Weeds And Wheat Together
2020년 7월 19일Why is there evil in the world. This question is asked by all religions, and each supplies a different answer. The Catholic faith maintains that evil is the result of sin, original and actual, venial and mortal.
Of course this presupposes that all evil exists only in the human realm. Yet once in a while something happens that cannot simply be explained by humans sinning. Many years ago an earthquake in southern Italy caused a church to collapse, killing all the children inside who were practicing for their First Communion. Terrible? Yes. Tragic? Absolutely. But was it evil?
To account for such tragedies, people posit the devil did this, not just to kill innocent children, but more importantly to get people of faith to give up believing in a merciful, all powerful God. So from this we see true evil is more than suffering and death. It includes what happens inside of us, to our faith.
One of the great mysteries of life isn’t just the existence of evil, but also how is it that evil and good, sin and salvation exist side by side, sometimes in the same person?
After all, all of us sin, yet we also repent, confess, and pray God help us resist temptation. In today’s gospel Jesus explains that God allows evil and good to exist at the same time to give as many as possible the opportunity to repent. When the great harvest (end of the world) comes, the good and the bad, saints and sinners, will be harvested together. Then evil will be separated from good like a farmer separates wheat from weeds, not just in the world, but in us. Each day God gives us an extra chance to be good by doing good. Evil will exist for a time. But our concern should focus on saying and doing things that represent and reflect the goodness of God in the world—and in us.