Word to the Wise
Friday, January 31, 2025 - Friday in the 3rd Week in Ordinary Time
[Heb 10:32-39 and Mark 4:26-34]"This is how it is with the Kingdom of God; it is as if a man were to scatter seed on the land and would sleep and rise night and day and the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how. Of its own accord the land yields fruit, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. And when the grain is ripe, he wields the sickle at once, for the harvest has come." [Mark]
JANUARY 31, ST. JOHN BOSCO SDB
Agricultural imagery figures greatly in Jesus' preaching. Most of his audience in Galilee would have been in subsistence farming, sheep herding or fishing. Although farming technology in first century Palestine was quite rudimentary compared with today's computer and satellite-aided practices, the idea is the same. There is a certain mystery to the process: put a seed in the ground and watch it grow until the plant bears fruit, harvest it and either eat the fruit or save the seed for the next harvest. It is a cyclical mystery because one can ask the question, "Why should a seed sprout at all?" Is this merely an accident of chemical evolution that developed over eons of time? For people of faith, the Kingdom of God is at work in all of this.
But Jesus uses this process as an analogy for evangelization. The missionary plants the seed and watches it sprout. Some care may be required to take out weeds that can choke, but the success of the crop may depend largely on the weather!! Some years, the weather will be right, and some years there will be drought. And, as a kind of amateur gardener that I am, I have learned that too much water [rain?] can be as bad as not enough! But the missionary has to persevere in planting or there is no crop at all! The planting is an act of trust but also one of responsibility. We are all called to be farmers in the Kingdom of God. AMEN