Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
Wis 12:13, 16–19 · Ps 86 · Rom 8:26–27 · Matt 13:24–43
I can vividly recall, from the hazy recollection of my youth, the bike race of ’76. Back then, a bicycle came with exactly one safety feature: your mother yelling, “Be careful!” as you disappeared around the corner. No helmet law had been invented yet because insurance companies hadn’t yet discovered children.
We’d all watched the Winter Olympics at Innsbruck that February, grown men flying down an icy chute at seventy miles an hour on a sled. Awesome! Naturally, we decided we could do that. So we decided to train for Lake Placid in ’80. The only equipment we lacked was ice, a sled, and adult supervision. We did have bicycles and a steep hill. Close enough.
People assume we called it Cemetery Hill because it was dangerous. Actually, it was because it was behind the cemetery. In hindsight, the name had a certain honesty to it. You were either racing toward the people who already lived there, or about to join them.
Psycho Pete, our neighborhood bully, was three years older which at ten years old made him roughly the age of Moses. He always won. Our competition was for who came in second. Pete rode a Schwinn with a banana seat, and, as far as any of us could tell, no functioning brakes.
At the starting line, Crazy Eddie smiled at Pete.“I’ve got a new strategy.” Those words should have frightened all of us.
Halfway down the hill, Crazy Eddie cut Pete off. Pete went into the dirt mound on the side of the hill and flipped over his handlebars and straight into a blackberry bush. He emerged looking like an angry porcupine. He was pulling thorns for a week afterward.
Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. Even the birds decided this wasn’t their business.
Pete stood up. He picked a thorn out of his arm the way you’d flick lint off a church suit, looked at Eddie, then looked down at his bent bike, then back to Eddie. He said, “Nicely done. See if you can do it without cheating next year.” Then he climbed on his mangled bicycle and rode home as if nothing had happened. Crazy Eddie spent the next month expecting to die.
Looking back, I think Pete accidentally stumbled onto something the Book of Wisdom says about God.
Real strength doesn’t have to destroy everyone it could.
One of the first things a child learns is that power means getting your way. The stronger child wins the fight. The stronger nation wins the war. The stronger company crushes the competition. The stronger politician defeats the opponent.
We absorb this lesson so early that we unconsciously apply it to God: If God is all-powerful, why does evil still exist? Why hasn’t he gotten rid of the bad people (you know, everyone but us)? Why leave the weeds in the field?
The Book of Wisdom gives an answer no one would guess: “Your might is the source of justice; your mastery over all things makes you lenient to all.”
God’s power does not need to prove itself by force. A ruler who must eliminate every rival reveals fear, not strength. Wisdom continues: “Though you are master of might, you judge with clemency, and with much lenience you govern us.”
“Clemency” (epieikeia), Aristotle’s equity, is the virtue that tempers strict justice to fit the real person. (As a side note, Biblical equity highlights God’s powerful restraint — a wise, merciful adjustment that leaves room for repentance and growth. It is the strong hand that chooses not to strike. Our contemporary usage seen in critical theories emphasizes forcing outcomes because they assume every difference is unjust and must be dismantled or re-engineered along group lines, which feels closer to the impatient servants who want to rip out the weeds immediately.
“Lenience” (pheidō) is the soldier’s hand that could strike but holds fire. God’s restraint is the truest display of His power.
In the parable, the servants see weeds among the wheat and ask the obvious question: “Do you want us to go and pull them up?” Any sensible farmer would say yes. The owner says no; not because the weeds are harmless, nor because the wheat doesn’t matter, but because the servants do not yet see what he sees. The field, and the people in it, are more complicated than a quick sweep can handle.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, after surviving the gulag, observed: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties, but through every human heart.” That is why every utopian purge fails. You cannot cut the weeds out of the world, because the line was never between groups to begin with. It runs through each of us.
Years ago, a company called Theranos promised to revolutionize medicine. Investors poured in billions. Magazine covers celebrated it. Anyone who questioned the company was accused of resisting innovation. It didn’t collapse because outside critics won an argument. It collapsed because the corruption was already inside.
Take the 2026 Supergirl movie. The fandom’s main complaint was that the story seemed more interested in lecturing than inspiring, more focused on scoring contemporary points than portraying genuine heroism. The script felt messy and disjointed, and by the end the film had lost sight of Kara herself.
Whether one agrees with every criticism is not the point. What is striking is how quickly blame shifted outward. The studios demanded fans’ money at the box office while dismissing those same fans as toxic, sexist, or threatened by a strong woman. Some Hollywood voices scolding the fandom rather than thanking them for years of support. The failure was explained by the audience rather than by any possible shortcomings in the storytelling.
Most of us spend enormous energy finding the failures of other people and almost none examining our own hearts.
This instinct is hardly unique to Hollywood. Churches do it. Families do it. Businesses do it. Politicians do it. The weeds are never only “out there.” Anyone who has tried to build a perfect anything eventually discovers this.
Most of us spend enormous energy identifying the failures of other people and very little examining our own hearts.
The Book of Wisdom says something astonishing. God’s mighty acts teach His people that “those who are just must be kind.”
Biblical kindness is not softness or denial of evil. It is not silence in the face of truth. It is the self-restraint of someone who has the power to strike but chooses instead to leave room for repentance.
More than anyone, Jesus lived this out on the cross. Religious and political leaders looked at him and decided he was the weed. They crucified him between two criminals. He had the power to end every one of them right there. Instead, he said, “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.”
Peter got another chance. Paul got another chance. Augustine got another chance. If God had harvested the field too early, none of them, and none of us, would have become saints.
The servants wanted a cleaner field. God wanted a larger harvest.
Every one of us should be grateful He chose the harvest—because every saint was once someone’s suspected weed.
The Joy of the Gospel 