There is an important aspect of the Gospel that is painful for our minds to confront, so we tend not to notice it. The Gospel, like the whole Bible, speaks of life and death and settles for nothing less. Forgetting this, we have learned to see Christianity as a sugary pink myth, turning it into what one rather unattractive thinker called the opium of the people. Yet the whole meaning of the Gospel lies precisely in this tension of the choice between life and death. Interpretations in the style of “everything will turn out well anyway” are very attractive and popular, and not only in the twentieth century. But if we close our eyes to the possibility of perishing, then the possibility of being saved also becomes illusory, and life itself turns into a kind of sickly sweet ideology.
That is why the interpretation the Lord Himself gives the parable of the wheat and the tares in today's passage from Matthew's Gospel is so important. Leaving no room for other interpretations, He speaks of the destruction of those who practice lawlessness and the salvation of the righteous. There are a number of other passages in the New Testament where Christ says the same thing: the possibility of perishing and the possibility of being saved are entirely real.
Another difficulty is that we immediately begin looking around, trying to see who are the children of darkness and who are the children of the Kingdom. That is why it is so important to remember that the Lord is speaking to you—about you, and no one else. These are two possible outcomes of your destiny and no one else's. Paraphrasing Christ's words today, the apostle Paul offers a vivid image in his letter to Corinth: “Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain” (1 Cor. 9:24).
