Today’s Reading concerns our basic nature. Jesus Christ, The Creation Program in perfect, obedient, human form, has described what we are and where we come from. We should pay attention to a Reading that may seem simpler than it is:
Matthew, 13:36-43
Jesus dismissed the crowds and went into the house.
His disciples approached him and said,
“Explain to us the parable of the weeds in the field.”
He said in reply, “He who sows good seed is the Son of Man,
the field is the world, the good seed the children of the Kingdom.
The weeds are the children of the Evil One,
and the enemy who sows them is the Devil.
The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels.
Just as weeds are collected and burned up with fire,
so will it be at the end of the age.
The Son of Man will send his angels,
and they will collect out of his Kingdom
all who cause others to sin and all evildoers.
They will throw them into the fiery furnace,
where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.
Then the righteous will shine like the sun
in the Kingdom of their Father.
Whoever has ears ought to hear.”
We all have lots of neighbors. Some, unfortunately, choose to willfully disobey The Programmer’s Operating Instructions. Worse, some of our neighbors/weeds cause others to sin.
There is a difficulty in interpreting: “The weeds are the children of the Evil One, and the enemy who sows them is the devil.”? Does the devil actually have children? Only those people who choose error as their operating system.
It may help to understand the passage if we insert, in parenthesis,”The weeds are (those who chose to be adopted by, thereby becoming) children of the Evil One, and the enemy who sows them is the devil.” The children of the Evil One are his because they rejected The Loving Programmer’s Operating Instructions. They are idol (error) worshippers. That’s how some human programs become the “children of the evil one.” Reading the passage in terms of adoption introduces free will into the salvation equation.
This is much more hopeful, and realistic, than the “deterministic” interpretation that those who do evil are born to do so. That lets those who want to infer “We humans have no real choice in belief or apostasy because we’re born the way we are.” justify their errors. Many embrace with relish the logical conclusion: “I could not select my father. Therefore, it really isn’t fair of God to punish anyone.”
That is not a fire escape, though many mistakenly believe it to be.
We human beings are, in Catholic Fundamentalism terms, free-will programs. We are much like living, replicating, computers. We were downloaded with wonderful self-maintenance, mobility, self-replication, and programming abilities in our human programs. Some of us choose to operate with The Loving Programmer/Manufacturer’s operating instructions.
Some of us “human computers” choose to download various viruses and operate with them, rejecting The Programmer’s Operating Instructions. They will not merely have their hard drives erased and their damaged programs restored. They will be thrown “into the fiery furnace, where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.” They end up like old computers that never get turned off and never stop being ground up and incinerated at the Recycling Center.
It would be foolish not to spend some time contemplating the Reading’s most hopeful conclusion, “Whoever has ears ought to hear.” Since all have ears, all are able to hear. But, this sort of “hearing” takes place in the brain. There, the living viruses/errors keep the actual “hearing”, meaning “understanding”, from happening.
The viruses, though they hate each other as much as the soul and mind in which they live, are united in one goal: “We must not let the mind we occupy hear about or understand that its soul will have one of two permanent resting places. We do not want a soul to realize that what it chooses to do will bring it only eternal joy or eternal pain.”
