Homily for the 16th Sunday of Ordinary Time (A)
At the end of one of the great 20th century Catholic novels Brideshead Revisited there’s a dramatic deathbed scene. The novel is about a British Catholic aristocratic family. Early on in the story the patriarch of the family, Lord Marchmain, abandons his wife and goes off to live with an Italian mistress who is younger than his children. Needless to say, he becomes very hostile toward the Church and its teachings. At the end of the novel, sick and dying, he comes back to the family estate in England, and all of his children—and even his Italian mistress—beg him to see a priest and be reconciled before he dies. He refuses. They call the local priest to visit the house several times, and each time Lord Marchmain angrily chases him away.
The story is narrated by a friend of the family, Charles, who is an atheist. Charles, the narrator, gets angry at the family for continuing to call the priest even though Lord Marchmain has chased him away again and again. Finally, when Lord Marchmain really is dying, when he’s still conscious but no longer able to speak, the priest comes again and begins the last rites. And Charles, the narrator, is indignant. The dying man starts to move his hand, and Charles thinks, “Look, he’s trying to swat the priest away one last time.” And the shaking old hand moves up to his forehead, and then down to his stomach and then across his chest. The Sign of the Cross.
Now deathbed conversions are probably more common in literature than in real life, though they happen in real life too. But there’s a reason deathbed conversions, though small in number, are important in our Catholic worldview. This is because the fact that deathbed conversions are even possible tells us something important about God: that his mercy is infinite, that his mercy is patient, that his mercy is more powerful than a lifetime of sin, that his mercy directs us toward a life that only begins in this world.
The parables that Jesus tells today about the wheat and the weeds, about the mustard seed and the yeast, reflect this understanding of God. God’s power is capable of bringing forth a good harvest even from a field that seems choked with weeds, of bringing forth a flowering tree from a tiny mustard seed, of bringing forth nourishing bread from what looks like a handful of dust.
I’d like to focus today on the first of these parables because in a lot of ways it’s the trickiest of the bunch. It involves making judgments, which is something that we do every day, indeed something that we have to do, but something that if we do wrong, gets us into trouble. Jesus preaches fairly often against being judgmental, as I think we know, but he preaches about this so often because it’s something that’s hard to avoid. So, to be faithful to his teachings, we need to think a bit deeper about what being judgmental actually means. I say this because I’ve noticed a tendency today, in our culture and in the Church as well, to throw around the term “judgmental” rather quickly—usually at someone with whom we disagree. And accusing someone else of being judgmental is a very judgmental thing to do.
So let’s go a little deeper and try to think about the difference between making judgments and being judgmental. We make judgments every day. We make judgments about how to spend our time, what to eat and drink, whom to trust. If you are an employer and you see that one of the people applying for a job has five shoplifting convictions, you may not want to put him in charge of the petty cash. That’s a reasonable and necessary judgment; in fact, given your responsibilities, making such a judgment is actually your duty. In order to make good, fair, and reasonable judgments we need to pray for wisdom.
Where we get into trouble and fall into being judgmental is when we go beyond what is necessary and start to make judgments about (1) things we don’t understand or (2) judgments we have no right to make. Let me explain. To go back to our shoplifting job applicant, if we go beyond the facts and start to speculate about why this person has done what he did, we start to walk on shaky ground. “Oh, he must be a greedy person.” I’ve just made a judgment about this person’s motives, and that’s something I know nothing about. Maybe this person suffers from a psychological condition and needs treatment; maybe he was in a desperate economic situation; maybe he really is greedy. The point is, I don’t have access to what’s inside his mind, so I should be reluctant to draw conclusions out of this ignorance. If I can offer a general guideline: be careful of motives. In a disagreement, as much as possible, try to stay away from judging someone else’s motives: “You’re just saying that because…” Be careful filling in that “because…”
This point is related to the question of who has the right to judge. I think about a conversation I once had with a parishioner, who was a wonderful virtuous woman and devout Catholic. She was a judge; so her job was to make legal judgments that seriously effected people’s lives, and she thought an awful lot about passages like these. Now if a judge sentences a criminal for a crime—a month in jail for shoplifting—we’d say she’s doing her job. But if she goes beyond that and says, “You’re just here for shoplifting, but I think you’re an rotten person, so I’m going to give you a life sentence,” we’d say she’s abusing her power. She’s going beyond those judgments she has a right to make.
And in the Gospel, Jesus is warning us against overstepping our bounds and making judgments that only God has a right to make. Only God has a right to make judgments about people that are absolute and final. This is what makes hope in the possibility of deathbed conversions possible; because the final judgment does not come until the final breath. And only God is qualified to make that final judgment.
The first reading from the book of Wisdom actually explains why; it says of God: “your might is the source of justice; your mastery over all things makes you lenient to all.” So often our misjudgments of others come out of our own insecurities, our own blind spots, our own weaknesses; when God is making the judgment we don’t have to worry about that. His vision is perfect.
Now there’s one final way we might misinterpret this passage, and this is a way of turning non-judgmentalism into something just as bad as judgmentalism. Our Lord is clear in this passage, as elsewhere, that there will be a final judgment. I’m not saying that to give you chills in today’s heat. I’m saying it because sometimes people use the language of non-judgmentalism to imply that there’s no moral law, that there’s no such thing as right or wrong. But Jesus is clear in this Gospel passage that the wheat is separated from the weeds; it’s just not our job to do the separating. I make this point because the world is a complicated place—you sometimes hear that the world is not black and white—and, indeed, it’s not. But the world is not just one blob of gray either. When Lord Marchmain decided to run off to Italy with his mistress, he wasn’t discerning an alternate lifestyle; he was committing adultery. There is darkness in the world, but there is also light. Sometimes the world is a checkerboard where it’s hard to keep our footing. It’s hard for us, and it’s hard for others, and at the end of the day the Lord’s parables about judging others are a plea for us to recognize that. For our hearts to be tender toward others, hopeful for others, always eager to help others regain their footing when they slip. Brideshead Revisited, the novel I’ve been talking about, contains another image, which I’ll end with. God’s love, it says, is like an infinite thread attached to each of us. We can stray and wander to the far reaches of the universe, but one day we’ll feel a tug upon the thread bringing us home. This image should give all of us, who are sinners, limitless hope. Jesus teaches us to hope not just for ourselves but for each other too.
Readings: Wis 12, Rom 8:26-27, Mt 13:24-43
St. Isaac Jogues Catholic Church
Rapid City, South Dakota
2017
Tony Lusvardi, S.J. 