15th Sunday 2023
Isaiah 55:10-11; Romans 8:18-23; Matthew 13:1-23
Doesn’t it make you want to spit? as a friend of mine used to exclaim in our teenage years. Some weeks, it is a struggle to find anything to say about any of the readings; then you have a day like today, when you could devote a whole homily to each of them.
Soil, creation, growth, feature in all of them: fruitfulness and new life are the aim of each. I can never hear that reading from the prophet Deutero-Isaiah without recalling a day on the Lake District hills, with a perfect blue sky, a golden sun, and a blanket of pure white snow enwrapping the fields. It was very easy to envisage the snow sinking slowly into the earth, enriching it, preparing the grass to spring up more lush, more abundant than ever.
It is this sinking in which is crucial. When earth is baked hard from prolonged drought, or when grass has been replaced by concrete, rain bounces off, runs to collect in one place, and creates havoc in the form of floods. So with us, claims the prophet: we must allow God’s word to seep into us, to enrich us, to make us fruitful.
What does that mean in practice? It means that we have to spend time with the scriptures, to ponder them, as Mary our Mother pondered the things of God, the words of her Son and of the aged Simeon. Meditation on scripture has been likened to a cow chewing the cud, turning it over and over, constantly calling it back. To give time to such an activity may appear difficult in our busy lives, but, as we were told in seminary, to say that you haven’t time for something means that you don’t really value it highly. Is it important to you that God’s word should bear fruit in your life? Only you know the answer to that.
Our Lord’s parable of the sower is, in effect, a continuation of the prophecy, and it raises the question “What kind of soil am I?” Am I stony ground at the edge of the path, not truly interested in God’s call to me, not worried if His call is carried away? On the other hand, am I too worried, choked by the thorns of anxiety, which smother the consolation, the encouragement which the word of God can bring, if I give it the openness, the time, the space to do so? Or are those the thorns of ambition, which leave no room for the word?
The thin soil, which gives rise to short-lived enthusiasm, is a regular feature of everyday life. How many fads and fashions seem to dominate our world for a time before vanishing as if they had never been? Do you remember Citizen Band radio, a craze of the seventies, which was everywhere for a while, but is now almost totally forgotten? Line dancing: that was another. Would anyone admit to being a line dancer today? I hope that I won’t offend anybody if I express the hope that tattoos will literally fade away.
Enthusiasm can be a feature of religion too. In my days at the Diocesan Youth Centre at Castlerigg Manor, it was invariably the case that, by the end of a week’s course, young people would be bursting with fervour, but how long would that fervour last? I recall leaving the chapel as a group of 15/16 year olds sang their hearts out at the close of the final Mass of the week, and being struck by the words of today’s Gospel coming unbidden into my mind: “They have no root in them”. How do we enrich the soil, that faith and the love of God may take deeper root? How do we cultivate fruitful soil in ourselves and others?
Meanwhile St. Paul, in a remarkable passage, declares that creation, like ourselves, longs to bear fruit, to attain the purpose which God has in mind for it and for us. Concern for the environment should not be, primarily, an obsession with keeping ourselves safe: rather, it is a sacred purpose. Benedict XVI was known as the first green Pope, a mantle assumed by Pope Francis, and set out by him theologically in his document “Laudato Si”. It seems to me, though I stand open to correction, that well meaning campaigners who cause inconvenience and distress to others by blocking roads, interrupting sporting events, or whatever, are shooting themselves in the foot. They are turning people against an important cause, and are ensuring that nothing will be done in the short term, as no government can afford to give in to blackmail.
They would do far better to read St. Paul and “Laudato Si”, and to recognise the deep sanctity which underlies this issue; to see it as a holy purpose; and to recognise, as the early Church Fathers pointed out, that people are attracted more by honey than by vinegar.
Soil, literal or metaphorical, fills all our readings today. How do we ensure that, in both forms, it bears fruit?
