and then repeats the same idea in the following
line, but expressed di erently.

26. The Jewish scholar and translator Robert Alter explains it this way: “If the
more common or general term for a concept appears in the rst verset, as is
usually the case, the “synonym” in the second verset is often a more unusual
term, a stronger word, some sort of speci cation of the rst term.”

27. So, in one line we have a general term, and in the following line we have some
sort of speci cation of the general term.

28. In the Our Father we pray these words in one line: You Kingdom come.

29. And then in the following line we pray: Your will be done on earth, as it is in
heaven.

30. So, what is God’s kingdom? God’s kingdom is God’s will being done on earth,
as it is in heaven.
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 31. But the Kingdom of God, God’s rule, reign, sovereignty or dominion, which is a
central concern of the Gospels, does not depend for its existence on human
activity. Humans do not create, build, construct, extend or render present the
kingdom.

32. Let’s turn to today’s gospel. Firstly, we have the parable of the wheat and the
darnel.

33. Secondly, we have the parable of the mustard seed.

34. Thirdly, the parable of the woman baking bread.

35. And nally, once Jesus leaves the crowds and enters a house, his disciples ask
for an explanation of the parable about the darnel in the eld.

36. So what do these three parables tell us about God’s kingdom, God’s reign or
God’s dominion?

37. Firstly, each of the three parables demands patience, because there is a time of
waiting.

38. The farmer must wait until harvest time before he can separate the wheat from
the darnel. Nothing can be done at the present moment.

39. We have to wait for the mustard seed to grow; it doesn’t become the biggest
shrub of all overnight.

40. And the woman baking bread has to wait some time before the yeast causes
the bread to rise.

41. Secondly, these parables are responding to the question: If the Kingdom of
God is already present among us …

42. … why isn’t it more obvious? And why hasn’t evil been rooted out already?
Why hasn’t God intervened and done something about it?
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 43. Although we have three parables in today’s gospel, followed by the explanation of
the rst of these parables, the lectionary gives us the option of reading only the
parable of the wheat and the darnel. However, I’d like to consider all three of the
parables.

44. So let’s consider the parable of the wheat and darnel, as well as the explanation
that Jesus gives us.

45. Presumably, Jesus is still sitting in the boat, a little way o shore.

46. Last Sunday we heard the parable of the sower going out to sow. That parable
posed the question, What kind of soil are you? Are you like rich and fertile soil
where God’s word will ourish, yielding a rich and abundant harvest? The rst of
our three parables today is about a man who also sowed seed. He sowed wheat
and his eld, but during the night an enemy came and sowed darnel all among the
wheat. This parable asks, not what kind of soil are you, but what kind of seed are
you?

47. It’s not long before the owner’s servant discovers what has happened; wheat and
darnel growing together in the same eld.
48. What we call darnel is known by its botanical name, Lolium Temulentum. It is a
bearded rye grass.

49. Winifred Walker’s book, All the Plants of the Bible, explains that darnel is almost
indistinguishable from wheat until fully grown. If eaten by humans or animals it
causes dizziness, nausea, severe gastric upset and, sometimes, even death.

50. However, by the time you can distinguish the wheat from the darnel their root
systems are so intertwined, that to pull out the darnel would also mean uprooting
the wheat.

51. The time of harvest will come, but not yet. Be patient!

52. At harvest time the reapers will gather the darnel, tie it in bundles and burn it.
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53. The disciples ask Jesus to explain the parable to them.

54. This parable cautions us about passing judgment on others. So often good and
evil are so intertwined that it’s hard, if not impossible, to separate one from the
other.

55. The Russian novelist and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1970. One of his best known works is The Gulag Archipelago,
which he wrote between 1958 and 1967. It is a three-volume work about the
Soviet prison camp system, based on his own experiences but also on the
testimony of over 250 former prisoners. Solzhenitsyn might have been tempted
to argue that he, the innocent one, had been imprisoned by evil people.
However, he o ers this sobering observation:

56. If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously
committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest
of us and destroy them.

57. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

58. Sobering words: the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every
human being.

59. Thomas Keneally’s 1982 novel Schindler’s Ark is the story of …

60. Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved more than 1,300 Jews from
the Nazis.

61. Keneally’s novel was made into a movie in 1993 but the title of the move was
changed to Schindler’s List. The role of Oskar Schindler was played by Liam
Neeson.

62. One of the Jews that Schindler saved said of him: “He was our father, mother, our
only hope. He never let us down.”
63. Schindler was a Catholic, but in name only. He had been unfaithful to his wife
many times over. He was a member of the Nazi party. And he was determined to
come to the end of the war with “trunks full of money.” He also exploited Jews
as a source of cheap labour in his factories.
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64. But as the war dragged on he became increasingly sickened by Hitler’s nal
solution. He courageously protected his workers from death camps at considerable
risk to himself. He was twice imprisoned by the Nazis. Eventually, though, he was
captured by the Russians and never heard of again. Was he a good or an evil
person?

65. The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

66. Or, in the words of Shakespeare: “The web of our life … is of a mingled yarn, good
and ill together.”

67. But we so often fail to acknowledge this. Michael Leunig’s cartoon has people
looking at a sign: “We are good and they are bad, always.”

68. Let us remember that wherever we encounter humanity:

69. … in our neighbourhood, in the workplace, in the parish, in the family, in ourselves
…

70. We discover a mixture of

71. Good and bad

73. Humility and pride

74. Saintliness and sinfulness

75. Graciousness and crudity

76. Purity and lasciviousness

77. Honesty and hypocrisy

78. Justice and fraud

79. And faith and doubt.

80. There will be judgment, but at the end of the age, and God will be the judge.

81. As St Paul tells the Corinthians: “There must be no passing of premature judgment.
Leave that until the Lord comes.”

82. The second parable in today’s gospel uses the image of the mustard seed.

83. The claim that the mustard seed is the smallest of all the seeds is a slight
exaggeration. Orchid and cypress seeds are smaller than mustard seeds. Mustard
seeds grow into bushes or shrubs, and around the lake where Jesus was preaching
the mustard bush could reach a height of up to three metres.

84. The tiny size of the mustard seed was a familiar metaphor among the Jews. So,
one of the key points of the parable is the contrast between the smallness of the
seed and the largeness of the bush once fully grown. Small beginnings but large
outcomes.
85. But perhaps there is also something subtly subversive in the image of the mustard
seed. In the prophet Ezekiel the Lord says: “From the top of the tall cedar tree,
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 from the highest branch I shall take a shoot and plant it myself on a high and lofty
mountain. I shall plant it on the highest mountain in Israel. It will put out branches
and bear fruit and grow into a noble cedar tree.” Ezekiel’s words were addressed
to the Jewish exiles in Babylon in the 6th century before Christ. It is a promise that
their fortunes will be restored. From small beginnings, a shoot, they will become a
noble cedar. But Jesus doesn’t use the noble cedar as a metaphor for the
kingdom. He uses instead something far more humble than the cedar - a very
commonplace bush that grows anywhere and everywhere.

86. In 77 AD Pliny the Elder wrote a 37-volume work entitled Naturalis Historia or
Natural History. He tells us this about the mustard bush: “It grows entirely wild, …
(and) when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it,
as the seed when it falls germinates at once.”

87. So, the metaphor that Jesus chooses for God’s kingdom is not the noble cedar, but
a common, hardy shrub that grows anywhere and everywhere. And why might
that be subversive? Because if Jesus were to have used the noble cedar his
listeners might have assumed, quite wrongly, that the kingdom he is proclaiming is
a worldly empire, that he was talking about restoring Israel to its former glory and
ridding it of foreign conquerers.

88. The parable concludes with an image of the birds of the air nesting in the branches.
The image of birds making their home in a mighty tree is reminiscent of Daniel 4,
where it refers to the worldly empire of the king of Babylon, and of Ezekiel 31 where
it refers to Assyria’s imperial grandeur. However, Jesus uses this image and applies
it, not to those worldly and now fallen empires, but to the eternal Kingdom of God.

89. And what do the birds symbolise? In Ezekiel 31:6 all the birds of the sky nest in the
branches of the tree, the birds representing all the multitude of the nations.
Matthew 13:32 uses exactly the same words as the Septuagint translation of
Ezekiel: τὰ πετεινὰ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ (ta peteina tou ouranou). One can therefore feel
con dent that Matthew sees the birds as representing the multitude of the nations
who will enter the kingdom of God.
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 90. But let’s come back to the smallness of the seed. That is saying something
important to us as well. When we see all that needs to be done in the world
around us, we can be overwhelmed and tempted to think that there’s nothing
that I can do which will make the slightest bit of di erence, so why bother
doing anything.

91. Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, was an amazing woman.

92. She was passionately involved in human rights, trade justice, peace and
con ict resolution, homelessness and poverty, health equality, and the
environment. When she sought to involve others in these causes she often
encountered a response that went something like this: It’s OK for you; you’re
wealthy, you’re articulate; you’re connected to people of in uence. But I’m a
nobody; there’s nothing that I could do that would make the slightest bit of
di erence whatsoever. And her reply?

93. “If you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a
mosquito.” In other words, think of the mustard seed!

94. Mother Teresa once said, “We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a
drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.”

95. Even before she died, Mother Teresa, founder of the Missionaries of Charity,
was acclaimed as a living saint. She was known internationally. You can see
her here with Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul II, and with Cardinal Ratzinger, the
future Pope Benedict XVI. But also with President Reagan and his wife, with
Princess Diana, and also a photograph of her receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.

96. Mother Teresa’s given name was Agnes, but when she became a Loreto nun
she took the religious name Teresa after St Thérèse of Lisieux. But the spiritual
journey of these two women could not have been more di erent.

97. St Thérèse of Lisieux was a Carmelite nun, the member of an enclosed order.
During her lifetime she was unknown, except to members of her own family,
and the nuns she lived with in community.

98. Just a few weeks before she died, at the age of 24, one of the nuns in her
community made this observation: “She’s a sweet little Sister, but what will
we be able to say about her after her death? She didn’t do anything.”

99. Her pathway to God, which she called her little way, was about delity in very
ordinary things. “In my little way are only very ordinary things.” This “little
way” of St Thérèse of Lisieux could be likened to a mustard seed. In time it
was to bear great fruit. In 1997 Pope John Paul II declared her a Doctor of
the Church because the impact of her spirituality upon so many people.

100. Let us now consider the third and briefest of our three parables. It o ers the
simple image of a woman baking bread. Three quick observations.

101. Firstly, both the Jerusalem Bible and New Revised Standard Version tell us
that the yeast is “mixed in” with the our. But Matthew has used an unusual
and unexpected Greek verb: it is ἐνέκρυψεν (enekrupsen). We get our
English word “encrypt” from that Greek word. Something encrypted is
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 concealed or hidden. So the implication is that God’s kingdom is at work in our
midst, but so often hidden and unseen.

102. Secondly, we’re told that the yeast is mixed into “three measures” of our. That’s a
whole lot more our than you’d need to make a loaf or two for the family. Three
measures would make enough bread to feed about 100 people.

103. So this parable of the kingdom provides an image of surprising extravagance and
abundance.

104. Thirdly, yeast is added to our so that it will rise. So, the implication is: you and I are
called to be yeast in our own society.

105. In a Letter from Birmingham Jail the American civil rights advocate Martin Luther King
used an interesting analogy. He likened some people to thermometers. Just as the
mercury in the thermometer rises and falls according to the prevailing temperature, so
thermometer-people simple re ect the values of the society around them. They go
with the crowd. So if they happen to live in a just society, they are just too. But if
they live in a society that discriminates against others because of race or ethnicity, so
do they.

106. They are fearful of being di erent, of not being accepted by others. Like a chameleon
they just want to blend in with their surroundings.

107. But King likens other people to thermostats. Just as the thermostat determines the
temperature, thermostat people work to change what is unjust or unfair in the society
around them, even when it costs them dearly. They are people of the kingdom.

108. The kingdom of God is at work already, often hidden from sight, and from the
smallest of beginnings, like the mustard seed. It is making a di erence in this present
age, like yeast in the process of baking bread. And there will be judgment, but not
yet, and not by us.
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