The sower scatters abundandly
Homily for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity, preached by Fr Christopher Woods, Vicar
Readings: Isaiah 55:10–11 · Romans 8:18–23 · Matthew 13:1–9
The sower seems to behave erratically. S/he flings seed onto the footpath, where the birds are already there. The sower scatters it across rock, where nothing can take any root. S/he throws handfuls into the brambles. Any farmer in Galilee - any allotment-holder in Jericho, for that matter - would tell you this is no way to grow plants! Seed is precious. You prepare the ground first. You sow where you know something will grow.
And yet Jesus tells this story without a hint of embarrassment, because the sower's extravagance is the whole point of the parable. The sower "makes no distinction in the land, but simply and indifferently casts his seed" (St John Chrysostom), sowing on thorn and rock and roadside alike, because, it is possible for the rock to change, for the path to be broken up, for the thorns to be cleared. The sower does not sow according to the soil's past. S/he sows according to its future – and sows in hope.
That is a portrait of God. Not the careful investor, weighing risk against return, but the reckless lover who throws the word of life at everyone; because no heart is beyond cultivating. If we are honest, most of us can show similarities to all four different types of ground in a single week! The mind wanders on the path; a resolution springs up on Sunday and withers by Tuesday; the anxieties and the bank balance and the diary grow up like thorns and quietly strangle the whole thing. I suggest that the parable is not a catalogue sorting the saved from the lost. It is a promise that the sower has not given up on any part of us.
And here is the deeper comfort, which Isaiah supplies. "As the rain and the snow come down from heaven and return not thither but water the earth… so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void." Notice what the prophet does not say. Isaiah does not say the word will produce instant results, or visible ones, or results on our timeframe. Rain disappears into the ground. Snow melts and vanishes. For weeks the field looks like nothing at all is happening. But the word is at work in the dark, in the hidden places, and it shall accomplish that which God pleases. Pope Francis wrote in Evangelii Gaudium that the one who evangelises must trust exactly this: we sow, and "the Holy Spirit works as he wills, when he wills and where he wills" — our task is fidelity, not control. Pope Leo has pressed the same note: the Church's confidence rests not in her strategies but in the sheer vitality of the seed.
What a liberation that is - for parents praying for children who no longer come to church; for teachers and godparents and grandmothers; for a parish like ours, sowing through school assemblies and baptisms and quiet conversations at the church door, and rarely seeing the harvest. Isaiah says: the harvest is not your department. The sowing is.
But St Paul will not let us keep this parable safely inside our own hearts. In Romans 8 he flings the field wide open: the whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now. The whole creation- every hedgerow and ocean and human institution is a field in labour, straining toward a glory not yet revealed. The sufferings of this present time are real, and cannot be glossed over, and Paul never minimises them, but they are the pains of something being born, not something dying. Every seed that falls into good soil is a first-fruit, a hint of the harvest to come, when the sons and daughters of God are revealed and creation itself is set free.
John Keble, whose feast we keep on Tuesday, understood this patient, hidden economy better than almost anyone. The Oxford Movement began not with a campaign but with a sermon — seed scattered from a university pulpit in 1833 — and Keble himself spent thirty years afterwards not in Oxford but in the small parish of Hursley, visiting the sick, catechising children, saying his prayers. The Christian Year teaches us to find God's glory in the ordinary round of seasons and Sundays, "the trivial round, the common task." He sowed in obscurity, and the seed is still bearing fruit, not least in parishes and communities of faith where the Mass is offered with beauty and the poor are loved.
So, three things to carry away. First: let the Sower at your own soil. Bring the hardened path, the rocky patch, the thorns, to him honestly in confession, in silence, in the Mass and let him plough. Second: keep sowing, and stop overthinking. The word you speak in kindness, the invitation you extend, the prayer you offer for someone who will never know: none of it returns void. Third: groan in hope. When the world's pain presses on you this week, hear it as Paul heard it and not the end of everything, but as part of the birth pangs of a kingdom of justice and peace yet to come. We pray.
"He that hath ears to hear, let him hear." The seed is falling, even now, in this church, on this soil. May it find in each of us ground broken open, and bear fruit, fruit that will last.
Amen.
