"Playing God."

Adam and Eve were the first to try it, but certainly not the last. It is the reason why evils like abortion, physician-assisted suicide, in-vitro fertilization and euthanasia exist today, and why an evil like human cloning may be on the horizon. What is "it" you ask? It's called "playing God." Which brings us to today's Gospel parable from Matthew 13. There Jesus tells us, in effect: "Do not 'play God' by trying to usurp my role as the final Judge of the human race." The servants in the story want to take matters into their own hands and remove all the weeds from their Master's field. A noble desire, but the Master knows that he needs to be in control of the process or his servants will make a mess of it by destroying some of the wheat along with the weeds. So he tells them to be patient and to wait until harvest time. Jesus uses the story to remind us that God's justice will not be revealed in its fullness until the end of the world. Until then, because we are imperfect human beings living alongside other imperfect human beings in an imperfect world, we will have to deal with the reality of less-than-perfect justice. Now, is Jesus telling us here that we're just supposed to sit back and accept things that are evil? Not at all. But he is warning us against attempting to do what only he can do. I dare say, every communist dictator in this century wanted to build a perfect world. Of course, each of them tried to do it his own way and without God; consequently in the process each of them destroyed many innocent lives (many innocent stalks of wheat, to use the imagery of this parable.)