Since I'm Not Preaching This Sunday...

... I thought I would give some random thoughts on the Gospel reading for Sunday (Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23).

The Parable of the Sower is a parable about parables and their effect on the people of Jesus' day. Some would hear and hear and hear and just won't buy it. And of course, Jesus' preaching had that effect upon the religious elite and their minions, who sought ways to have Jesus taken out. Some people just don't appreciate getting rained and snowed upon, not knowing that precipitation is necessary for growth and renewal.

We can be like little children who sing, "Rain, rain, go away. Come again another day." The Word of God is showered upon us "as the rain and the snow come down from heaven" to make our hearts fertile so that we become fruitful and multiply in works that "give seed to the sower and bread to the eater."

But instead, we come in out of the rain for one reason or another. It could be fear that God sends acid rain instead of pure water. It could be fear of becoming wet with the image of Christ. Or maybe we don't want to go through the troublesome task of drying off.

But what if we're never supposed to get dry in the first place? Baptism drenches us with water (the basis of all life) and Word (the sustenance of all life).

Jesus accomplished what God sent His Word to do. Parables were just the start of how he did it. Some people wouldn't have any of the freedom that Jesus was offering them. They were so used to their own ways and ideas of what freedom should look like that they were blinded to what God was revealing in Christ.

The tour de force was the cross. If people refused to see what was happening there-- the destructiveness of their own hatreds and biases and the identity of who they were to be-- then they would suffer the same fate, and suffer dearly. But if their eyes were opened to what God was doing-- showing the door to freedom from a destructive and self-defeating system--they would be transformed and become people with a mission.

Freedom never comes "as you want it". This is not bad news. The futility of thinking that we are the masters of our own destinies comes at great cost. Self-interest at the expense of the whole destroys the self. We are not the islands we believe ourselves to be. But by grace we are knitted together as self-interested individuals into a body that benefits from the body and blood of Christ, given and shed for us in the Eucharistic Feast, so that we reach and benefit those outside of the faith.