Thinking Anew:IN 1998 a major biotechnology company sued one Percy Schmeiser, a 67-year-old farmer from Saskatchewan in Canada, claiming that he had infringed their patent rights by using a seed product which they had developed. The seed had been genetically modified to make it weed-killer resistant, which meant that you could kill weeds without damaging the crop.
Schmeiser admitted using the seed but claimed that it had blown on to his land from a neighbouring farm and that he had simply harvested seed from his own land.
The case went all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court which ruled against Schmeiser stating that he had deprived the company of the “full enjoyment of their monopoly”. And so, in what the press described as a David and Goliath struggle, Goliath won but leaving important ethical issues unresolved.
In tomorrow’s Gospel reading Jesus tells a story about a man who sows good seed only to find that the crop is contaminated by weeds. The crop is wheat and the weed is darnel, a grass-like plant which in its early stages of growth looks just like young wheat plants. The farmer faces a difficult choice: try to remove the weeds in the early season and damage the crop or leave them to harvest time and settle for a poorer crop.
Percy Schmeiser thought he had found the perfect solution to his problem but the situation Jesus faced was much more challenging because the field he had in mind was the world and the story was about society where good and bad intermingle. Genetically modified people were not an option! We get a sense of the difficulties in the splurge of the Celtic Tiger when few seemed to recognise or want to recognise the dangers facing our country through corruption in business and the abuse of political power.
Anyone who expressed concern was ignored or ridiculed. We could not see the weeds in our rich green pastures – perhaps we did not want to – because it was all so comfortable.
Recent revelations that British journalists had accessed people’s private conversations and messages at times of personal tragedy are truly shocking and the possibility that the police were involved makes it even worse. But this was only possible because there were enough people willing to pay for and read what was being published, which begs the question: where did the badness end? Journalism as a profession has, for some, been discredited, which is unfortunate because journalists can be our prophets, speaking out for those on the margins and calling churchmen, politicians and others, to live up to their promises but unfortunately some journalists did not live up to theirs.
The thrust of Jesus’s teaching in this parable is that it is difficult in human affairs to distinguish wheat from weeds, the good from the bad, because we are all a mixture of both. The old saying is true: “There is so much bad in the best of us and so much good in the worst of us that it ill beholds any to speak ill of the rest of us”. Or as St Paul put it in more personal terms: “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.” On its own that is a depressing thought whereas it can be a reminder that we are the raw material of redemption, deeply flawed and unable to save ourselves yet counted worthy by God to be rescued and redeemed.
Father Andrew, the English Franciscan, wrote: “The danger is when the weeds appear among the flowers to see only the weeds. The pessimist counts the sick people, the failures, the frauds, till he begins to declare that there is no health, no success, no honesty anywhere. He sees a real view of life but it is a superficial view. There are weeds, but there are flowers. There are dark nights but there are stars.”
The News of the Worldmay have gone but the Good News of the Gospel is still in circulation.
– GL