" The sower went out to sow." Jesus is from this productive earth on which we live. He watched the peasants sow an uneven field, He saw good and confident men under God's sun, and he saw generous and optimistic sowers. He saw the heart of men in soils more or less productive. "The sower is out of the house." Over and above the kindness of the gesture, let's look at the heart, the generosity, and the kindness of the sower. Who is He? He speaks to the crowd from Peter's boat at a distance... By an array of images, He reveals the amazing wealth of the Kingdom He is establishing.

 

The word is given to the world as a seed. The generous sower has full confidence in the seed spread in the soil : it will be covered up to die, and will germinate, grow, and bear its intended fruit. And like the farmer trusts his field and waits for heavenly rain, Jesus saw men's trust in God and God's trust in men.

"The sower went out." He crossed the space in between heaven and earth; the Word comes to shine like a bright light and fertilise man's heart to bring his life to fruition. This Word is divine, coming from God to be returned to Him from man, and is transmitted to the world's remote locations to bring fruition.

The humble and fraternal seed of God's Word is brought to each throughout the generations as the good news for man and humanity; it is respectful of all liberty, and carries fertility and life. It has been carried throughout the centuries by the Church's voice and the witnessing of the Saints.

No soil rejects or discourages this seed, earlier carried by the prophets, as being part of the past which was the present of our history in development. It will accomplish its mission: it has within itself the effervescent strength to transform the world. God is confident in his works, in his beautiful and kind creation, confident also in his soil as in each of us, of whom he never despairs, Him who can transform the desert in fertile ground and the heart of stone into a heart of flesh. Because this seed is alive, fertilised by the Spirit through which God unites with man as a seed in the ground.

The parable is that of the patience of God, of his hope, his respect for our delays, our refusals, our dissipations, our entanglements... as also for our conversions. God's success is uneven. It is submitted to our reception. We must first hear, and, having heard, pay attention and understand. And the received seed will bear fruit in the night as well as in the day.

But man's heart is an open field, also receiving other perfidious and destructive seeds. The obstacles are many and within, in the soil itself: wealth, vain glory, shallowness, and passions. They are also from outside : our adversary is at work; persecution is unleashed on account of the Word. To accept the divine seed is a personal decision, and to bring it to fruition and carry its fruit of love, justice, and truth is a daily battle. One must take it upon oneself with violence in order to persevere and one may suffer the violence of the strong and resist it with the strength of the martyrs. The Kingdom is a peaceful kingdom, however based on justice and truth.

This seed must permanently and laboriously grow towards maturity, until being harvested by the divine harvester.

The man with a heart which is weak, ambivalent, spread in many directions or which is choked by too many influences or interference, will only be able to produce a fraction of what the sower was expecting to reap.

 

And this is the call and mission that the Lord presents us with: what soil can I offer unto you, Lord, that you may not be displeased and that I may offer you some wholesome fruits such as Abel the Just did?

Having received altogether from you the soil that I represent and the seed that you give me, I will be able to give you praise for everything and express my gratitude by saying the psalm that Jesus most likely repeated with his family and his people: "You care for the land and water it; you enrich it abundantly" (Ps 65 (64)), with the vivifying Stream of your Word you fill it with riches, you prepare the harvest and we live surrounded by the abundance of the gifts of God which we will not be able to keep for ourselves but shall offer in turn unto others as fruits of our charity, of our joy, and the light of our hope.