With Opened Bible
16th Sunday in Ordinary Time
The Creator, like Jesus the Savior, is a gardener (cf. 1 Corinthians 3,9). This idea runs throughout the entire Bible, from Genesis to the Book of Revelation. This Sunday's Gospel presents a challenge, inviting us to recognize—ever more clearly—that the Church (like the world) is a garden where good and evil, light and darkness, the values of life and those of death, truth and falsehood, coexist side by side.
Jesus asks us to confront the reality of this duality: good seed (from God) and bad seed (from the Evil One). It is a mixture that reminds us the world is just when founded on God and eternal values, yet unjust when we focus on what is negative and toxic—sin.
The first Garden was created by God Himself (Genesis 1–2). But Evil disrupted His divine plan, throwing everything into disarray (Genesis 4). Through the Church, Jesus becomes the gardener who sows not a perishable seed, but one that endures for eternal life: His Word.
He alone can distinguish between the good grain and the bad. In the life of the Church, we are sometimes tempted to pass judgment here and now on what seems amiss. Yet, due to our limitations, we cannot act without risking harm to the good seed: "No, if you pull up the weeds you might uproot the wheat along with them. Let them grow together until harvest; then at harvest time I will say to the harvesters, 'First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles for burning; but gather the wheat into my barn'" (Matthew 13:29–30).
The beneficiaries of the first Garden failed due to their disobedience; however, those who inherit the spiritual Garden of eternal life (Paradise) will triumph through the obedience of faith.
