FALSE WALLS
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
July 19, 2020
One of my earliest memories in grade school was the day that
our Principal, Sister Mary Rosaline, came on the public address system –
infuriated. There had been a terrible infraction committed during recess – at least
as she saw it, and she wanted to tell all of us that it must never happen
again. The great sin that day was that some of the boys had been including some
of the girls in their recreation outside. I will never forget Sr. Mary Rosaline’s
indignant proclamation that day: “Boys play with boys! Girls play with girls!” I
don’t recall any explanation for that determination, but it was absolute and
emphatic. Keep your interactions among people who are like you.
I, and we, learned early on that there was something vaguely
wrong about crossing boundaries like that – even when it felt like the most
natural and enjoyable thing to do. We were taught to put up false walls.
To be fair, our principal was something of a creature of her
time. It was at a time when Catholics did not mingle with Protestants – whether
at church or school or social venues or hospitals or political events. I’m sure
that they did, weren’t supposed to. False walls.
We had lots of them. To get married to a non-Catholic was
very rare and very suspect. To enter a non-Catholic place of worship was
forbidden. To buy a house in some neighborhood where there were people of other
races was illegal. I learned relatively recently that the home where I spent my
childhood was in one of those neighborhoods. False walls.
In the flurry of parables that we hear from Jesus in today’s
gospel of Matthew, he is taking on the issue of false walls, because back then –
as now, and always – the worst instincts of religious people and religious institutions
have been to create false walls. Specifically, the wall between the imagined “good
people” (or good enough people) and the imagined “bad people,” between the
saints and the sinners, the righteous and the damned – or as Jesus describes
them in a metaphor in today’s Gospel, the wheat and the weeds.
That’s the most insidious and false wall of them all, as he
knew, because there is no such thing as the categorically holy person or the absolute
religious failure. You’ll find people around today who will claim otherwise. They
are wrong. To be human is to be both on the quest for virtue and for goodness, for
God, and to be subject to weakness and failure and sin. There is no false wall
that separates anybody that way – except the delusional, or the arrogant.
And further, as Jesus teaches, even if there could be such a
thing as the absolutely bad person, or evil community, it is God’s job, and not
ours, to render a judgement about that not today, but when we see God face to
face. “Let the wheat and the weeds grow up together,” he says, “because you are
not smart enough or skilled enough or pious enough now to know which is which.”
That’s a hard thing to accept – that people and groups who
aren’t just like me or us may enjoy God’s care and favor in a way that seems
unimaginable.
Certainly there is a wall between good and bad, a real wall that
separates holiness from sin. It’s just that we mentally are very inexact, and
sometimes cruel, when we presume to know too quickly just where that wall is. The
real one.
False walls are easy to erect it’s not much trouble to
identify that guy or that race or that religion or that political disposition
or that gender as the right or wrong one. But that’s not yet exactly the gospel
way.
Sister Mary Rosaline, I’m sure, meant well in her attempt to
put up a false wall between boys and girls on the playground, in her belief
that everybody needed to play with people who were pretty much like themselves.
But that’s not how the world works. And more importantly in today’s Scripture,
that’s not how Jesus works either. “Let them grow together until the harvest.”
Then let God take care of things.
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