to be powerless over evil - 16th Sunday A 2014

Today Tay Vic or Msgr. Vic Casa turns 95 years old and yesterday I texted all the priests in the archdiocese  making it known that 95 is summa cum laude.  It is not common that people reach the age of 95.  The bible says, specifically, Psalm 90 says, that our life span is 70 or 80 for those who are strong.  Yet there are some of us, not all, who are graced with the gift of old age and it is a wonderful gift.  I will tell you why.

What does it feel like to have so many years in your life, with a memory still able to recall the good and the bad that transpired?  What does it feel like to have so many years in your life with a still vivid remembrances of the beautiful and the ugly, the triumphs and defeats, the successes and mistakes, the achievements and the regrets?  What does it feel like holding all the memories of those long years and yet powerless to do anything anymore that would alter regrets, correct our mistakes and rectify our faults?  You remember everything and yet you are already powerless to do anything about it anymore.  Wala na, tapos na.

Today we read the parable of the wheat and the weeds.  It is a parable which reveals to us our own reality - the reality of our own community, the reality of our own families, the reality of our church even, the reality of our own personal history, a reality which we now hold in our memories - that we are wheat and weeds, that life in this world is far from perfect.  The Son of Man sows wheat but the evil one comes at night and sows weeds.  Meanwhile while harvest time has not yet arrived, the master prohibits the workers to pull out the weeds for fear that the wheat, the good seed, might be destroyed in the process.  And so the good and the bad co-exist, the wheat and the weeds grow together, side by side until harvest time.  Isn’t this our life, is it not that our memories are filled with these thoughts?

In effect Jesus is helping us recognize through this parable that in reality we cannot fix everything, that there are things in our lives that only God can take care of.  This is the privilege of reaching a ripe old age - of being placed in a situation where one can only accept the realities that transpired, where one can only relinquish control and commend everything to the one who alone can really fulfil and fix everything in our lives.  This is the gift of old age, of being 70 or 80 or 95 - when it’s too late to do anything anymore except to trust and to let God.

Our gospel ends well this wheat and weeds parable.  The good will triumph, the just shall shine forth.  And why is that so?   Because of God.  Not because of us but because of God.  We pray so shall our lives be.