Homily for Saturday of the 16th Week in Ordinary Time
It doesn’t matter when our relationship with the Lord first began or how far it has progressed, for most of us as people of faith, we know how the Lord is calling us to follow Him. We are trying our best to follow His will and to do what He is asking us to do. We are striving to be His disciples. In other words, we know what the wheat looks like; we know that the wheat is all that Christ taught and how He continues to instruct us to live our lives. But we also know what the weeds look like.
We don’t have to look very hard to see that there are many prevalent things in our world today that are pulling us away from living the fullness of our Christian lives. There is much in our society that is at odds with Christianity. At times, it may even seem like the weeds are overtaking the wheat – and they might be. Despite that, the Lord asks us to recommit ourselves to following Him. He asks us to continue being the wheat.
Our responsibility as Christians is to keep our focus on Him. We are called to keep gazing intently on the Cross of Jesus, striving to remain rooted in His Word, and continuing to nourish our spiritual lives with the sacraments of the Church. Because whenever our gaze shifts, even in the slightest way, we open ourselves up to falling prey to so many different temptations; we risk being overtaken altogether by the weeds. If that happens, the very life can be sucked out of us and we will struggle to survive.
Today the Lord is reassuring all of us to simply stay the course. In fact, He is inviting us to up our game. We are being called to intensify our efforts at striving for holiness, to pray more, to spend more time with the Lord, deepening our relationship with Him even further. The Lord wants us to be the wheat that is gathered into His barn – He wants us to spend eternity with Him. May we continue responding to Him with faith and generosity.
Photo: Fields of wheat in Ukraine, Polina Rytova on Unsplash. Used under Unsplash license.
Fr. Tom Pringle 
Always a great and pertinent homily. I also like to meditate on what happened to the wheat – the promise of the harvest. One of our many secular mistakes is in not realizing that in focusing too much on the weeds we choke off the opportunity to enjoy the harvest – the inevitable blessings we receive from being a member of Jesus’s family.
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There are sometimes so many weeds…. We just have to rid ourselves of them so that our wheat can grow and flourish….
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