The End of the Age
19 July Seventh Sunday After Trinity
Readings: Isaiah 44. 6-8; Romans 8. 12-25; Matthew 13. 24-30, 36-43
Theme: The End of the Age
Today, we have another parable about the kingdom of God which Jesus explains to his disciples. The story of the ‘wheat and the weeds.’ It reveals an important truth about the kingdom of heaven and sets this truth in the context of the historical struggle, until “the end of the age,” between good and evil.
Once again, Jesus uses an agricultural example. The people of the time lived from the land and knew how things worked in this domain, so Jesus applies this common knowledge of the land to the historical and spiritual plains in the parable. Paul explores these insights at the cosmic level in his Letter to the Romans, seeing the whole of creation as groaning to be set free from this struggle.
In the gospel, the struggle between good and evil is framed by the notion of two kingdoms. These kingdoms represent those who follow the “evil one,” the “devil,” and those who follow the “Son of Man,” “Jesus,” the Messiah, the true “King” and “Redeemer” of Israel. These two roles of “King” and “Redeemer” are separated in the first reading from Isaiah but united in the gospel. Jesus is both ‘King’ and ‘Redeemer’ of Israel for the New Testament. The long-awaited Messiah will be the Son of Man. The one whom the prophets had spoken about as coming, but not in a way that would finally come to pass in Jesus. He is the “suffering servant” of Isaiah but this will be the Son of God himself who will endure this suffering so that the kingdom will be inaugurated and the death knell of evil announced, if not yet completed in history.
This is why we learn from the parable that both good and evil must grow in history, in this dual age when both kingdoms operate. The wheat and the weeds will grow until “the end of the age;” an expression indicating ‘the end of history’ in the gospel. This dual ‘age’ will then end and the ‘new age’ of the ‘consummated’ kingdom of God will begin at ‘harvest’ time. Until that time we must, as Paul announces, wait in patience and enduring the sufferings of this in-between time.
The return of Jesus at that ‘harvest’ is the time when evil will be no more. While in the Resurrection, Jesus has ‘fulfilled’ the covenantal promises that God made to Israel, to redeem God’s people, the ‘consummation’ of these promises is yet to be completed. It is only with the return of Jesus at the end of history that evil will finally be no more and the world will enter the ‘new age’ of consummation in God’s kingdom. Such a ‘temporal’ truth of the kingdom of God which Jesus reveals in this parable is often expressed by the phrase “already and not yet.”
It is important to understand how this dual age of the kingdom of God “already and not yet” operates in the New Testament, if we are not to miss the point of the parable.
In Jesus’s death and resurrection, the victory of good over evil has been ‘inaugurated’ in history. “The good seed has been sown.” However, this good seed has not yet been separated from evil. History rolls on with the growth of both the wheat and the weeds, of good and evil, until its end when it will be finally and definitively separated. This ‘end time’ of ‘consummation,’ at the “harvest,” will be the return of Jesus that we proclaim in our weekly liturgies. We do this each time we proclaim the mystery of the faith with words such as “Christ has died, Christ has risen and Christ will come again.”
In other words, the timeline of the history of our salvation is one with these three periods to it. The past of the death of Christ, the present of the Resurrection of Christ and the future of the final return of Christ. These three eras are all ways of saying that Jesus is the Lord of all time. The alpha and the omega to whom all time belongs, as the beautiful words of the Easter Vigil proclaim it.
This is also why Paul speaks of sufferings in the reading from Romans. We are suspended in this force field of good and evil in history and it is not one which we should assume that we can escape. It is part of the sufferings of the present age that all must experience and which Christians understand as a solidarity with the sufferings of Christ.
However, what we learn from this gospel is that this tension between good and evil will end at the “harvest time.” Then the Lord will return and dispatch his angels to do the work of the harvest, as it is put in the gospel. While this language is pictorial for how these events will actually occur, and so is not to be taken literally, we should take them seriously. When Jesus returns we will all be judged and justice and peace will final reign on earth when heaven comes down.
May we remain awake and vigilant because while we do not know when this ‘end time’ will be, in faith, we know that it will be. We should have no fear of this time, because the Lord to whom our loyalty has been given in this world will then take us home and we shall be finally free from the suffering and tensions of this period of history.
This is why on our lips should always be those Aramaic words of “Maranatha,” “The Lord is coming.” May this Lord come and finally liberate the whole of the creation from its birth pangs so that the New Creation may finally transform the world.
