Sexagesima (February 7, 2021)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

“As for that in good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bring forth fruit with patience.”

In the beginning of his spiritual autobiography, Confessions, St. Augustine uses his personal experience to provide one of the greatest insights about the human person when he prays to God: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless till it rests in you.” We have been created for a reason: to love and praise the Lord. When we fail to live out that reason, we live chaotically. We are born with a disease: a wavering, unstable, and restless heart which is caused by the splitting of our loves. Instead of loving God, we love the world. According to medieval theologian Hugh of Saint Victor, the heart goes from a singular, unifying love of God to being hopelessly divided: “once it had begun to lose its integrity through its earthly desires, the human heart, which had hitherto kept its stability in cleaving to divine love and remained one in the love of the One, was as it were divided into as many channels as there were objects that it craved, once it had begun to flow in different directions through earthly longings. And that is how it happens that the soul, not knowing how to love its true good, is never able to maintain its stability” (Noah’s Ark 1.2). Just as one crack in our windshield gives way to multiple cracks until the windshield ultimately disintegrates, so the divisions in our hearts expand until the person becomes a disjointed, unstable mess.

This background aids us, I think, in understanding the Gospel reading for today, the Parable of the Sower. Jesus tells the crowds of a sower who indiscriminately spreads his seeds. Some land on the path where they’re trampled by people who walk on the road and eaten by birds. Some other seeds land among rocks and they initially spring up because they have a shallow network of roots; what enables them to grow quickly is also their downfall: they have no moisture and wither away. Still other seeds land amongst thorns. These also grow initially but end up getting choked out by the thorns. But finally we’re told of the seed that lands on good soil. The soil receives the seed which grows and yields a hundredfold.

Before we interpret and apply the parable to ourselves, it’s important to understand why Jesus is telling this parable at all. Verse 4 gives us a clue: “When a great crowd came together and people from town after town came to him, he said in a parable...” The point is that Jesus is explaining the different reactions to himself; the various types of soil aren’t abstract categories for later Christians; the story explains why different people react differently to his ministry.

This is further reinforced by how Jesus explains the parable to his disciples. The disciples come to Jesus and ask what it means and Jesus tells them “To you it has been given to know the secrets (or mysteries) of the kingdom of God; but for others they are in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.” Now mysteries are things which don’t show themselves easily; they require us to pay close attention to the signs and symbols being used to be taken further up and further into the mystery itself. So, Jesus is telling the disciples that they have been charged with knowing the secrets or mysteries of the kingdom of God, which here refers to God’s plan to redeem the world that unfolds in human history through the Church. At the heart of this mystery is the crucified Christ. The parable, then, is a tool Jesus employs to invite participation into the mystery of salvation but those who reject the truth cannot understand it. I’m reminded here of theologian Herbert McCabe who points out that the existence of God frees us to continually ask questions while "a genuine atheist is one who simply does not see that there is any problem or mystery here, one who is content to ask questions within the world, but cannot see that the world itself raises a question.” And unfortunately, this too often describes not only the crowds following after Jesus in the Gospels but it also depicts an all too often tendency endemic to humanity at large.

Jesus then gives us an explanation of the parable. The seed is the word of God, we’re told. We could say these are sown through the preaching of the Church Catholic and the administration of the Sacraments. The types of soil really form a spectrum with two poles: the path and the good soil and then in the middle are the rocks and thorns. And really, there are two kinds of soil: bad and good. However, the bad he splits into three kinds: the path, the rocks, and the thorns. The bad soils all share one thing in common, however: they all display divided hearts.

The seeds that fall on the path represent those taken away by the devil. These are hard hearts. St. Bede, a Church Father, remarks that these seed are “trodden on by wayfarers and snatched by birds. The path, therefore is the heart, which is trodden on by the frequent traffic of evil thoughts, and cannot take in the seed and let it germinate because it is so dried up” (In Luce Evangelium exposito). This is the worst kind of soil to be; the seed in the rocks and thorns are able to spring up into something, there’s something in the soil that enables there to be at least an initial response. But not on the path.

The seed which falls on the rocks stands for an initial response that’s positive but falls to temptations. For a plant to withstand various forces of nature, it needs to have a robust root system that can bring and absorb nutrients, but that’s lacking in the seed that falls on the rock. The roots can’t go deep and the rocks suck up moisture so the plants wither. Similarly, those who might respond initially to the Gospel need to take care that they have access to those things: a healthy Church that preaches the Gospel and administers the Sacraments. Without that, there will be no moisture, there will be no sustenance.

Then we see the seed which falls amongst thorns. Again, there is positive response thats’ eventually choked out. Here, the thorns represent the cares, riches, and pleasures of this life. They allow their hearts to be divided as they place their pursuit of money or luxury or comfort in competition with their pursuit of God. In St. Luke 6:47-49, Jesus uses another metaphor:

Every one who comes to me and hears my words and does them, I will show you what he is like: 48 he is like a man building a house, who dug deep, and laid the foundation upon rock; and when a flood arose, the stream broke against that house, and could not shake it, because it had been well built. 49 But he who hears and does not do them is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation; against which the stream broke, and immediately it fell, and the ruin of that house was great.”

Those who seek after wealth and materiality build their house on a ground without a foundation; material things are here today and gone tomorrow when the thieves break in and steal and moth and rust destroy.

But there is good soil in which the seed can flourish. This soil represents the positive response to the Gospel that holds fast to the message of salvation offered to us in jesus Christ. To go back to Augustine and Hugh, this is the heart which, having been divided, is reintegrated into a singular whole that cleaves to divine love and, by grace, attains the stability it previously lacked. According to the parable, the unified heart exhibits three features worthy of our emulation. It listens to God’s commands with a good disposition and generous heart. This occurs when we see the obligations placed on us not as chores but as opportunities. This is why, at the end of Mass, we dismiss with the words “Let us go forth to love and serve the Lord.” And that leads to the second feature of a unified heart which is that it strives not to water down the demands placed on us by the Gospel and its Law of Love. When we understand that, at the heart of the Gospel, is what God did for us on the Cross, we don’t see our call to love and serve Him and our neighbor as a chore or an inconvenience. We don’t seek to just do the minimum to “get by” and check our boxes off; instead, we understand that this is how we live out our baptism. And finally, the unified heart doesn’t get disheartened if the fruit is slow to appear. Growth takes time. Instead of being like the rocky or thorny soil which produced quick spurts of growth that ended up being unsustainable, we are called to be patient. Keep attending Mass, keep going to Confession, keep studying the Scriptures. When sin knocks you down, let grace help you up so your journey can continue. We don’t get where we’re going overnight; we get there in God’s time and so we ought to be patient as we wait for his movement in our lives because, as our collect says, “we put not our trust in any thing that we do,” instead trusting, along with St. Paul in Philippians 1:6 that “he who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.”

“Our heart is restless until it rests in you,” St. Augustine said, “My faith, Lord, calls upon you. It is your gift to me. You breathed it into me by the humanity of your Son, by the ministry of your preacher.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.