Thursday in the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time, July 28, 2022

Matthew 13, 47-53

Jesus said to the disciples: “The Kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea, which collects fish of every kind. When it is full they haul it ashore and sit down to put what is good into buckets. What is bad they throw away. Thus it will be at the end of the age. The angels will go out and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.  Do you understand all these things?” They answered, “Yes.” And he replied, “Then every scribe who has been instructed in the Kingdom of heaven is like the head of a household who brings from his storeroom both the new and the old.” When Jesus finished these parables, he went away from there.

“The Kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea, which collects fish of every kind.”  The Apostles Peter, Andrew, James, and John would have especially paid attention to this parable as they had made their living from fishing before Jesus called them.  Jesus had even promised to make them “fishers of men”.  Here, they might pick up a clue as to what he had meant.  The net the Lord speaks of is indifferent to the kinds of fish that go into it: a fish of any size and any condition might be naught in it.  “When it is full they haul it ashore and sit down to put what is good into buckets.”  When we read “buckets” we should think “baskets”.  The hard work of fishing is not finished when the boat returns, but continues with the sifting of the catch.  This would be done with the sunrise.  “What is bad they throw away.”  The Greek word translated here as “bad” actually means “rotten” and “useless”.  Something “bad” might still be salvaged, but not something rotten.  

“Thus it will be at the end of the age.”  The Jews believed that the world passed through six ages, and that the seventh brought an eternal Sabbath.  Jesus taught that the people of his generation lived in the sixth age, and that at its end would come the great judgment.  We know that this age began with the Lord’s Incarnation and will end with his Second Coming. 

 

“The angels will go out and separate the wicked from the righteous.”  The Lord repeated a number of times in his preaching that the good and the wicked — the “rotten” — would be together until the end, at which point it would be the task of the angels to separate them.  See also Matthew 13, 24-30.  The angels, always an important part of our lives, have this responsibility as well.  “And throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.”  The rotten are not merely set aside but are burned into eternity.  We see from this that those deemed rotten are punished for having made themselves so, and by mixing with the good, threaten to cause them to go rotten as well.  This may remind us of the wheat and the weeds, where the weeds are wicked because they steal nutrition from the wheat.  Their punishment is eternal because they have permanently fixed their malice in their hearts through the evil they have committed repeatedly during their lives on earth.

“ ‘Then every scribe who has been instructed in the Kingdom of heaven is like the head of a household who brings from his storeroom both the new and the old.’ When Jesus finished these parables, he went away from there.”  The Lord commends the scribe who understands the Gospel well enough to teach it using the works of the Prophets and also the words of Jesus and, later, his Apostles.  The Lord may be addressing whatever scribes were present, or he may have been looking to the future when Matthew and John, among those present at that time, would write their Gospels, and when James, Jude, and Peter would write their epistles.

We strive to be the good fish which the Lord puts in his baskets and we strive to recognize the dead, rotten fish  around us so that we may preserve ourselves from them.