Becoming Good Soil and Good Sowers, 16th Friday (II), July 24, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the 16th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Charbel Maklouf
July 27, 2018
Jer 3:14-17, Jer 31:10-13, Mt 13:18-23

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• The two main ways to apply the word of God to our Christian lives is what it says to us as disciples called to holiness of life and what it says to us as apostles summoned to share the faith with everyone so that they may be holy. Perhaps the most powerful words of Jesus in the Gospel about both of these areas is contained in today’s Parable of the Sower and the Seed. On Wednesday, we would have had Jesus’ mentioning of the Parable, but because of the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene we didn’t. Today we have his explanation of it.
• Let’s begin with the application to our discipleship. Jesus today is inspiring us to take a soil sample of our hearts, to help determine how we receive and respond to him, to all that he teaches us, and to all that he seeks to do in our life. He is the Sower who goes out to sow. He ultimately sows himself like a “grain of wheat” (Jn 12:24): he sows his word, his grace, his body and blood, all he is and has he tries to implant within us and within the world. But the way we respond to those gifts varies. To understand what he says, we first need to grasp a little about ancient farming techniques (and how much farming has advanced in 2,000 years!). Sowers would scatter seed on long thin plots before any soil had been turned over. The seed would land on four different types of earth. The first is the hardened land between plots that would serve as the paths on which people would walk and make hard; no seed could penetrate those ancient sidewalks. The second would be the very thin “rocky” soil that would have thick layers of limestone a few inches underneath the surface. Here the seeds would take and quickly germinate because the water would be retained within the few inches of soil during the rapid temperature rise in the morning. Because the roots couldn’t penetrate the stone, however, the sprouts would not be able to last for long, quickly dehydrating and withering as the sun grew in intensity. The third terrain Jesus describes as “thorny” soil, which is basically good earth that could have borne a lot of fruit if it weren’t covered with thornbushes and weeds that would grow up exhausting the nutriets of the soil so that the good seed really couldn’t grow. And the last type was good soil that Jesus describes would bear much fruit.
• Just as a sower would scatter seed over all four types of earth, so Jesus scatters his word, his grace, his saving deeds over all four kinds of people represented by the respective soil samples. We see all four soil types among his first listeners. We saw in many of the scribes and Pharisees the hardened soil that totally resisted Jesus’ words and the testimony of his miracles, closing their ears and their hearts to his message and actually accusing him of working his indisputable miracles not by God’s power but by the devil. No matter what Jesus said, no matter how he said it, no matter how he backed it up by deeds, they weren’t going to listen and be converted. The evil one, as Jesus mentions in the Parable, would come to snatch the seed away before it could ever get planted. We see the rocky or superficial soil in the people for whom Jesus worked the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish. They listened to Jesus for hours, they even followed him after the miracle along the entire upper lip of the Sea of Galilee, but most of them abandoned Jesus as soon as he asked them to believe something they found hard, his teaching on the Eucharist, that to have life we need to gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood. They were willing to listen to Jesus’ words for a time, but when he asked them to do something that made them uncomfortable, their faith withered and died. We see the thorny soil in those who said that they would follow Jesus but first they wanted to bury their father, or go on their honeymoon, or inspect their new oxen. We also see it in the Rich Young Man, who came to Jesus as a good teacher and who kept all the commandments from his youth, but who — when Jesus gave him a choice between storing up for himself treasure in heaven or holding on to his earthly riches — chose the thornbush of his worldly wealth. His materialism choked his growth in faith and prevented his seeking “perfection” together with Jesus. We see the good soil in people like the Blessed Mother, who, as the ancient icons attest, conceived the word of God first through her “ear” before she conceived him in her womb, whom Jesus praised for hearing the word of God and putting into pratice, who wanted her whole life to develop, as she told God through his angel, according to God’s word. We see this good soil in so many other saints like eleven of the apostles, Martha, Mary and Lazarus, and others who bore abundant fruit by allowing God to work through them.
• The first point of today’s parable is that God wants us all to receive his word and to respond to him with good soil. To become a saint we don’t have to be a spiritual superhero; we simply need to give God permission and correspond to what he wishes to do in and through us. We just need to have good, receptive and responsive soil. If we’re going to do that, however, we have to graps what good soil is. And there are three things we need to grasp about good soil. Jesus tells us that good soil produces fruit, and not just a little fruit, but abundant fruit: 30, 60 or 100 fold, all huge numbers according to the Jewish mentality of the age.
• In the first reading today, we have a chance to ponder the fruitful way we are called to respond not just to God’s word but God himself. The Prophet Jeremiah, before the exile, announces what will come: the Lord will appoint shepherds after his own heart to shepherd us and they will be signs to us of his constant presence. He promises that they will “become fruitful in the land” and they will no longer say “The ark of the covenant of the Lord,” because they will no longer need this sign of God’s presence and of his great miracles because they will be aware of the presence of the Signified, God himself. He says they will “walk no longer in their hardhearted wickedness,” because their soil will be maximally responsive to God’s presence. Once we are aware that God is present, then it’s possible for us to bear abundant fruit, because our awareness of God’s being with us will change literally every action we do: 30, 60, 100, 500 actions a day will be changed as, as branches on the vine, attach ourselves to Christ. Today’s parable talks to us not just about our response to God’s words, but to the Word made Flesh. We will no longer have to think about an Ark of the Covenant, because the treasure of the new and eternal covenant is with us, literally within us.
• Someone who grasped the gift of God and responded with great soil is St. Charbel Maklouf, a Maronite monk, priest and hermit whom the Church celebrates today. As a young boy, he was drawn to the example of his maternal uncles who were monks. Shepherding his family’s small flock as a boy, he would take them to a grotto where he had installed an icon of the  the Blessed Virgin Mary and would spend the day in prayer. He learned from her how to receive and respond to the Word of God. His family wanted him to marry and to continue his hard work on the farm, but when he was 23, he left home without telling them because of the opposition to begin his training as a monk and then as a priest and finally as a hermit. He sought constantly to turn with the Lord in prayer. He was deeply devoted to the Lord Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, and it’s significant that he basically died during Mass, having a stroke while celebrating the divine liturgy from which he never recovered. God waited to call him home for eight days and summoned him on Christmas Eve. After his death, his remains glowed, people came to him to ask for miracles that were granted, when his body was examined it was found incorrupt, and now he continues to bear fruit through his miraculous intercession. He remains a beacon for the type of good soil, and the fruit it bears, not just for Maronites but for every Christian.
• Let’s shift briefly to the application to the apostolate. Just like a plant that grows from a seed eventually bears fruit with new seeds that can be implanted elsewhere, so if we have good soil, then the grown and developed seeds that Jesus has planted will mature within us so that we can then implant them in the soil of others’ hearts. Over the course of my priesthood, many people have come to me discouraged that as hard as they’ve worked to pass the faith on to their children and grandchildren — through sacrificing to send them to Catholic schools, praying with and for them, setting the best example they could, policing what they watched and the friends they hung out with — they seemed to have failed because their loved ones have wandered from the practice of the faith and have often gotten involved in immoral lifestyles. They’re in enormous pain and feel like failures in the most important thing of life, their fidelity to the command God gave them on the day they brought their loved ones to be baptized, to be the first and best teachers of their children in the ways of faith. Sometimes parents and grandparents even want to come to confess it, because they think they’re sinfully responsible or that failure. Today’s Gospel, however, is very consoling for all of us who try to share our faith only to meet with a lack of response or outright rejection. It helps us to keep these objective failures in the transmission of the faith in their proper context. The seed — the Word of God — is perfect and we, the sowers in these cases, may have done our job as well as anyone possibly could. The reason why our work may not have borne fruit is because of the type of soil of those to whom we try to pass on the word. They might be too hardened, or too superficial, or too concerned with pleasure, riches or worldly anxieties to have let the word penetrate. There are a lot of things we can control, but we can’t control others’ soil.  Some people will use their ears to hear and some won’t. The only thing we can do is to keep planting the seed with eager longing, entrusting our loved ones to the Lord and asking his help to prepare the soil of their hearts to receive him fruitfully.
• Today at this Mass, not only has God tried to plant us the seed of Jesus’ word — so that we might have good soil and act on today’s beautiful Gospel! — but he also wants to inseminate us with Jesus the Word-made-flesh in the Eucharist to be with us until the end of time. Jesus is the word that has come forth from the mouth of the Father, who did not return to Him empty but accomplished the purpose for which he was sent. He is the grain of wheat who fell to the earth and died, but rose again to rebirth so that we might share his divine life (cf. Jn 12:24). As we prepare to receive that Word bodily in Holy Communion, we ask him to till the soil of our souls so that his life might sink so deeply in ours that we, like St. Charbel, might bear abundant fruit, fruit that will last into eternal life, fruit that will be the seeds of the word of God in the lives of those we love and meet.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel MT 13:18-23

Jesus said to his disciples:
“Hear the parable of the sower.
The seed sown on the path is the one who hears the word of the Kingdom
without understanding it,
and the Evil One comes and steals away
what was sown in his heart.
The seed sown on rocky ground
is the one who hears the word and receives it at once with joy.
But he has no root and lasts only for a time.
When some tribulation or persecution comes because of the word,
he immediately falls away.
The seed sown among thorns is the one who hears the word,
but then worldly anxiety and the lure of riches choke the word
and it bears no fruit.
But the seed sown on rich soil
is the one who hears the word and understands it,
who indeed bears fruit and yields a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.”

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