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We enter the 3rd long discourse of Matthew’s Gospel and it represents another teaching moment in Christ’s ministry. Verse 1 Chapter 13 is instructive as we read that Jesus left the house and SAT by the lakeside. Sitting is the posture of teaching. It explains why both the Cathedra and the Bishop are connected. Every Bishop is the fullness of Christ’s priesthood and as such he sits down when he teaches. On May 7, 2005, when Benedict XVI took possession of the Diocese of Rome, he said, “The Bishop of Rome sits upon the cathedra to bear witness to Christ. Thus, the cathedra is the symbol of the potestas docendi, the power to teach that is an essential part of the mandate of binding and loosing which the Lord conferred upon Peter, and after him, on the Twelve. … The Chair is—let us say it again—a symbol of the power of teaching, which is the power of obedience and service so that the Word of God—the truth!—may shine out among us and show us the way of life”.
This week’s teaching is centred on the famous Parable of the Sower. At its heart, this narrative highlights how important it is to allow God’s word to take root in our hearts. In the 1st Reading, we are reminded that God’s word will achieve its purpose. In short, the seeds of the Sower should fall upon fertile ground and to bear a plentiful harvest.
The questions we usually ask is what sort of soil or ground our hearts consist of. Are we the paths, the rocky grounds, the thorny patches or the fertile soil? Interestingly, the Sower, who symbolises God, is prodigious. Since He sows plenty of seeds, the invitation is to look at how receptive we are to God’s word taking roots in our hearts. Can we nurture His gifts and bring about a bountiful harvest?
That would be a usual way of understanding this parable. However, I have always been interested not in the fertility of whatever composition the soil is but to perhaps survey a matter which we seldom pay attention to and it is the seedsthat fall by the wayside.
According to the Gospel, the seeds scattered onto the path will have the birds come and snatch them away. Come to think of it, digital distractions are possibly a good explanation for one being taken away. But what do these snatched away grains actually symbolise? They can serve as tokens of individual Christians who have no connection to the community. How so?
In the past, religion was both social and spiritual. Today we tend to reduce religion to a personal choice and give little thought to its social context. Without a social netting, it is easier to cut corners in one’s personal commitment and fall away from practice. Even solitary monks and nuns who live alone are not so much alone because they are connected to the wider Church through their prayers. In fact, the Church is sustained by their unceasing prayers. As soon as a believer is not supported by a faith community, it is easy to fall away. The imagery of Satan as the prowling lion is most apt to describe the seeds taken away by birds.
Do you know how many of our youths who hail from East Malaysia come over here and without the spiritual support of a believing community and a sense of belonging have abandoned their faith? Or our local West Malaysian youths who after Confirmation go away for studies but when they return for home visits, they attend Mass to hide the fact that they had abandoned their faith. Of course, one can explain their lapse in the practice of the faith as seeds that have fallen onto rocky grounds or thorny patches, either from poor catechesis or beingchocked by distractions etc.
The nature of Christianity is that it is profoundly communal and highly collaborative as we read in the Acts of the Apostles. The Communion of Saintscomposed of the “ecclesia militans”, the “ecclesia triumphans” and the “ecclesia poenitans” are united as one Body even though these three distinct states or conditions are separated by time and space. Through Baptism, we have been gathered into the Body of Christ and this organic metaphor reveals that we are more connected than we admit.
We are happy that the Cathedral is getting more people attending Mass but we seem to worship as strangers. We should not. We should worship as brothers and sisters in Christ. A good way to gauge the level of our being—at—home with each other is simply through how we park our cars properly or how patient we are with someone who is slower. Of course it does not mean that when people are kind, we take it for granted. For example, I take my own sweet time and that the driver of a car being blocked from leaving should be patient and wait for me. No. Rather, all must strive to excel in charity towards one another.
We recently concluded our PPA and out of a body population of close to 2000 souls, the attendance numbered less than 200. I am not criticising parishioners for not coming though I am concerned with the philosophy behind our engagement as a community. We may be operating from a space where the community or the communion is extraneous or exterior to our identity as Christians. Perhaps we can consider the seeds that fell on the wayside as the embodiment of a Christian spirituality which is narrowly self-sufficient. We can be self-sustaining individuals but without a social netting, soon we will cut corners when it comes to our relationship with God and the way we perceive His commandments.
In our self-determined, achievement-centred world, we may hear the Gospel from a view of personal responsibility or capability. Nothing is wrong with that perspective. But recently there was a movie, an “indie” movie from China. Surprisingly, the original language is Teochew and it shines the spotlight on the experience of the “hua qiao’s” or the Chinese diaspora. There was a high degree of cohesiveness of that generation forced to emigrate from China in search of a better future. In the unknown, South-East Asia, their cultural cohesiveness was palpable in how the community held itself together. It explains the different “huay kuan’s” we have in parts of the world where the Chinese diaspora has been. The modern challenge is, in Europe or most of the developed West, they may still retain a lot of the social religion but minus a relationship with God whereas in Asia, we have kept the cultural connexions with some semblances of religious expressions but nothing more. As St Paul writes, we are a Body joined to the Head, who is Christ and therefore both cultural commonality and social netting are crucial to the maintenance of our relationship with the Lord.
The Gospel today certainly invites us to examine our receptivity to God’s word. While it is good to ponder, it can also be a self-absorbed exercise which makes us forget that the Sacrament of Baptism actually incorporates a baptised into the organic Body of Christ and as a result we are connected one to another. Yielding a harvest is amazing but it is never a test of an individual’s abilities or a measure of personal achievements. The seeds that fall by the wayside challenge us to think beyond a silo existence because the danger of being snatched away is real especially when one has no bond or kinship with Christ and with His Body, the Church.
Today we begin reading from chapter 13, almost halfway through the Gospel of Matthew. It is also the 3rd of 5 sermons given by Jesus, and it consists of 7 parables that have as their theme, the Kingdom of Heaven. This morning, the Kingdom is likened to a sower who goes out to sow his seeds. The parable is divided into three parts. The first, Jesus narrates the story of how the sower scatters the seeds generously. The second, Jesus answers the query of the Disciples on why He spoke in parables and thirdly, He explains the parable.
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.
