Friends, welcome to Word on Fire, Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an apostolate dedicated

to the mission of evangelization, using media both old and new to share the faith on every

continent, and to facilitate and encounter with Christ and His Church. The efforts of

Word on Fire engage the culture and bring the transformative power of God's Word where

it is most needed. Today we invite you to join Bishop Robert Baron, as he preaches

the gospel and shares the warmth and light of Christ with each of us.

Peace be with you. Friends, the gospel for this weekend is taken from the 13th chapter

of the gospel of Matthew, and it features three marvelous parables of Jesus. How rich

are the parables? How inexhaustible in meaning. You know, if Jesus had simply taught in

the manner of a theologian, His words would be relatively univocal straight forward.

But see parables like poems and stories and songs have multiple layers. They just have

a way of generating new meaning across the centuries, and that's certainly true now

in the case of these great parables of Jesus. So what I'll do in this sermon is just

say a simple thing about each of these three, though they all have multiple senses. We

could spend a whole year talking about them. We still wouldn't exhaust these parables.

So the first one is the well-known parable of the wheat and the tares to give it its classical

name. We could say the wheat and the weeds. We hear of a man who sowed his field with good

seed, but then an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat. So then the two begin to grow

side by side and friends say to the planter, look, let us pull up the weeds. But he replies,

no, no, if you pull up the weeds, you might uproot the wheat along with them. Okay. This speaks to

something I think really fundamental in our spiritual experience. I'll state the principle

abstractly first, and I'll give you some examples. Here's the abstract statement of some goods

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