When I was a kid growing up in the Bronx, New York City (sadly noted for its summer heat and humidity) tried to promote itself to tourists with the slogan “New York is a summer festival.” Festival or not, we certainly have had a festive summer, an exciting summer. We had the Knicks. We celebrated our semi-quincentennial – complete with tall ships, fireworks, and a celebrity wedding – and more locally our own Paulist Pilgrimage to Liberty Island in Support of Immigrants. And, of course, we have had the World Cup, which will come to its glorious conclusion later today in the final championship match between Spain and Argentina at the stadium across the Hudson.
Meanwhile, here in church this summer, we have been making our way, week-by-week, through Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans, the longest and most studied of all Saint Paul’s letters. Before I had ever formally studied it, however, my first serious personal encounter with the letter to the Romans occurred some 50 years ago, right around the 1976 bicentennial. It was in a Peanuts cartoon, in which Charlie Brown was moaning and groaning in his characteristic way, until finally someone said to him, “Stop sighing,” to which he responded, “It’s scriptural,” and then proceeded to cite Saint Paul’s words from the short passage we just heard today – in the more elegant, more traditional translation, for the Spirit helps us in our weakness, with sighs too deep for words [Romans 8:26].
Well, of course, there really is a lot to sigh about. Just listen to the news – or the poisonous brew that is social media. Paul’s words express the problem of the present, that is, the tension between, on the one hand, our obvious weakness and the sense of overwhelming futility that seems to characterize the world, and, on the other, our hope as children of God and joint heirs with Christ. We have, Saint Paul insists, been offered an alternative, already in the present. Hence, his stirring call to a total reorientation of our lives.
Even so, we remain burdened by what we have made of ourselves and our world, in the here and now. Left on our own, we would stay stuck. Paul, however, wants to alert us to something better and brighter than the present but which is already accessible to us now, thanks only to the presence and power of the Holy Spirit acting upon us, filling us, surrounding us, transforming us.
Similarly, the parables Jesus proposes in today’s Gospel [Matthew 13:24-43] all illustrate the slow – but inexorable – progress of God’s kingdom, transforming our pathetic present into God’s glorious future. God sows his good seed in the field of the world and patiently waits until the harvest before separating the wheat from the weeds. The weeds are very real and must be recognized and dealt with eventually. But God’s judgment is patient with the world – for our sake. Because, of course, God is not at all like us! As we just heard in the book of Wisdom, God’s mastery over all things makes him judge with clemency. He governs us with much lenience, thus giving us good ground for hope that he would permit our repentance [Wisdom 12:16-18].
God is not at all like us! In our frustratingly futile present, we lack patience – with God, with ourselves, with one another, with our world. But, again, God is not like us! Like the yeast which, when mixed with flour, leavens the whole batch, God is patiently filling, surrounding, and transforming our world with the presence and power of his Holy Spirit.
As the first fruits of the Spirit, we – the Church, Christ’s witnesses in the world – reflect the Holy Spirit’s leavening presence and power at work. We are not quite there yet, of course, as the parable of the field so dramatically demonstrates. Wheat and weeds coexist in the Church – as they do in each one of us individually.
With the presence and power of the Holy Spirit acting upon us and within us, we are being aided to trust God’s process and make good use of the opportunity God’s patience provides us.
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