Good Soil in Response to God’s Implanting, 16th Wednesday (I), July 21, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Lorenzo Brindisi, Doctor of the Church
July 21, 2021
Ex 16:1-5.9-15, Ps 78, Mt 13:1-9

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In today’s Gospel, Jesus gives us the first of eight parables in the 13th Chapter of St. Matthew. Jesus is inspiring us, first, 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 and when the temperature would quickly 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 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 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.
  • The first is that 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.
  • The second quality of good soil: eager longing to bear fruit and let God’s purpose be accomplished. The real test of good soil is how we seek to let the seed grow in us and give birth to massive amounts of deeds of genuine love for God and each other over years. When we receive God’s word on good soil, we do bear abundant fruit. When we hear his word on forgiveness, for example, we begin to receive and share that mercy. When we hear his word on being peacemakers, we seek to go out with the Prince of Peace and spread that tranquility of order with God and others. When we hear his word on seeking first the kingdom, we begin to seek him in our study, our work, our relationships, our community life. When we hear his word to chop off our body parts if they lead us to sin, we focus with brutal determination on eliminating from ourselves not just sins but near occasions of sin. When we hear his word to love others as he loves us, we begin immediately to look around us and ask for the grace to love each other with the love with which Christ loved us.
  • The third quality of good soil: it’s eradicated the hardness, the stones and the thorns. In order to be good soil, we need more than to listen attentively and eagerly to God’s word so that we allow it to accomplish its purpose in us. We also need to be aware of the types of things that can make infertile the good soil we receive on the day of our baptism.
• In today’s first reading, we see the stubborn, complaining soil of the Israelites in the desert. Even after the ten miracles by which God showed his closeness to the Israelites and his power to Pharaoh and the Egyptians, after especially the miracle of the Red Sea, they should have had good soil, but they still didn’t trust in God and they grumbled. We see this in the Psalm, which is a commentary on Exodus. “They tempted God in their hearts by demanding the food they craved. Yes, they spoke against God, saying, ‘Can God spread a table in the desert?'” They were tempting God out of distrust. Instead of expressing gratitude, of recognizing that the same Lord who had worked those great miracles was still with them, they complained. In his mercy, God responded, by giving them manna in the morning and quails at night, and he would give them also water from the rock for 40 years in the desert. What God did for them with manna he does for us all the more with the “true manna,” Jesus Himself in the Holy Eucharist. From the parable of the Sower and the Seed, we can ask ourselves about our receptivity to Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. Do we receive him with good soil and bear abundant fruit? Do we take that miracle as a confirmation of how God will give us every good thing? Does it lead us to overflowing gratitude, 30, 6o or 100-fold?
• Today we celebrate a saint who received God’s action in general, and the True Manna in particular, on good soil and bore abundant fruit. St. Lawrence of Brindisi was gifted with extraordinary intelligence and an incredible memory such that he learned almost all of the modern European languages as well as the ancient ones used in the Bible, but he didn’t allow his intelligence to go proudly to his head, but humbly sought out God’s wisdom not as a thing to be known but a gift to be lived and nourished through prayer and shared with others. We see his good and fruitful soil very young. As a six year old boy, he used to give powerful homilies at Christmas time to his family members and other parishioners on the meaning of Christ’s incarnation! Eventually after he had become a Capuchin Franciscan, he became a famous preacher of conversion, sowing the seed of the Word of God first to Catholics in traditional missions and sermons, then to Protestants in Germany who had left during the Reformation and finally, at Pope Paul V’s request, to the Jews in the Jewish Ghetto in Rome. In the breviary lesson we prayed this morning in the Office of Readings, St. Lawrence focused on how we’re supposed to respond to the word of God with faith. “Without faith,” he said, “it is impossible to please God. And faith is not conceived unless the word of God is preached.” He focused on how the angels, Moses, Jesus, and the apostles all preached the word of the Lord and, echoing St. James’ words, he urged all of us, “Welcome the word that has taken root in you, with its power to save you” (James 1:21), words that St. James says immediately before he tells us to be “doers of the word and not hearers only.” To welcome the word of God as words to be done and to do it — to be good and fruitful soil — was what made him a great doctor of the Church and a saint. At the beginning of Mass today, we prayed to God the Father to grant us “that in the same spirit [of St. Lawrence], we may know what must be done and, through his intercession, bring it to completion.” God tells us in the word what we must do and gives us grace, like he did St. Lawrence, to do it.
• As we celebrate Mass today, we ask through his intercession that we might have soil like him, and bear great fruit from the word of God that Jesus has just proclaimed and the Word-made-flesh that he himself will soon implant within our bodies and souls.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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