July 14, 2002 – 15^th Sunday "A"

Is 55,10-11; Rom 8,18-23; Mat 13,1-23

H O M I L Y

Farming or gardening can be a good school of patience, trust and abandonment. After you have tilled the ground, sowed the seed and watered it, you just have to wait in patience. For awhile there is no way of knowing whether it will grow or not. Then you don't know how tall it will grow. You can work on the conditions of growth; you have no way of influencing the growth process itself.

With that in mind let us now return to today's Gospel.

The prophets of Israel and Jesus were speaking to people who for the most part were farmers and fishermen ; and therefore, when they wanted to speak about the Kingdom of God, they used parables and images that had something to do with life and with growth.

In today's first reading, the prophet Isaiah compares the Word of God to the rain watering the earth, making it fertile and fruitful, and not returning to God void but only after having accomplished the end for which it had been sent. And in the Gospel Jesus compares it to a seed.

One thing interesting about this morning's parable is that we have both the parable itself and its interpretation. This is very unusual, since the use of parables was a teaching technique by which the teacher or rabbi let everyone draw his/her own conclusion from the parable. And therefore exegetes and commentators agree that the second part of this Gospel, the interpretation, is not from Jesus himself, but represents the interpretation of the early Church.

In Matthew's text, this parable is placed immediately after the narrative about Jesus' relatives wanting to seize him and to bring him back home because they thought he had lost his mind. The present parable is really a reflection of Jesus about his own ministry. His word, the word of God, is received in various manners. In some people it meets a heart of stone, and therefore does not grow at all, in others it grows with more or less difficulty, but it grows. And when it has grown to proper height, it will be the End. As a whole it is a message of hope.

As the parable was repeated in the early Church, an explanation was added and attributed to Jesus. And surprisingly enough the preoccupation has shifted from the seed to the soil. Jesus' preoccupation was with the seed, that is with God's reign. It has become, for the early Christians a moral preoccupation for being as good a soil as possible.

Such a preoccupation, of course, is very legitimate and has some foundation in the Parable itself as it was told by Jesus. But that shift shows very well our human tendency to be more preoccupied with ourselves, with the way we receive God's Word than with the Word itself. Jesus' preoccupation was with the Word of God. And his message was that in spite of all our obduracy and lack of cooperation, the seed of the Kingdom will grow

The reason for such a shift in the preoccupation is probably also our innate fear of suffering. Paul, in the Epistle to the Romans reminds us that all the sufferings we may have to go through are simply part of the growth towards the fullness of the Kingdom of God in us: they are as normal as childbirth pains.

It is amazing how we easily find all kinds of good reasons and pretexts for shying away from the painful reality of growth to the safer reality of preparing the ground. We feel more secure when we are all preoccupied with plowing our soil, plucking out the weeds, tilling the ground in various ways. We are "doing" something, and we expect a reward for our doing. All this is good and necessary. But the Gospel and Paul are reminding us of another dimension: the need just to wait with patience while the seed is growing, to experience the death of the seed, without being sure whether it will take root or die out, without knowing how tall it will grow. We don't control growth. And it is painful. Both the growth process itself is painful, and the fact of not controlling it.

While remaining aware of the need for ascetical practice, for weeding the garden of our heart, for watering the plants, let us come back to what is, for Jesus at least, the most important thing: the Word of God, the seed of life placed in mankind by the Father, and let us await with confidence its full growth in each one of us and in the whole of mankind. Let us also accept to go through the sufferings involved in such a birth and such a growth.