God judges in kindness. God allows the weeds to grow until harvesting. God gives the world an abundance of growth. God makes the call. When God searches your heart, will there be an abundance of kindness?

The Book of Wisdom declares that divine justice is superior to human justice because God adds mercy and clemency into the mix. Justice becomes no longer a matter of adding and subtracting and arriving at a final sum: innocent or guilty. Instead divine justice takes the full measure of the human person, and not only the deed in question, before rendering its verdict.

God’s kingdom is like a farmer who planted good seed in his field. That night, while his hired men were asleep, his enemy sowed thistles all through the wheat and slipped away before dawn. When the first green shoots appeared and the grain began to form, the thistles showed up, too.

Jesus knew the power of metaphor, and that is what parables are: What seems abstract or unimaginable suddenly comes to life by comparison with things we can grasp, like the Kingdom of God being like a mustard seed.

Brothers and sisters, let us acknowledge our sins, and so prepare ourselves to celebrate the sacred mysteries.

The books of the Hebrew Bible known as “the Writings,” of which Wisdom and Psalms are parts, often speak of the sovereignty of the one God—God alone is the ultimate power in the universe. And this week’s readings are a kind of meditation on the greatness of God.

When Jesus compares the world to a field and the righteous to good seeds, the weeds become the actions that lead away from Christ. If we aren’t careful, we may find that the weeds have overgrown us and cannot be cleared without doing much damage to our hearts. What weeds can you clear from your life?

The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth—love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn’t flowers grow out of dirt? —Robert Cormier