The Wheat and the Tares
The Wheat and the Tares[1]
It is not your work to uproot the tares; rather, grow *** so that when the great Reaper comes, He may find your ears full of wheat, and gather from them thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold, and His granaries may be filled with wheat.
The Lord Christ did not waste His time resisting the errors of His age..
He did not spend the period of His Incarnation on earth fighting with those who were at fault and with the problems of society and the Church; rather, He cared about building, establishing new principles, and preparing people who believed in them and spread them everywhere.
Being preoccupied with uprooting the tares involves waste ***
Satan is ready to keep you occupied at all times with problems, and to offer you an innumerable amount of errors, in order to inflame you with resisting them and distract you from working on building yourself and building the Kingdom.
And in this struggle, he wastes your time, your efforts, and your energies.
In uprooting the tares also, you may lose your inner peace, and perhaps your peace with people as well, as you live in a struggle.
Thus you lose your calmness and serenity, and perhaps you also lose your meekness. Problems may bring you into an atmosphere of disturbance and endless disputes, which provoke you and surround you with constant emotion.
And just as you lose your meekness and calmness, you may also lose your cheerfulness.
People see you only looking gloomy, with no smile, and perhaps anger possesses you and sadness possesses you, and you do not try to get rid of them because you consider them holy anger and sadness, for God’s sake.
And all this may lead you to hardness of heart.
Continually, you judge the people who are at fault, raging against the errors in them, under the pretext of uprooting the tares from them. And continually you are in noise, and your voice may rise over people, and you rebuke, scold, breathe out threats, and become annoyed with everything.
And in all this, you may lose your love for people, and lose your humility; and while you uproot the tares from people, you may have uprooted the wheat that is within you, and people look at you and see you as tares in everything.
Few are those who can uproot the tares while at the same time preserving their wheat. Therefore, the Lord rightly prevented His children from uprooting the tares, lest they uproot the wheat with it.
And rightly the Scripture said, “Do not resist evil.”
The best way to uproot the tares is to present the good example that eliminates them, and as the wise man said, “Instead of cursing the darkness, light a candle.”
[1] An article by His Holiness Pope Shenouda III in Al-Keraza Magazine, ninth year, issue 34, August 25, 1978.
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