Fr. Coleridge [1884]: The Parable of the Cockle amid the Wheat

[Stone]

The Parable of the Cockle amid the Wheat
From The Training of the Apostles Vol. III
Fr Henry James Coleridge, 1884, Ch. IX, pp 148-159
St. Matt. xiii. 24–28, 36–53
Story of the Gospels, § 59-62
Sung at the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany and in one of the “spare” Sundays before Advent.
[Taken from here and here.]

The second sowing parable

Of the series of parables of which we are now speaking, there are two only which have been explained for us at length by our Lord Himself. These are the two first in order, and, as we may fairly conclude, those which He thus explained may have been considered by Him as of the very highest importance.

Taken together, and with the rest, they present a very complete view of the conditions under which the Gospel teaching has to be carried on in the world, and they explain the principles of the Divine government in that teaching in a manner which it would have been difficult to ascertain so clearly if we had not this distinct interpretation of the figures by our Lord Himself. It is well, therefore, to subjoin at once this parable, with its explanation, to the Parable of the Sower, and the interpretation of that parable given by our Lord.

‘Another parable He proposed to them, saying, The Kingdom of Heaven is likened to a man that sowed good seed in his field. But while men were asleep, his enemy came and oversowed cockle among the wheat, and went his way. And when the blade was sprung up, and had brought forth fruit, then appeared also the cockle.

‘And the servants of the good man of the house coming said to him, Sir, didst thou not sow good seed in thy field? whence then hath it cockle? And he said to them, an enemy hath done this. And the servants said to him, Wilt thou that we go and gather it up?

‘And he said, No, lest perhaps gathering up the cockle, you root up the wheat also together with it. Suffer both to grow until the harvest, and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather up first the cockle, and bind it into bundles to burn, but the wheat gather ye into my barn.’

Explained to the disciples

This parable, then, was delivered to the multitudes, as well as to the disciples, and afterwards explained to the latter alone.

‘Then having sent away the multitudes, He came to the house, and His disciples came to Him, saying, Expound to us the parable of the cockle of the field.

‘Who made answer, and said to them, He that soweth the good seed is the Son of Man. And the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the Kingdom, and the cockle are the children of the wicked one. And the enemy that soweth them is the devil. But the harvest is the end of the world, and the reapers are the angels. Even as cockle therefore is gathered up and burned with fire, so shall it be at the end of the world.

‘The Son of Man shall send His angels, and they shall gather out of His Kingdom all scandals and them that work iniquity, and shall cast them into the furnace, there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then shall the just shine as the sun in the Kingdom of their Father. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.’

In the Parable of the Sower, our Lord had described Himself as content with a good deal of failure in the beneficent work which He had undertaken for mankind.

He had intimated that He knew that much of the good seed which He came to sow would be wasted, and He had described the various manners in which that waste would be brought about. In some cases the seed was to be snatched away by the devil, as the seed by the pathside is snatched up by the birds.

In other cases, the seed was to fall as it were on stony ground, and wither away, the hearts in which it had been sown being too shallow and weak to give it strength enough to withstand temptation and trial.

In other cases the souls in which the seed was sown would be engrossed by worldly cares and ambitions, by the love of riches and other temporal things, unsatisfying in themselves and unable to supply the soul with true happiness, but still attractive and deceitful enough to occupy the mind and heart to the exclusion of the true goods.

In these cases the good seed would be stifled and made unfruitful. On the other hand, He was to find His reward and the recompense of His labours in the good seed which would spring up and return Him thirty for one, or sixty for one, or even a hundred for one.


The action of the evil one

Here, then, our Lord had said but little of the action of the evil one on the world.

It is true He had given a most important lesson as to that action, for He had pointed out that the utter forgetfulness and inattention with which so many careless persons come to lose their opportunities, and to be as if they had never heard the good word, were due, not simply to their own recklessness, but to the direct action of the devil, taking the seed out of their hearts, whether by direct action on their memories, or by filling their minds with other thoughts and affections which were sufficient to exclude the thoughts of faith and religion and the work of grace.

But for the remainder of the mishaps which were to prevent the fruitfulness of the seed, our Lord said nothing which could hint at the positive activity of the spirit of evil in the field which was sown by the word of God. There remained, therefore, these two great features in the description to be added by a new parable.

The first of these was the further action of the evil one which our Lord would permit, according to the general laws on which the universe is now governed, and the second was the manner in which God acts with regard to this action of His enemy. These two great features, then, form the special subject of this second parable.


Transfer of the image

In the Parable of the Sower, it will have been remarked that there is a transition from one point to another, in the use of the image, from the seed sown, to the persons in whose souls the seed is sown with so many diversities of issue, as to fruitfulness or the reverse.

The seed is the word of God, and yet the seed sown or dropped by the wayside are the heedless hearers, the seed sown among the thorns or on the stony ground are those who fail in this or that way to profit by the grace of God. So in the parable now before us, the seed is said to be the children of the kingdom and the children of the wicked one respectively, while the Son of Man sows the first and the evil one sows the other.

This transfer of the image is necessary in this second parable, for in this there is question of the manner in which God will treat those who are occasions of evil and scandal in His Kingdom. The parable deals with persons rather than with things.

But for the strict interpretation of the parable according to the lines of theological truth, we must remember the language of the Parable of the Sower, in which the seed is in the first instance the word of God, and in the second instance the persons in whom the word of God is sown.

The devil has no power to create evil, and our Lord in His dealings with the world gives or offers graces to all. He does not create good souls, and leave evil souls to be created by His enemy.

The parable speaks of the result of the action of our Lord on the one hand and of the action of Satan on the other, as being good and evil men, but in the truth to which the parable corresponds the evil are not purely and originally evil, nor so absolutely corrupted as to be beyond hope of recovery, and the good are not so good as to be preserved from the possibility of becoming evil, although wheat cannot become cockle nor cockle wheat. What is permitted to the devil is to ape and imitate, as well as to thwart as far as lies in his power, the action of God.


Phenomenon represented by the cockle

Our Lord looked forward prophetically to the history of the Church—nor had He far to look, when He knew already that among His own chosen disciples there was one who would turn out a true child of the wicked one—and He saw that which would always be the marvel of His saints and the special cross of His dearest friends, that the field in which the Gospel seed was to be sown would, when the time came for the fruits of the sowing to become manifest to the outward eye, be found to be full of a growth which certainly was not of the Gospel.

This is a phenomenon for which no account was furnished, as has been said, in the former parable, and our Lord represents it as a matter of surprise and complaint to the servants of the good master of the field. Who these servants are we are not distinctly told by our Lord, but the fact that the angels are said in the end of the parable to be the reapers is hardly sufficient to make us conclude that the angels are not also these good and zealous friends of their Master, Who would fain purge His field at once of the weeds which had so suddenly appeared.

The unfolding of the Divine plan of the government of the world, and especially of the Church, is spoken of in Scripture as the great study of the angels, who have not by nature the knowledge of the future, and to whom the beautiful wisdom of God reveals itself gradually in the course of events.


Angels and saints

And besides the angels, God has always among His servants on earth many who spend their days and nights in the prayerful contemplation of the progress of events in the world and in the Church, and to such also, far more even than to the angels, the phenomena of human history, and especially of that part of it which concerns the fortunes of the Catholic Church, are the subject and occasion of continual amazement and wondering surprise.

The angels, no doubt, would willingly, if it were the will of God, exert their wonderful power in the destruction and removal at once of all scandals in the Church. And the chosen saints and servants of God yet upon earth, must burn with zeal at the sight of so much evil and so much mischief, and would gladly call down fire from Heaven, as Elias did, and as the two Apostles, the sons of Zebedee, would have done on an occasion mentioned in the Gospel history itself.

For the desolation and ruin produced in the fair field of the Church by the evils of which our Lord speaks, are certainly enough to make the hearts of the friends of God boil over with indignation, and with desire for redress.


Satan using men

It is remarkable that in the parable itself the answer which our Lord puts into the mouth of the good householder is not simply, as might be supposed from the common version, ‘an enemy hath done this,’ but ‘a man who is an enemy hath done this.’

And when our Lord comes to explain the figure which He has used, He says simply the enemy is the devil. It may be that we are meant to understand, even from the language used by our Lord, that though the arch enemy and the principal agent in the attempted ruin of the fair harvest is the devil, still he acts mainly through the instrumentality of men.


Heresy, and oversowing what has already been sown

Another truth which may be conveyed by this language is, that the evil agencies are always posterior in date to the good agencies. The devil sows over the ground which has already been sown by the Son of Man, he follows the lines and works over the work of God.

The Fathers are very fond of understanding this parable, in a particular manner, of heresies, rather than of other evils, which proceed, like heresies, from the evil spirit and his subordinates, and according to this interpretation, it is very easy to see the force of this remark about the manner in which the evil one acts in spoiling the work of God.

For all heresies are perversions of the truth, they require the truth of the Catholic doctrine as their foundation, they have no originality in themselves, and the devil their author has no creative power, he can but mar and distort and pull to pieces.

But it is not necessary to confine the meaning of this great parable, in which the agency of the devil is described, to that single department of his work which issues in the production of heresies, and what is so plainly true of his procedure in this one part of his work, is also true of his work in other ways. He is essentially a copyist, a mimic of God, as if his insane thought that he would be as God was always repeating and forcing itself upon him, as the poor animals who ape man in his ways, are never quiet or happy, while they see him do anything, without attempting themselves to mimic him.

The intense malignity of the character of Satan must not make us forget this feature in the same character—the feature of the most insane and foolish vanity, a feature very remarkable in those who have sold themselves to do his work in the world.

One of the surest tests of the heretical spirit is the unwillingness to acknowledge mistakes and misrepresentations, when they are pointed out, and this unwillingness is founded on personal vanity.

It may safely be said that a writer on the side of heresy or schism who shows any eagerness to acknowledge and correct the errors in statement into which he has fallen, is already half converted.

And yet the want of this simple honesty is one of the commonest characteristics of heretical controversialists, and it shows most clearly the spirit by which they are guided.


The sleep of the servants of God

Another point may here be noticed. As God in His dealings with mankind acts according to His own infinite wisdom and knowledge of human nature, and so of all that it requires and of all that is adapted to influence it, and to supply its wants and cravings, the plan which He has followed in His Kingdom must of necessity cover the whole ground and penetrate every department of humanity.

It is the plan of the enemy, therefore, to proceed on his own work of mischief wherever God has extended His own beneficent operations, and thus the work of the evil one is aptly described as the sowing of bad seed over the good seed which God has sown.

This is said in the parable to have been done while men slept, and if this particular also is to have its counterpart in the truth, we must understand that our Lord refers to the necessity of the utmost vigilance on the part of those who are responsible for the good estate of the field sown by Him, and to the truth that the beginning of the activity of the evil influences is to be traced, more or less, to the want of watchfulness on the part of the rulers of the Church.

This, however, may perhaps be pressing the figure too far, for nothing is said in the explanation of the parable by our Lord of this want of vigilance. It may be that He means us to understand that there is always a great deal going on in the unseen world around us, and with direct reference to ourselves and to the welfare or ruin of our souls, of which we can have no more perception than men can have of what goes on in the hours in which they are naturally wrapt up in sleep.


Satan befouling everything

These few words, then, of our Lord, ‘an enemy hath done this,’ contain the whole of what He tells us here of the ever-active and most malicious exertions of the evil one and his emissaries for the purpose of destroying the good work which God has begun in the world.

As the enemy passes over the field in which the footsteps of the sower of the good seed have gone before him, and leaves no part of that field unvisited and, as far as lies in him, unspoiled by the seeds of evil, such we must suppose our Lord means us to consider is the activity of the enemy in scattering his evil influences wherever our Lord has left behind Him the principles of good.

Alas! it is but too true that there is no part of the field to which Satan is forbidden to penetrate. Nothing is too sacred for him to befoul. It is natural enough to expect his work in those regions of society which are more especially under his influence, which we call, by pre-eminence, ‘the world,’ the mass of those who worship temporal goods and aims, and regulate their conduct by the maxims of time and not by those of eternity.

But the work of the enemy is not only here. It is to be found in the sanctuary itself.


The hierarchy, religious life, the home

The Church of God is provided by the care of its Founder with an admirably organized hierarchy, a complete army of selected souls, vowed especially to the service of the altar, to the life of prayer, to the ministration of the sacraments, to the government of the general body, to the defence of the true doctrine, and to the preaching of the Word of God.

It is Satan’s chiefest joy and greatest triumph when he can sow seeds of evil in the sanctuary and around the altar of God, and though he has never been allowed for long together, or to any overwhelming extent, to corrupt the ruling body and fill the sees of Christendom with prelates who might be described as legitimate successors rather of Annas and Caiaphas, than of the Twelve Apostles, still he has not been altogether without his successes in this most vital assault on the good work of God. Incalculable as have been the services to the Church of God of the great majority of her chief rulers, her history would be different indeed from what it is if the world had never been able to intrude its own children into their ranks.

Pride, vanity, worldliness, personal ambition, jealousy, avarice, nepotism, an indolent and a luxurious life—if such scandals as these had never been in the sanctuary of the Church, she might not at this moment have to lament the falling away of so many fair kingdoms which once owned her gentle sway. As a matter of fact, the greater number of heresies and schisms in the Church have had their origin in the clerical order itself, and in many cases they have arisen among ecclesiastics of the highest rank.

If Satan has been allowed to see the evil shoots manifest themselves in the very highest orders of the hierarchy, it is not wonderful that in other parts of the field of the good householder the same miserable enjoyment should not have been denied to him. The enclosed garden of religious life, the cultivated retreat in which evangelical counsels are made the rule of daily practice under the sanction of vows, this also has been invaded by the malignity of the evil one, and the souls most immediately consecrated to God have sometimes been the occasions of the greatest triumphs to His enemy.

As the ecclesiastical state has its own peculiar temptations, such as those which have been enumerated, so also are there found, among the religious communities, the seeds of evil particularly fatal in their case.

So again it has been in that other garden of beauty and fruitfulness in virtue, the holy domestic life of the Christian family, formed on the model of the holy home at Nazareth, and the cares of a household and the lawful worldly callings to which the members of such families are naturally devoted have been the occasion of a thousand seductions and of a thousand instances of forgetfulness of God.

Not a calling, not a profession, not a pursuit, from the most laborious scientific investigations to the simplest relaxations and recreations, into which some evil seed has not been cast, as it were, to occupy the ground. The whole of society may be looked on as a field sown by the hand of God and intended to return to Him the fair fruit of obedience to His law and glorification of His bounties and benefits to man.

And yet every department has its evil traditions and examples and principles asserted against those of God and of our Lord, nor can there be any truer picture either of the natural society of man or of the supernatural kingdom of the Church, than that which our Lord here gives, the picture of a field covered with two growths of seed side by side, the one good, the other evil.


‘An enemy hath done this’

This, then, is the chief part, so to say, of the parable, the declaration on the part of our Lord as to what was to be expected in the field in which the evangelical labourers were to spend their work—a picture true indeed of the history of the world before He came and before the foundation of the Gospel kingdom, but far more true prophetically, as a forecast, for the benefit and warning of the Apostles and those who were to come after them in their work for God.

For the true picture of the state of the world before the times of redemption might perhaps have more properly been said to be that of a field in which there was but, here and there, a faint trace of the Divine culture, a few shoots of good wheat among a forest of shoots of cockle.

But it was all the more surprising, after the work of our Lord and after the establishment of His Church, that even in that chosen field so carefully cultivated and fenced round, there were still to be these many shoots of the evil seed in every department and in every corner.

Our Lord knew what was in man, as it is said of Him by St. John. He did not need the experience, even of His own reception at the hands of the chosen nation, to show Him what was to be expected by His Church at the hands of the world.

But He knew also what was in Satan, and He knew how intense would be the fresh activity into which the enemy of God and man would be roused by his defeat and by the destruction of his kingdom and power in the world. He knew how he would fasten on all the weak points in man, and work all the lower influences of his nature against his own good, all the more zealously because he would see, in the new creation of the Church, a world capable of giving far more glory to God than that former natural world which he had been allowed to deface and to turn into a dominion of his own. And the whole process of the efforts of Satan in the Church and their issue is summed up in these few words of our Lord, ‘an enemy hath done this.’


Evil and the Kingdom of God

The enemy of God and man will not be excluded from making his malignant attempts on the fair field of the Church, as he was not prevented from assailing the beautiful and innocent creation of God when man was first made.

The evil which sin has introduced into man remains in the Kingdom of God as long as the time of probation lasts, that is, the conflict of the flesh and the spirit is to go on even in regenerate man, although immense forces of grace have been supplied to him for his easy victory in the conflict. And so neither is the activity of the evil spirits fettered or put an end to, though men are wonderfully stronger for resistance against these deadly enemies than they were before the coming of our Lord.

As a consequence of these two truths, the field of the world in which the good seed has been sown is to be still what it always was, a field in which good and evil grow up side by side, nor is there to be any part of it in which the work of the evil one is not to be rewarded by a kind of miserable success of its own.


How will God deal with it?

But then, the question rises up—it must certainly have risen up in the minds of the angels as they watched the progress of the Gospel Kingdom—how will God deal with the evil shoots which have covered so large a space on this field which He has sown and is to be continually sowing?

When evil sprang up in Heaven, God did not tolerate it. The evil shoots were uprooted at once and cast away. Even in the history of His dealings with man, the principle of swift vengeance and extermination has not unfrequently been followed.

Once the whole race of man was destroyed, except eight persons, and there had been other instances of summary chastisements, only less signal than that.

What is to be the law of God’s action in the government of His Church, or of the world into which He has sent forth His Church?


From Fr Henry James Coleridge, The Training of the Apostles Vol. III