What stands out of the three parts is the middle where Jesus “deliberately” chooses to muddle His message through the use of parables. A possible way to understand this is that He had encountered strong resistance to His message. The evangelist has to reconcile this wonder-worker with the fact that many rejected His teaching? It could be Matthew’s attempt to console the early Christian community that sacred scripture already foretold the rejection and that it was all part of God’s mysterious plan.
Still, as Jesus neatly unpacked the parable in the 3rd part, how can we link it to life as we know it today? Firstly, God is prodigious or extravagant in His sowing. He has never stopped being generous. Secondly, the problem may lie in the predisposition of our soil. It is true that Jesus speaks of the rocky grounds, pathways and the presence of thorns as harsh conditions that prevent the seeds from taking root, from being snatched away by birds or from being choked by thorny distractions. All things being equal, meaning that there being no rocky grounds, pathways or thorns, will the soil always produce the kind of abundance that Jesus has spelt out?
If not, then the question bids us to pay attention to the soil. Our soil could be fertile but not congenial for the seeds God sows. What do I mean by that? Two words perfectly capture the condition of our soil that is conducive to fertile growth. They are weaponise and monetise.
They come from the arenas of politics and economics, the main areas that organise or make life possible. Of these two, to monetise is as old as time itself as evidence by this joke about why Adam and Eve could not be Chinese. If they were, they would have eaten the snake and sold the apple. In these days of Black Lives Matter, such jocular stereotyping would have been weaponised to be a racist slight when it is told by someone who is not Chinese. As you know, apparently only Black people can use the N word.
That we monetise everything is not surprising. When Jesus says, “Man does not live on bread alone”, He is not condemning bread as unnecessary. In fact, to worship God, man needs bread. Without an economic life we will not have any life at all. If Jesus speaks of the thorns choking us as being distracted by the cares of the world, He means that we should not idolise economics to the point of crowding out the spiritual seeds that God wants to plant in our heart.
Apart from the monetisation of life, there is also a process of weaponisation taking place. In this country race and religion have been effectively and systematically weaponised to exclude and intimidate. Can you tell me that the so-called “Social Contract” has never been used to silence people from questioning the inherent injustice of positive discrimination? In fact, we do not even question why when buying a house only certain people automatically qualify for a discount whether they needed it or not.
Nowadays, anything and everything can be weaponised. The human body together with the aircraft were weaponised on 11th Sept. Identity, intelligence and social media have become weapons of choice. Social media played a pivotal role in the election of PH in 2018 as well as its demise in 2020. Elsewhere, the alleged Russian interference in the US election became a weapon to discredit the presidency of Trump. At present, anyone, benevolent or malicious, can viralise their ideas through a mix of “likes”, deceptions and network algorithms.
This comment is not an attack on any standard operating procedure put in place for during pandemic. Instead my comment is directed at the word “normal” which has been weaponised. There is a chasm of difference between “normal” and “abnormal” with the latter carrying with it a moral connotation. If we accept the present condition as normative and not abnormal, we would be canonising certain unquestioned assumptions—children below 12 are not human enough. Worse still, they do not need salvation. Those above 70 should be euthanised because they have outlived their usefulness. It sounds terrible when put this way. Perhaps it should give us pause to reflect on how “abnormal” we have become.
Both the illustrations of monetisation and power weaponisation merely highlight what seems to grow well in the soil of our hearts. Today is Bible Sunday. While money and power are necessary to the flourishing of human life, so too the word of God is important for the salvation of the human soul. Our human heart needs spiritual nourishment so that God’s word can take root in our hearts. For that to happen, we need to cultivate our soil or prepare it to receive God’s word. In an era of fake news and disinformation, all the more that the soil of our heart should be primed for the seed of God’s truth—about who God is, who we are and where we are meant to be.
If God’s seed is truth, then faith is the fertiliser that allows the seeds sown to penetrate deep into the spiritual soil of the heart. In the first sermon of Jesus, He spoke to the crowd about having faith in God who even clothes the lilies of the field and feeds the birds of the air. In these post-pandemic days of uncertainty where political loyalties shift more than drifting sand and instead of surging ahead, the economic recovery falters, we can be so choked by our immediate problems as to forget that God alone is our Saviour. Without Him, nothing is possible. Thus, faith is indispensable if we want to grow spiritually.
This brings us to the Sacraments given by Christ. “The purpose of the Sacraments is to sanctify men, to build up the body of Christ, and finally, to give worship to God. Because they are signs, they also instruct. They not only presuppose faith, but by words and objects they also nourish, strengthen, and express it; that is why they are called ‘Sacraments of Faith.’ They do indeed impart grace, but, in addition, the very act of celebrating them disposes the faithful most effectively to receive this grace in a fruitful manner, to worship God duly, and to practise charity” (Sacred Constitution on the Liturgy, 59).
Both money and power are God’s blessing given for the good of life, but they are always our servants never idols to be worshipped. They are to assist us on this saving pilgrimage never to enslave us. It is appropriate that on Bible Sunday we return to the public worship of God with the first public celebration of the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. Pope Francis asked that one Sunday each year to be celebrated as “Bible Sunday”. According to the Pope, “through Sacred Scripture, kept alive by the faith of the Church, the Lord continues to speak to his Bride, showing her the path she must take to enable the Gospel of salvation to reach all mankind”. With thanksgiving at this Mass, we pray that the seeds that God has sown may take deeper roots in the soil of our hearts so that in turn we can be His sowers because there is a world waiting for His message of truth and salvation.
