Throughout the Gospels, Jesus uses parables to explain difficult truths about God, morality, and the human heart. Sometimes we are told what question prompted a particular parable, but other times we are left to wonder.
In the parable of the wheat and the weeds, perhaps the question being asked was one many of us have asked: If God is good, why does He allow evil?
Why does God allow sickness, violence, broken families, injustice, and especially the suffering of innocent people? If He has the power to stop evil, why doesn’t He simply do it?
Jesus answers this question through the image of a farmer who plants good seed in his field. While everyone is asleep, an enemy comes and sows weeds among the wheat. When the servants discover the weeds, they ask the master, “Do you want us to pull them up?”
That response makes sense to us. Let’s get rid of the evil. But the master says, “Let them grow together until the harvest.”
God never wills evil, but He does permit it for a time. One reason is that He can bring about a greater good than what would have existed before.
The greatest example is the cross. The Crucifixion was the greatest evil ever committed, yet God transformed it into the greatest good: our salvation. If God can bring the Resurrection out of the cross, then He can bring good even from the evil and suffering we experience.
God also allows trials because they strengthen us. We do not grow much when life is easy. Virtues such as patience, courage, forgiveness, perseverance, and trust are forged in moments of difficulty. As St. Paul reminds us, suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope.
God also desires our love to be real, and love must be freely chosen. If God removed every temptation, struggle, and possibility of rejecting Him, then our “yes” would no longer be a free act of love.
We must also remember that the devil is real, but he is not equal to God. He is a creature, not God’s rival, and he can only do what God permits. God never permits evil unless He can draw a greater good from it. Satan thought he had won on Good Friday, but the cross became the very instrument of his defeat.
This does not mean that evil is good. We should fight against evil every day. But the Gospel reminds us that God is so powerful that He can use even evil to accomplish His saving plan. The weeds never have the final word because the harvest belongs to God.
Why, then, are the weeds allowed to remain? Pulling them up too soon might uproot the wheat as well. God’s patience is not weakness; it is mercy. Scripture tells us that although God is all-powerful, He governs with clemency and gives sinners reason to hope that they may repent.
Think about your own life. Aren’t you grateful that God did not judge you at your worst moment?
Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future. God is patient because He desires our conversion.
Jesus is not only speaking about evil in the world. The field is also our own heart. Within each of us, there is wheat and there are weeds. There is an ongoing battle between virtue and vice, faith and doubt, generosity and selfishness.
Rather than focusing on the weeds in someone else’s life, let us tend to the wheat in our own. Let us remain close to Christ, trusting that He is patient and still at work within us.
Evil will not last forever. There will be a harvest. Justice will be done, and those who remain faithful “will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”
Why does God allow evil? Because love requires freedom, because He can draw a greater good from evil, because He patiently gives us time to repent and become saints, and because one day He will destroy evil forever.
Father James Schibi, Pastor