Jesus reminds us that evil is still at work, that life is not fair, that bad things happen, even though he has come with the good news of the kingdom. God is not the only one at work. Not all actions in the world can be attributed to God. God often gets blamed for every event that occurs, but he is not the cause of every event. There is moral evil which is caused by the free will of individuals. There is natural evil which is caused by the structure of the material universe. There is evil that can only be identified as the work of an enemy. We should not overemphasize the sovereignty of God, and attribute every event to God's manipulation. We cannot say of every event: it is God's will. For the universe to function, and individuals to develop, God has to allow a certain amount of autonomy to his creation.

We live in the midst of a world, and a church, in which "evil is ever mingled with the good, and sometime the evil have chief authority." (Article XXVI BCP). There is conflict, warfare, persecution, injustice, suffering, child abuse, disease, exploitation, and cruelty. How are we to understand this? Where is God in all this?

The servants ask, "Where then did the weeds come from?" Their master sowed the seed. When terrible things happen we ask, "why"? Are you, God, to blame for this? Aren't you ultimately responsible? Aren't you in charge? How could you have allowed this? Could you not have prevented this? It is natural for us to ask these questions if we believe in a good and great God who is in control of the universe and our lives. "When we voice protest over the suffering and evil we encounter in life, we do more than just vent our rage. We engage in an ancient and profound form of prayer, an appeal to the honor of God. Understanding prayer as the language of relationship, it makes sense for prayer sometimes to take the form of 'God, there is evil in the world. This is not like you. Act to overcome it.'" (Thomas G. Long, What Then Shall we Say? Evil Suffering, and the Crisis of Faith, p.128)

At Nancy's funeral I related how she fought the enemy all the way. She was determined never to give in. She never capitulated to the enemy. She gave new meaning to the words of Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.....
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, Bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light

The landowner answered, "An enemy did this." He made clear that he was not the source of the weeds. We should not try to figure out why God would cause or allow evil to happen. We should not try to rationalize why such a thing should happen and how it will turn out to further God's will. God did not do this. This evil did not come from God. "It is not the gospel either to pretend that evil is not evil but only good in disguise, or to see the hand of God causing evil...God does not plant evil in the fields of our lives and creation." (Long op.cit.p.132f.)

Evil is God's enemy. Who is this enemy? He is the devil. Evil cannot be fully accounted for by political, anthropological, or psychological explanation. There is a dark spiritual force in evil. "Think, for example, of any parent who has struggled with a son or daughter hopelessly caught in the downward and suicidal spiral of serious addiction to narcotics. Yes, we can analyze the chemical aspects of addiction, the psychological brokenness, the existential despair, the negative social influence of peers, but none of these explanations, even in combination, can fully encompass the will to self-destruction, even at times the perverse delight in it, the rage toward self and others, the hopelessness and inability to will what the mind knows is the good. The parent realizes that the child is captive to forces beyond rational control, knows that the child is up against more than human failings, recognizes in the heart the truth of the biblical claim 'For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.' (Eph.6:12)" (Long, op.cit. p.134)

The servants go to ask the owner, "Do you want us to go and pull up the weeds?" The farmer's answer is "No, because while you are pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them." You cannot eliminate all evil in this life. God does not rush into the world to fix it. He is not that kind of God. We might respond to evil in this way but the God who revealed himself in Jesus does not. God knows that we are too intertwined with evil in our lives, in our relationships, in our businesses, in our politics, in our churches, in our thinking, to survive such surgery prematurely. We have to wait until the harvest before we are healed. We are healed, not through miracles, but through the wounds of Jesus on the Cross. Ripping out evil is not the way of God in the world.

What, then, happens to the weeds? "The Son of Man will send out his angels and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father." (Matt.13:41-43) The loving power of God will finally destroy all evil. "The ravenous beast of evil, which has soaked history in blood and tears, will be completely eradicated. Every tear will be dried, and death and pain will be no more." (Long, op.cit. p.144)

Charles de Gaulle and his wife Yvonne were the parents of Anne, who had Downs syndrome. Every day, when he returned home, he played with Anne before she went to bed. Yvonne would often say, "Oh, Charles, why couldn't she have been like the others." Anne died when she was young, and after the requiem mass Yvonne was reluctant to leave the grave. Charles rested his hand on her arm and said to her, "Come Yvonne. Now, she is like the others."

I closed my homily for Nancy with these words: "What is still future for us, still painful for us, is present for Nancy. Now no enemy separates her from the love of God in Christ. The weeds have been eliminated from her life. She is purely good, healthy wheat now: redeemed, whole, saved. She is rooted and established in love, and has the power, together with all the saints, to grasp the width, and length, and height, and depth of the love of Christ. She knows this love that surpasses knowledge. She is filled to the measure of the fullness of God. (Eph.3:18f)"

That is the Gospel for us all who seek to follow Christ.