16th Sunday Ordinary Time - July 23rd, 2023 (Click Here for Readings)

Our culture is laden with weeds among wheat, sown in our hearts and minds by the proverbial enemy mentioned in today’s Gospel. Though we may consider ourselves grounded in our faith, we can often allow those weeds to creep into our thoughts and behaviors.

So let us always remain alert to the weeds in our hearts we overlook; those undergrowths we’ve harbored to where they’ve become part of our nature.

Because God can patiently let all things prevail, wheat and weeds together, we need to continually pray for the strength to cleanse the weeds of our faults and sins, and replace them with our many God-given virtues before the final winnowing occurs in God’s time.

Though our praying efforts may not always seem productive to us, as St. Paul tells the Romans, even when we are not able to pray and express ourselves as we want, God knows us and hears us through the channel of the spirit, which can fill the gap in our prayer intentions when our expressions and words can’t measure up. We don’t need eloquence or impressive rhetoric. Just faith and fervency.
 
Let us always pray from the heart. Not from the head like a hypocrite with loud visible expressions intended to impress others. When we simply clear our heads and let the spirit do his work, he will melt our will to the will of God.

God knows our weaknesses and will speak his answers to our hearts. Let us better learn to be still in our prayer efforts. If necessary, by doing contemplative or centering prayer and patiently waiting for God’s answers.

Like the feuding farmers in this Sunday’s Gospel, we must also prevent ourselves from using our weeds of gossip and derisive talk to dishonor others in order to elevate ourselves.

When we emulate the wisdom, humility and loving power of God, we’ll never need to contaminate our consciences and hearts with weeds of competition, ambition, superiority, position and power.

We also won’t have to compromise to the world’s standards to avoid being ostracized, excluded or ridiculed. The stronger we are in God, the less we’ll need to impress others or be concerned about who we offend.

As the book of Wisdom states today, in the same way God has no need to prove himself to anyone or any other gods because of his power and omniscience, we too can access this
God-given power to live committed lives to God’s will for us when we give ourselves, hearts and souls to him.

The power of wheat to build God’s kingdom will always eclipse the power of weeds to destroy.

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