Sermon XXVIII.
Gather up first the cockle,
and bind it into bundles to burn;
but gather the wheat into my barn.
—St. Matthew xiii. 30.
The parable which is the subject of the Gospel of to-day is explained by our Lord himself a little further on. The disciples asked him to expound it to them; and he told them that the good seed were the children of the kingdom—that is, all good and faithful Christians; and that the cockle were the children of the wicked one—that is, all those who refuse to believe in the faith which God has revealed, or who will not obey his law. These two kinds of people, said he, live together in this world, but at the end of the world they shall all be for ever separated, the wicked to be cast into the furnace of fire, and the just to shine as the sun in the kingdom of their Father.
Our Lord calls the sinful the children of the wicked one—that is, of the devil. But he does not mean that the devil created them, for he can create no one; no, God created us all, and has, furthermore, redeemed us all with his precious Blood. There is something about them, though, which the devil may be said to have created, and that it is which makes them his children. It is sin, which he first brought into God's creation, to which he tempted our first parents, and to which he is all the while tempting us now. Sin is the devil's work; and sinners are his children, because they do his work.
But few people, at least few Christians, are all the time sinners and children of the devil. Sometimes they repent and become, at least for a time, children of God. Good and evil are mixed up in them, as they are in the world. So our Lord's parable is true of each one of them as it is of the world at large. Each of our hearts is a little field in which God is sowing the good seed of his holy inspirations, and the devil the bad seed of his wicked temptations; and sometimes consent is given to one, sometimes to the other.
Perhaps we may have asked ourselves the question (for it is a very natural one to ask): "Why has God allowed the devil to sow his bad seed in the world and in the hearts of men? And why, if he lets it be sown, does he not root out this bad seed, and not let it grow and choke what is good?" I should not wonder at your asking this question, and you should not wonder if we cannot give all of God's reasons for it, for it is one of the mysteries of his providence. But he has himself given one reason for it in his explanation of this parable. The servants, you will remember, wanted to go and root out the cockle; but the master said: "No, lest while ye gather up the cockle, you root up the wheat also together with it." Would it not be so with us, too, if God should take away all the bad seed of temptation out of our hearts? A great deal of our virtue would be rooted up, too, and what was left would not be very strong and solid. You can see that often. A person seems very good, but what is the reason? It is because he is not much tempted. Let a strong temptation come, and perhaps such a person will sin more easily than one who has seemed much worse, but has really been acquiring solid virtue by faithfully combating with difficulties the other has not had. And not only would our virtue not be solid, but our merits would not be very abundant, without temptation; for most of our merit is gained by resisting sin.
Our Lord, then, does not mean to pull up the cockle out of the way of the wheat, but wants the wheat to live and outgrow the cockle. It is for us to see that it does so; for if there is any cockle left when we come to die there will be something to do before the wheat goes to the barn—that is, to cast the cockle into the furnace of fire; and that furnace of fire, for those who die in the grace of God, is the fire of purgatory. We shall have to wait there till the cockle of sin is all burned before we can go to heaven with our wheat of virtue and of merit.
Let us not think, then, in this month of November, only of praying for those who are in those purging flames, but also of avoiding them ourselves. Our Lord does not want us to go to purgatory. He would infinitely rather take us to heaven from our death-bed than let us remain in that state of suffering. What he wants is to have the wheat grow over the whole field and choke the cockle instead of being choked by it—in a word, he wants us to be saints. That is what St. Paul says: "This is the will of God, your sanctification." Let this, then, be our devotion in the month of November and all the year round: to imitate those (and there are many of them) who have died and gone before their Lord with plenty of wheat and no cockle on their hands.