15th Sunday 2020
Isaiah 55: 10-11; Romans 8:18-23; Matthew 13:1-23
Three very powerful readings today and, perhaps more unusually, three inter-connected readings. To begin with the first, from the prophecies of Isaiah, I can’t resist repeating the story which I have told every year for more than thirty years on the first Tuesday of Lent.
It concerns a walk up Walla Crag, above Derwentwater, with a group of fifth years (Year 11 in new money) from St. Joseph’s HS Workington when I was based at the Diocesan Youth Centre at Castlerigg Manor, Keswick. The year was 1987, and the setting the final stages of a hard winter by present day UK standards. On that particular Tuesday afternoon, a golden sun beamed down from a cloudless blue sky on fields and paths gleaming white under a blanket of snow. It was easy, that afternoon, to picture the grass growing lush and green as the snow gently soaked into it, the frozen ruts on the paths gradually softening and melting.
We returned to the house for Mass, and what should the first reading be but that same passage from the Book of Isaiah: “as the rain and the snow come down from the heavens....”. My homily wrote itself.
That, says the prophet, is a metaphor for the word of God, blanketing us, soaking into us, melting and softening us, and making us fruitful, if only we allow it. There’s the rub: just as the fields and the paths have a different reaction to the influence of the snow, so do we human beings, depending on the different surfaces which we offer to God’s word.
So we are brought to today’s Gospel, and the parable of the Sower, spreading the seed of God’s word on differing types of soil. Some of the ground is too exposed, some is hard and unyielding, some already strewn with suffocating thorns. Not all of it will be fruitful after the manner of the grass blanketed with protective snow: so much will depend on the ground’s receptivity.
Again an incident at the Youth Centre comes to mind, from a different course at a different time. I was leaving the chapel during the final hymn at Mass, which the young people were belting out with fervour and enthusiasm, when an expression from that parable came unbidden into my head: “They have no root in them.” For some, that fervour and enthusiasm might linger for a week or two; for others it would not outlast the coach journey home.
That doesn’t mean that the Castlerigg course would be wasted. I am frequently encouraged by a saying of a former parish priest of mine, the late and great Mgr. Gregory Turner, who was fond of commenting “If you throw enough manure at the fan, eventually some of it sticks,” though he didn’t actually use the word “manure”. Greg was well aware that you would yourself end up caked with dung, but he felt, rightly, that it was a price worth paying.
How do we encourage people to become rooted in faith and in deeper understanding? It will not be achieved, as is sometimes suggested, by turning the clock back. To attempt that would be doomed to failure, and would involve a misunderstanding of where our roots lie. Liturgically, for instance, our most ancient roots lie in active participation of the people in Mass, celebrated in the vernacular, and receiving Holy Communion by making of their hands a throne for the Body of Christ. In any case, our roots provide an anchor, and a basis for growth. They are vital, in the literal sense of that word, but they enable us to flourish and spread, not to turn inward. We have to begin with a deepening of our own prayer life, a closer adherence to God’s word, a more wholehearted surrender of our lives to Him.
The metaphors of sowing, silent growth, and flourishing are turned into literal reality by St. Paul, who looks at creation, and speaks of it striving to attain its full purpose. This is a remarkable passage, which chimes with the efforts of Popes Benedict and Francis to make us more conscious of the role which the environment plays in God’s plan for the world. As we seek to become more deeply rooted in Christ, to become more fruitful soil for the seeds of God’s word, and to enable others to do the same, we need to remember that the whole of creation belongs to Him, and that we, as creation’s stewards, must do our best to enable it to fulfil its God-given purpose.
