You Have: The Soil of Your Heart Is Rich
Fifteenth Sunday of the Year
Our Gospel reading last week came from the 11th chapter of Matthew, and found Jesus offering those famous words of comfort to his followers: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest . . . For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.” Today’s Gospel reading comes just two chapters later and gives us what is seemingly a much more pessimistic message. Christ tells the crowds that only a ¼ of them will receive the word of God and flourish; for the rest of those in the crowds, the vast majority of those who follow Christ, the soil of their hearts and minds is too rocky, or too shallow, or too choked with thorns for the word of God to take root.
And then, after Christ concludes the Parable of the Sower, the situation becomes even more grim: Christ tells the disciples that he speaks to the crowds in parables because those who belong to the crowds possess hearts that are closed off almost completely to the word of God; they do not see, they do not hear, “gross is the heart of this people,” says Christ. Those who belong to the crowds just can’t understand what Christ has to say. So, while the Gospel last week finds Christ issuing a seemingly universal call for all to come to him with their hardships and their suffering, the Gospel this week finds Christ using a parable to connect to the lives of those whose hearts are too hardened, and minds are too closed off to receive the word of God.
I think that one of the real temptations with the parables that we read in the Gospels is to want to immediately find within them a moral or spiritual teaching that is relevant to our own lives. So, for example, many commentaries and homilies given on the Parable of the Sower focus on this idea that Christ is telling us to examine our own hearts and minds to determine exactly how open we are to the word of God in our lives. We read the Parable of the Sower as though Christ is speaking directly to us, telling us that we will not flourish and bear fruit for the kingdom of God unless we set aside our worldly concerns and prepare a place for Christ in our lives. And of course, the parables absolutely do possess such a moral and spiritual meaning for our lives. Christ is most definitely speaking to each one of us gathered in this church today when he tells the Parable of the Sower. The word of God is precisely that alive and dynamic, and Christ calls each of us to examine our hearts and minds and our openness to the word of God in our lives.
But these parables in the Gospels possess more than moral and spiritual teachings meant to instruct future generations of Christians about holiness and virtue. The Parable of the Sower that we hear today—in addition to possessing a moral or spiritual teaching that challenges us to live better—the Parable of the Sower is also a concrete historical event in the life of Christ. And at this moment in time, after teaching the crowds through parables on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, when the disciples approach him with this question of why he always teaches in parables, Christ does something remarkable. Listen again to his response to the disciples: “knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven has been granted to you, but to them it has not been granted.”
Christ makes a critical distinction between the disciples and the crowds: the disciples do in fact belong to a privileged group, a group to whom God has granted the grace necessary to understand something of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, mysteries that those in the crowd are not capable of understanding. I think that another way of saying this is that at this moment in time Christ makes a statement that foreshadows a reality that will become crystal clear to us just a few chapters later in the Gospel of Matthew: the disciples belong to what will become the Church, the disciples belong to the body of Christ.
I think that this exchange between Christ and the disciples is remarkable for two reasons. First, because this exchange points toward that famous moment at Caesarea Philippi when Christ tells the disciples that upon the rock of Peter he will establish his Church. With the Parable of the Sower, we see Christ gradually revealing to the disciples a reality that they will not fully understand until the Holy Spirit is given to them on the Feast of Pentecost. To the Church has been given knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven. And what begins at this moment in time with the Parable of the Sower and just a few disciples will continue on for the next two-thousand years right up until today, in the year 2023 — the Church making known the mysteries of the kingdom of God to each successive generation, using the grace given to her to make Christ known to the world.
But the second reason that I think that this exchange between Christ and the disciples is so remarkable is because it gives a new context to the Parable of the Sower. You and I belong to the Church. As far as the factions go in today’s Gospel, we stand with the disciples, and not with the crowds. We belong to the body of Christ, and through the grace of our baptism and the life of the sacraments, knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven has indeed been given to us. And membership in the body of Christ comes with quite a bit of privilege. Christ makes perfectly clear to us how the Parable of the Sower applies to our lives: “To anyone who has, more will be given, and he will grow rich.”
The Parable of the Sower teaches us that as members of Christ’s Church, we should not need to spend so much time discerning the state of our hearts and minds. You might think that the soil of your heart is shallow, or choked with thorns, or too rocky for the word of God to flourish in your life. And you might, in your own way, fear tribulation or persecution or suffer from worldly anxiety or experience desires for worldly riches that pull you away from the life of the Gospel. There is no doubt that we all have our struggles with living our faith; sometimes we fail; maybe most of the time we know we can be doing better.
But there is a point to the Parable of the Sower that we risk missing if we get too caught up in self-assessment and personal discernment: the soil of our hearts and minds is rich because our lives have already been transformed by Christ. If more will be given to those who have, make no mistake: you have, you possess riches beyond measure because you belong to the Church. You can spend as much time as you want trying to determine what kind of soil you are, reflecting on your life and asking yourself if your heart is too rocky or shallow or choked with thorns. But the deeper reality of your life is that you have been baptized and incorporated into Christ’s body and you do not belong to the crowds with their gross hearts that do not see or hear because you belong to the Church and to you has been given knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven. You stand with Christ, no matter what you think about how well you are living the Christian life. You stand with the disciples, no matter what you think you think about the word of God taking root in your heart. You have been baptized and you belong to the Church and the soil of your heart is rich. The question that matters most to us is not ‘What is the condition of the soil of your heart?’ That might be a good question to ask sometimes, but there is a deeper reality that matters more, a deeper question that Christ asks each of us: how much fruit are you bearing for the kingdom of heaven?
I don’t know much about plants, but I know that you can give a plant so much attention that it never really flourishes. Maybe you give the plant too much water and it drowns or introduce too many additives to the soil and it whithers or spend so much time pruning and trimming that there is barely a plant there at all by the time you finish. What am I trying to say? Sometimes in life we need to get out of our own way and let ourselves flourish for the sake of the kingdom. We could spend a lifetime drowning ourselves in self-assessment or introducing so many spiritual additives to our lives that we never get the chance to flourish or pruning the branches of our souls to the point that we cut ourselves down to a remnant of the person we are called to be in Christ.
We need to let ourselves flourish for the sake of the kingdom. That means that the way forward for us is a life of labor and mission—we need to get outside of ourselves and get to work. The soil of our hearts is rich, and in the life of the Church and her sacraments Christ has given us everything we could ever need to receive the word of God in our lives and to bear much fruit for the kingdom. Those who belonged to the crowds might have been able to say that the soil of their hearts and minds was too rocky, or too shallow, or too choked with thorns. But those are excuses we don’t have; as members of the Church, our lives must bear fruit for God’s kingdom. We stand with Christ and the soil of our hearts is rich: blessed are your eyes, because they see, and your ears, because they hear.
Homily preached on July 16th, 2023 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary