[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.
