13/07/2014
15th Sunday (A)
Matthew 13:1-23.
Homily; Fr. Aelred
15th Sunday (A)) 2014
1. The Parable of the Sower, from today’s
Gospel, is very well known to us. Matthew, Mark and Luke all record it. It is
well adapted to Jesus’ original audience, which must have included many
Galilean famers. Yet its meaning or interpretation isn’t immediately obvious to
us. Indeed all Jesus’ parables are somewhat mysterious. They need some quirt
thought to unravel them.
2. All the seed of the sower is good and
lavishly sown. But the first three sowings are lost, only the seed sown in rich
soil produces a harvest. The parable can be understood as Jesus retelling the
story of Isreael. The first three sowings consists of the word of God as it
comes to Israel through the Prophets. But the prophetic word was not obeyed and
the harvest was lost. Now Jesus comes preaching the kingdom of God as the
climax of Israel’s history, and there is the fresh chance that it will be
receive in the soil of people’s hearts.
3. Another way of understanding the
parable is to see Jesus confronting the mystery of the rejection and acceptance
of his preaching Jesuas had been sent from God to the Jewish people, the people
of Election, but many of them rejected him. Only the relatively small number of
his People accepts him. This would become an acute problem in the early Church:
why did the Jewish reject the Messiah? St. Paul would agonize over this in his
letter to the Romans.
4. A third way of looking at the parable
is to see it as the various responses to the words of Jesus among Christians
themselves. How the words of Jesus can be lost through the action of the evil
one, through personal shallowness, through worldly concerns and the desire for
wealth
5. Why some people persevere in the faith
and same do not can ultimately only known by God. But a passage in John’s
Gospel can shed some light on it. John is the only Evangelist who does not
record the Parable of the Sower, but he does give us these words of Jesus
spoken shortly before in his Passion: “Unless
a wheat grain falls into the earth dies, it remains only a single grain; but if
it does it yields a rich harvest. Anyone who loves his life loses it: anyone
who hates life in his world will keep it for eternal life”. Jesus is here
enunciating an important principle of the spiritual life: only to the degree
that we can give up our own preferences, our own way of doing things, and
surrender to God’s inscrutable will can we yield a hasrvest for eternal life,
some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.
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