15TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (YEAR A)

1st Reading             Isaiah 55: 10-11

Psalm                       65: 9abcd, 9e-10, 11-12, 13 (R. Lk. 8:8a)

R:// "The seed that fell into good soil yielded a hundredfold"

2nd Reading          Romans 8: 18-23

Gospel                     Matthew 13: 1-23

THE SOWER BELIEVES IN THE SOIL

Dear Friends, Peace and Goodness! Today is the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A) and the Second Sunday of the month. Our first reading is from Isaiah 55: 10-11 and the Gospel passage is from Matthew 13: 1-23. I suggest we focus on the Gospel passage which is the popular parable of the sower. 

I think, in focusing on the Gospel passage from Matthew 13:1-23, we shall revisit and refresh our minds about the Parable of the Sower, not counting familiarity, because familiarity can blind us. Let us do so looking at how the sower sowed and where he sowed.

The first is how the Sower did his work. How did he sow? We might read the sower as a bad farmer. We read the parable and assume that a sensible, competent man would have examined his field first, identified the path, avoided the rocks, cleared the thorns, and sowed only on the demonstrably good ground. Therefore, when this sower throws seed onto hard paths and rocky patches and thorn-choked margins, we instinctively read him as a reckless man and as a parable of God's wastefulness, or perhaps of our own negligence. That is not really the case. 

In first-century Palestinian agriculture, the standard practice in many regions was to sow before ploughing, not after. The farmer would broadcast the seed broadly across the whole field, including the hardened paths that ran through it, the shallow edges near rocky outcrops, and the marginal borders where thorns and brambles grew. Only after sowing would he plough the seed into the ground, breaking up the compacted path, turning the rocky surface, and uprooting the thorn-growth. Under this method, what looks to modern eyes like incompetent farming is, in fact, the normal, accepted method. The path was supposed to be ploughed over. The thorns were going to be cleared. The rocky ground would be turned. The "path" in the parable was not a permanent public road through the field. Itt was the temporary working path of the farmer himself, already destined to be broken up when the plough came through. The sower was not ignoring the path but he was planning to bury it. The "problem" soils in the parable are not signs of the sower's negligence. They are soils whose transformation has simply not yet arrived. This is one dimension of the Sower's how of sowing. 

The second dimension to the Sower's how of sowing lies in the Greek word "σπείρειν" (speirein). That is the word translated as "sow", thus "A sower went out to SOW". This assumes that it could be any sower and if that assumption is done by the author in not mentioning any specific sower, then it means that whatever is done by the sower is the standard agricultural practice of the time. The word SPEIREIN (SOW) is done by the the Sower (speiron) carrying a bag or pouch of seed over his shoulder or around his waist. He reaches into the bag with his hand. With a wide, sweeping motion of the arm, he scatters the seed over the field. After the seed had been scattered, the field is often ploughed lightly or harrowed so that some of the seed would be covered by the soil. The practice of doing SPEIREIN (Sowing) was scattering and not really about planting one seed at a time. The fall of the seeds is natural and spontaneous. 

There is a third dimension to the how he sowed. The Gospel passage opens by stating emphatically that "A SOWER went out to sow" (Matt. 13:3). The word translated as SOWER is SPEIRON and it is grammatically present active participle. This tense describes an action that has not stopped. The author is not saying "a sower who went out and sowed" (a completed past action), but "one who is sowing," the sowing continuous and unfinished. The Greek present participle describes an action that has not stopped. This is Matthew's way of telling us that the parable is not a story about something that happened once in Galilee. The Sower is still going out. The seed is still in the air. What Jesus is describing to the crowd on the shore is the present reality of what God is doing in the world at that very moment, and at every moment since. The question the parable raises is therefore "what is the sower doing? and what are you doing with the ground you have been given right now?" 

This launches us into the second consideration of where he is sowing? But what is the implication of "how" he sowed? 

The sower does not pre-sort his audience. He does not conduct a spiritual audit of the field before he sows. He does not withhold seed from the difficult ground on the grounds that it is unlikely to produce. He sows on all of it because that is how sowing works, and because the ground's current condition is not his final assessment of its potential. The hardened path can be broken. The rocky ground can be cleared. The thorns can be uprooted. All of this is the sower's intention. None of it is beyond transformation.

This reframes the parable entirely at its opening. I think there is a twist to the parable here. It is a parable about God's refusal to pre-disqualify. The word goes out onto every kind of ground because that is the nature of the word. It is sown before the ploughing of grace has had its chance to prepare the soil.

The second part now comes in. Where did he sow? This consideration remains ever relevant because there are four descriptions. I want to sugges that the author is not describing four different kinds of fields. He is describing the same field which has four experiences. Each one of us, really considering the parable, will conclude that we inhabit all four, sometimes within a single week. The parable leads us to examine which part of the field or landscape dominates our life at present. Let us explore the thorny aspect of the field.

The author states two thorns that disturb the growth of the seed (word). 

The first is worries or anxieties of this world. The word Jesus uses for the thorns' action in that case is "Merimna". It comes from merizō which means to divide, to fragment, to cut into pieces. Anxiety, etymologically in Greek, is what happens to a person who is being pulled in too many directions at once until they come apart. However there is a qualifier. The qualifier is "of the age" or "of this present world-order" (tou aiōnos). Jesus is naming the ambient, manufactured anxiety produced by a social order organised around scarcity and competition. The thorns are grown by the age we live in. This means the thorny-ground condition is not overcome by personal willpower alone. It requires a decision to live inside a different world and to operate by the logic of the kingdom rather than the logic of the age. The thorns must be uprooted deliberately and replaced with different habits of mind and community.

The second thorn is named with the Greek word "Apatē". Its root meaning is deceit, a lie, a false impression, an illusion that presents itself as something it is not. Wealth, Jesus says, does not just compete with the word for our attention. It deceives. It presents itself as the answer to the very hungers that only the word can satisfy, with some hungers being security, significance, sufficiency, and belonging. The person choked by this thorn is a person who has been honestly deceived, one who pursued wealth believing it would give them something it was never capable of giving. The pastoral tenderness here is that Jesus does not condemn the thorny-ground person. He diagnoses them. The thorns are not sins in themselves. They are a misreading, a category error about what will actually fill the soil of a human life.

The solution comes with the good part of the field with the rich soil. The author aptly states that "the one who received the seed in rich soil is the man who hears the word and UNDERSTANDS it" (Matt. 13:23). The Greek word for understanding is "συνιείς" (synieis). It is a compound verb of "syn" (together) and "hiēmi" (to send, to bring). To understand is literally to bring things together, to integrate the word with the whole of one's life, to allow it to make contact with one's fears and habits and relationships until it reshapes them. This action is not an intellectual mastery of the text. It is the slow, patient, repeated work of letting the word into the places where we have kept it out. They are anyone in whom the word has found enough of an opening to bear something.

Pax et Bonum