Seeds

[Homily preparation two times a week has been where I try to be creative these days. Working on the Greek-Latin psalter on “friarzimm.com” is a non-creative job that is taking a lot of my time. The software, Wix, has not allowed me to move my Word files onto the site without a lot of manual reformatting. But here’s a recent homily, for Friday of the Sixteenth Week of the liturgical year, with the gospel parable about seeds falling in different places.]

 

Today’s gospel interprets the story of the seeds in a different way from the one I used last Wednesday. On Wednesday I said the parable is about how even a little effort on our part can result in a great harvest. Today’s gospel says the parable is about why sometimes the gospel does not take root when we try to share it.

I am going to do a statistical analysis of the parable. I want to estimate the percentage of people in the city of Quincy who fit each of the four categories in the parable. 

There are four categories: seed sown on the road, seed sown on rocky ground, seed sown among thorns, and seed sown on good ground. I will use the 40,000 people in the city of Quincy as an example of how we could think about the parable.

First of all, the parable assumes that the seed has been sown somewhere. How many of the people in Quincy have never heard the gospel? Of the 40,000, how many would you estimate have not even been exposed to the gospel in any formal way?

Most of us have heard snatches of the gospel just because references to scripture are so much a part of our cultural heritage. But some people have been influenced deeply by the gospel without being a church member.

An example: Abraham Lincoln. It seems that he almost never attended a church. But he makes reference to passages from scripture in a way that makes people think he must have had some kind of systematic exposure to it. For example, one of his most famous speeches uses the image a “house divided against itself,” which is an obvious reference to the gospel. How many people in Quincy would not even have that much acquaintance with scripture or the gospels?

My guess would be 40%, or 16,000. Much of our younger generation is growing up without religious instruction. (You can disagree with that number. I hope you do, because that means you are getting into what I am trying to do.)

So 60% of Quincyans, 24,000, would have the seed scattered among them. How many of them would be the road, where birds come and eat the seed up? My guess would be 50% of the people who have heard of the gospel. 50% of the 24,000 people who have heard of the gospel never get beyond just hearing of it. That’s 12,000 people, leaving another 12,000 for the other categories.

How many are planted on rocky ground? Let’s say 2,000. Another 2,000 would be among thorns. That leaves 8,000 people who are fertile soil where the seed can grow up to produce fruit.

I could go on and estimate how many of the 8,000 would produce 30-fold, how many 60-fold, and how many 100-fold, but I won’t do that, because that was not what Jesus intended when he spoke the parable.

Obviously Jesus didn’t care how many people were involved at any stage of the preaching of the gospel. His point was that there are conditions which make it impossible for the seed to sprout even when it has been sown, and that when it is sown on good ground, some of it produces enough that we can almost ignore the rest. Jesus didn’t care about anything more than that.

Which brings us back to the idea that his basic message was: God’s grace gets sown in all kinds of environments, and with various kinds of response, but in the end some of it produces far beyond what you would expect.

So, of the 40,000 people in Quincy, maybe 8,000 are hearing God’s word, and of those 8,000, some produce more fruit than others. But that is enough for marvelous things to happen.

And marvelous things have happened.

People bemoan how secular our society and culture have become. But our society and culture have been influenced by many of the things Jesus did.

Jesus’s public life was taken up with two things: healing and teaching. Look how much of the city of Quincy is involved in healing. The hospital and medical group are, I think, the largest employers in town. How many young people graduate from college with degrees designed to promote healing?

I am helping with the tenant workshops going on right now. One of the people attending the workshop  told the group that she was a recovering alcohol and drug addict, but her immediate goal was to take part in the St. Jude Hospital for Children run from Quincy to Peoria that took place last weekend.

Jesus taught. How much of our work force and our tax dollars are going to the public schools and John Wood Community College? How much are Catholics spending, in addition to their taxes, to support four elementary schools, one high school, and Quincy University? And more and more our schools, but public and private, are involved in healing, because so many of our young people need more healing than young people used to need.

Even in how we deal with crime, the goal of teaching lies behind our efforts. Our prisons are part of what is called the Department of Corrections, the DOC. Correction implies teaching. Rehabilitation has always been a goal of our correction systems, even when correction gets swallowed up by the politics of vengeance.

The seed has produced much fruit. But the seed needs to be sown over and over again in each generation. I think Jesus intended his parable not only to make us think about the power of God’s grace, but about the need for sowers. Jesus explicitly said that we should ask the master of the harvest to send workers into the harvest because the harvest is great but the laborers are few.

There are not many young men and women entering religious life and the priesthood. But the harvest is still great and the laborers are still few. We should pray that the master of the harvest will send workers into future harvests, maybe in ways that we do not now imagine. Nobody imagined that the harvest could be gathered the way St. Francis of Assisi gathered it until he came along and demonstrated a new way to do it. Since the time of Francis there have been men and women who gathered the harvest in all kinds of new ways. I am sure that history will not stop with those movements. God’s grace has a way of sprouting in unexpected places, the way weeds sprout in sidewalks.