Wednesday, January 29, 2003

In today’s Gospel, our Lord not only recounts the elaborate parable about the sower, but then explains it afterwards.  The parable is a very important insight into the heart of Jesus Christ because he’s talking about himself. He is the sower, the sower who sows the Word. He used the image of seed, but the sower is really sowing the word, the Gospel. The first and  most important sower is Jesus, the word made flesh, who has come to the world, being sent by his father.

Jesus explained to the apostles that seed is scattered in the fields, and fields have variations — part rich soil, part hard where people have trod and sown paths, part rocky, part rich but filled with thornbushes and brambles.  The images are so powerful because Our Lord is saying that he knows that the hearts of men and women vary greatly and the word will not bear fruit everywhere. We might think that Our Lord must be sad, he must even feel like a failure when he sows healthy seed and some of it doesn’t last, some of it is eaten by birds, some is swallowed up by hard ground, some is ruined by the sun, and some of it grows up with brambles and is suffocated. How can Our Lord subject himself to rejection?  Because he respects our freedom. Our Lord created us as free creatures. He will not try to force anything on us. He gives us abundant seed, he gives us the word and shows us the way, but he respects our freedom. 

How can we receive the seed? We have to use our freedom well. If  we look into our hearts and soul and as we look into our lives, we see that God’s word at times hits hard ground because we’re being hard, stubborn, prideful or lazy.  Our Lord’s beautiful word comes to us,  but it can’t take hold because the ground is shallow or hard. Jesus himself says that there are people who hear the word, but allow it to be choked by the lure of anxiety, riches, and craving for earthly things. Materialism is a very powerful counterforce to the teachings of Jesus.  When we see Our Lord running into difficulties  in spreading His Word, we as Christians must expect the same thing because we are the other christs who continue to spread the seed. We are the sowers. We sow the word by our example, by the things we say, by the way we live. Sometimes we’re going to find that  people will not accept the Word , or they receive it but don’t make full use of it. Do we become sad, do we become frustrated, do we lose our own faith?  No. We continue to sow the seed, we continue to live the Word, we continue to live our lives the way we know God wants us to.

Let’s put it another way. If we come across a field that is rocky and has hard ground, and has bramble bushes on it, we say that there has got to be a way to improve it.  The first thing we say is: “We’ve got to throw seeds out there. There have to be seeds.” We then say: “Yeah, but if we sow seeds, half of them will be lost.” Still, there’s no way the field will change without seed. It will remain hard and rocky with brambles, and will be unfruitful.  The best reason not to lose heart is that we have to continue to talk about Our Lord and what he has done in our lives to the people around us, because as hard as those fields may be, the only way they will ever produce fruit is if we cast seed there. Of course, we have to water the seed and make sure that the soil is as fertile as it can be. If there’s no seed, there’s no change.  The field will remain the same, the world will remain the same, the people around us will remain in the same darkness unless we — with a certain madness — continue to persevere in our task of sowing the seed. Some of it will be fruitful. Thirty, sixty, or a hundredfold will be the yield from that seed, and we might say this offsets all the other seed eaten by birds or dried up by the sun. 

We are saving the world. Good people are really good when they’re good. They can offset a lot of people who are indifferent or even bad.  Even the good people won’t remain good unless we’re praying and encouraging them and giving them the word of God.  This starts with ourselves. We recognize in ourselves the need to be receptive to Our Lord’s words and never to lose heart. If I can be good, I can change the environment around me. All it takes is one person to really follow Jesus Christ to change a home, to change a family, to change a workplace because goodness is far more powerful than evil and we can’t lose heart.  Jesus is not losing heart. He’s telling us in this parable that He will encounter difficulties.  We encounter these same difficulties, and we know less than the Master.  We experience the same rejection and apathy.  So we have to be patient, continue to be prayerful and not be afraid to be who we are and to speak about what’s in our hearts. Let us keep close to God through Jesus Christ and through the intercession of his mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary. 

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