This past week, some 300 of our younger parishioners are
involved in a two week summer intensive in Faith Formation. With considerable joy, I have the opportunity
of visiting each of the classrooms and share and teach our youth about Jesus,
Jesus’ love for them, and how Jesus wants us to live as his disciples.
Our students are filled with questions. One of our second graders asked me how many
stories are in the Bible. I must admit I
was stumped. What I do know is that stories were very important to Jesus. His stories called parables are the way
Jesus used to teach us about the deepest mysteries of our faith. Jesus was a story teller through and
through. I figured that Jesus knew that
people remember stories better than memorized definitions.
One of the major audiences for
Jesus’ parables were Galilean farmers.
They knew all about sowing seeds and waiting for the harvest -- and so,
today’s parable about the sower and the seed.
As we listen to the stories that Jesus tells, we need to
reflect on the spiritual message that is contained in the story. As in many parables of Jesus, there is a
little strangeness to it. The sower
scatters the seed in a reckless fashion – throwing some seed on the path and
other seed on rocky ground and still other seed among thorns. This parable is not exactly a tract on
productive farming. Otherwise, the sower
would have been more careful about just placing the seed on good soil. But on the other hand, the seed that did land
on the good soil yielded a prodigious harvest, much more than a normal harvest,
yielding a hundred or sixty or thirty fold.
Jesus, the sower of the seed, scatters the seed of God’s
grace extravagantly and indiscriminately.
This is a sign of the abundance, the generosity, and graciousness of the
kingdom of God
The disciples ask:
“Why do you speak to them in parables?”
Jesus speaks in parables because the outer symbolic language of the
story gives God a chance to work in the hearts of those who hear it in order to
bring them to understand “the secrets of the kingdom of heaven.”
In the Gospel parable, there are four kinds of soil that
received the seeds from the sower. The
different kinds of soil represent the different conditions of the human heart. Instead of interpreting the parable in terms
of four different groups of people who receive the Word of God, I invite you to
consider the soil as your own self.
Sometimes we are open to receiving the Word of God; other times we are
not. Sometimes, we are open to receiving
the Word of God; other times we are distracted, preoccupied, wrestling with our
inner demons and we do not have an inner receptivity to receive the workings of
the Holy Spirit within us.
The choice that is ours is to place
God first in our life. The choice that
is ours is to live for self or to live in love and service of those around us
and those who are in need. When the
focus of our lives is on the Lord, we naturally live other-centered lives,
rather than self-centered lives. When we allow the grace of God to
grow within us, we discover the deepest meaning of our lives in making a
difference in other people’s lives.
I was in Hill Haven nursing home
this past week visiting an elderly lady who had requested to see a priest. She then told me she was a devout presbyterian but her minister did not make house calls; and so, I would did do
in a pinch. She was a beautiful woman
who has been blind form birth. And as
she told me, she has been in the nursing home for the last 19 years. Even if she had the numbers of years
incorrect, the point is she had been confined to a nursing home for a long time
with very few visitors. It was a
privilege to spend time with her and to share in prayer with her the mystery of
God’s love in her life.
Another telling experience for me
this week is to watch our teen catechists teach and share the Gospel with our
elementary youth in our summer faith formation.
I marvel and stand in complete admiration of our teens sharing the
beauty of the Gospel message with our younger parishioners.
In thinking about my nursing home
visit and our teen catechists, I’m reminded of a spiritual wisdom that has been one of my mantras:
One hundred years
from now, it will not matter what kind of car I drove, what kind of house I
lived in, how much money I had in my bank account, nor what my clothes looked
like. But the world may be a little
better because I was important in the life of a child.
(and I would also add: the world may be a little better because I
was important in the life of a senior citizen.)
Indeed, the seed that is the Word of God falls on the good
soil of our own hearts when we are important in the life of an another.
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