THE GOSPEL NARRATES THAT THE SOWER WENT OUT TO SOW, HOWEVER HE DOES NOT TELL US THAT HE RETURNED

An Italian missionary killed in 1985 in Brazil he used to say: «The sower went out to sow, but he does not say that he then returned". And it went on: "The fate of the seed will be no different from the fate of the sower".

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An Italian missionary[1] killed in 1985 in Brazil he used to say: «The sower went out to sow, but he does not say that he then returned". And it went on: "The fate of the seed will be no different from the fate of the sower".

This very concise sentence condenses the heart of the evangelical message of this XV Sunday of Ordinary Time. The Gospel (Mt 13, 1-23) which will be proclaimed in the Liturgy of the Word opens, indeed, with one of the begins best known of all the Gospels: «The sower went out to sow». At this link you can find it the text in the longer version[2].

The passage begins the discourse in parables[3] third of the five great speeches that Matthew puts in the mouth of Jesus and is structured in four parts. A brief introduction (vv. 1-3a), the parable of the sower (vv. 3b-9) and his explanation (vv. 18-23). In the middle (vv. 10-17) there is a short pericope that addresses the methodological question: because Jesus speaks to the crowds in parables?

The parable is the genre that Jesus preferred when he wanted to present, in the form of a story, a hidden truth starting from situations, examples and realities that his listeners could immediately understand. It has thus become a pedagogical model which, transcending time, retains its value even today, when we live in an era of disenchantment.. An era, our, in which the symbolic has a strong impact and this is precisely what Jesus' speaking in parables tends to do: grasp the new and unexpected meaning of reality, presented symbolically. Putting farmers and winemakers on stage, kings and servants, fishermen or shepherds, a housewife or a woman who has lost a coin, all realities familiar to listeners, Jesus spoke in this way about the Kingdom of God, without even mentioning God.

But the immediacy and simplicity of the parable they must not deceive, since it also has a paradoxical value. Everyone knows the paradoxes of the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea[4] – the famous one of Achilles and the tortoise – which had the aim of refuting multiplicity and movement. Jesus instead, with parables, it creates paradoxical realities to invite listeners and readers to grasp a further meaning, other, compared to what is normally seen, believes and lives. The unexpected inhabits daily life with Jesus.

In fact, no one throws precious seed everywhere if not in the prepared furrows, no one, after having sown wheat, no longer cares about the soil and only waits for the harvest. Who would leave an entire flock to go and find just one lost sheep? How does a very small grain become very large? Who gives the same pay to everyone without looking at the hours of work per day? Only God and it can be seen in the actions of Jesus as he announces his Kingdom. Ultimately, parables have this as their purpose: surprise and displace to help reshape reality, looking at it otherwise, according to a new logic, the paradoxical one of the Gospel, that Jesus embodies. He is in fact the living parable of God o, as Maximus the Confessor said: «He is a symbol of himself»[5].

In this Sunday's parable the seed is a symbol, according to the explanation that Jesus gives, of the Word of God, theological reality that must be listened to and understood. The paradoxical story is that it ends up on various terrains generating a whole series of reactions. The divine Word, indeed, as the prophet Isaiah says in today's first reading «it will not return to me without effect" in the same way as rain or snow that comes from the sky. Now God “makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and makes it rain on the just and the unjust" Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount (cf.. Mt 5, 45). The Word of God, so, it is not a mysterious reality aimed at initiates, but it compromises itself with human situations, also accepting failure, in the parable, it's big, since on four plots three will not produce fruit. In the explanation that Jesus gives, taking up the serious words of the book of Isaiah[6], people who will not listen to the Word will only become rigid in their situation, that is, they will not be able to change their reality or open up to the newness of the Kingdom. They are the ones who have a lack of interiority, the superficial ones who let the seed of the Word be taken away by the first thing that arrives, as if it were a fluttering sparrow. They are those who lack perseverance because for them life is like a stone that perhaps defends them from external assaults, but neither does it allow good and beautiful things to take root. The Gospel calls the men of the moment (temporary, proskairos v. 21) that catch fire at the moment. They certainly listen to the Word, but if it has to last everything becomes tiring. Having no roots, faced with the first difficulty they abandon. Then there are those who, despite having listened, then prefer the sirens of life behind riches and worldliness and therefore worries and anxieties envelop them like brambles and thorns that do not let the light filter through which would allow the Word to emerge and allow them to look and live life differently.

Finally there are those who, to use the image of the parable, they are the minority of the good soil that bears fruit according to its possibilities. They are those who not only know how to listen, but they also know how to understand the Word. That is, they know how to put it together (companions, synieis v. 23) composing them Word and life constantly. They have a profound understanding of the Word, spiritual and vital. But it is not easy, because the ground could become hard and refractory for them too, stony or filled with infesting thorns and brambles. Here then is the need for constant vigilance and spiritual work because as simple "hearers of the Word"[7] it becomes a reality that grows with them. As in the very happy expression of Gregory the Great: «The text grows with the reader»[8] (The text grows with the one who reads it).

At this point we can ask ourselves two questions, who gives the strength so that the Word grows and where do I find this strength? The first question can be answered by remembering another parable of the seed that we find this time in the fourth Gospel: «If the grain of wheat, fell to the ground, it doesn't die, it remains only; but if it dies, it produces much fruit ». (GV 12, 24). Jesus is talking about his death on the cross. The editor of the Gospel, indeed, reacting to Jesus' statement: «And me when I am raised from the ground, I will attract everyone to me" he comments: «He said this to indicate the death he was going to die» (GV 12, 32-33).

Jesus therefore compares himself to a seed sent by the Father in the heart of the earth - "For God loved the world so much that he gave his only begotten Son" (GV 3, 16a) — and all this love that Jesus revealed during his existence will condense and bear its maximum fruit precisely at the moment of his death, on the cross. According to John, the first fruit of Jesus' death is the Spirit[9] who like water flows from his dead body towards believers: the mother and the beloved disciple.

This Spirit not only resurrected Jesus from the dead[10] but it is the hermeneutic who reveals the meaning of the Word of truth which is Jesus. Her words, indeed, I am spirit and life (GV 6, 63). It is therefore now the Spirit of Christ who helps believers to be that fertile ground that knows how to welcome the Word and makes it understood so that it bears good fruit..

In this sense, according to the words of the missionary reported at the beginning of this text, Jesus, who became a seed of love until the cross, through his Spirit he does not stop sowing the Word and will never return. This constant action is expressed by the words of the responsorial psalm of the Liturgy which it announces:

«You visit the earth and quench its thirst,
fill it with riches.
The river of God is full of waters;
you prepare wheat for men.
This is how you prepare the land:
you irrigate the furrows, wipe out the clods,
bathe it with rain and bless its buds" (Shall 64).

In the time of difficult gestation that the entire created work suffers, as Paul recalls in today's second reading. E, at last, to answer the second question, It is in the Eucharistic liturgy that the Church experiences this action of Jesus and the Spirit to the highest degree. When He states in this Sunday's Gospel passage: «But blessed are your eyes for they see and your ears for they hear» (v. 16) it is not privileging some while excluding others. It's true, the direct and concrete experience that the disciples had of encountering the humanity of Jesus was unique and unrepeatable, so much so that John stated in his first letter: «What we heard, what we saw with our own eyes, what we contemplated and what our hands touched of the Word of life" (1GV 1,1).

But this humanity, now glorified of the Word we can still "touch" it today when during the sacramental action, thanks to the same Spirit[11] which acts on the word and on the Eucharistic offerings, let us listen to that Word again and nourish ourselves with Christ. This grace descends abundantly, today, here and now, on the ground which is our vital situation, whatever condition it is in at the moment, in the hope that all this gift, which is the love of the Father in Jesus through the Spirit should not be lost, but bear fruit in turn.

Happy Sunday everyone!

from the Hermitage, 15 July 2023

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NOTE

[1] Father Ezekiel Ramin, Comboni missionary in Brazil, was killed 24 July 1985 while he defended small farmers and Indians in Mato Grosso. Saint John Paul II defined him as "a witness to the charity of Christ" during a Angelus.

[2] The liturgy also provides a shorter form.

[3] Mt 13, 1-52.

[4] Zeno of Elea (489 a.C. – 431 a.C.) was a pre-Socratic Ancient Greek philosopher of Magna Graecia and a member of the Eleatic School founded by Parmenides. Aristotle defines him as the inventor of dialectics.

[5] "The Sir […] he became his own precursor; he has become a type and symbol of himself. Symbolically he makes himself known through himself. That is, he leads all creation, starting from itself as it manifests itself, but to lead her to himself as it is unfathomably hidden" (Cantarella R., Mystagogy and other writings, 1931).

[6] Is 6,9-10.

[7] Rahner K., Hearers of the Word, Tassel, 1967.

[8] Bori P. C., The infinite interpretation, Ancient Christian hermeneutics and its transformations, 1988.

[9] «E, bowed his head, handed over the spirit" (GV 19, 30).

[10] «And if the Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you " (Rom 8, 15).

[11] The eastern bishop Mons. Neofito Edelby, the 5 October 1964, during the work of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council he left an important mark by pronouncing these words: «The Holy Scripture is not just a written norm, rather, almost a consecration of the History of salvation under the guise of the human word, however, it is inseparable from the Eucharistic consecration in which the whole Body of Christ is summarized […] The mission of the Holy Spirit cannot be separated from the mission of the Incarnate Word. This is the first theological principle of any interpretation of Holy Scripture. And you can't forget that, as well as auxiliary sciences of all kinds, the ultimate goal of Christian exegesis is the spiritual understanding of Sacred Scripture in the light of the resurrected Christ".

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San Giovanni all'Orfento. Abruzzo, Mount Maiella, it was a hermitage inhabited by Pietro da Morrone, called in 1294 to the Chair of Peter on which he ascended with the name of Celestine V (29 August – 13 December 1294).

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