Care of the soul

Today’s readings: Isaiah 55, 10-11; Romans 8, 18-23; Matthew 13, 1-23

Anxiety, vanity, absurdity are different shades of our daily life that cannot be bypassed because they actually condition, at times to large extents, our way of living and believing. All this is part and parcel of our very being that yearns for redemption, as Paul writes to the Romans.

This is at the end of the day what is so mysterious or sacramental about our redemption: it already happened in Jesus Christ risen from death, yet in our bodies it is still in becoming.

We have been brought up to think of God as an able God and Isaiah in the first reading today affirms that God’s word does not return to him empty, “without carrying out his will”.

Yet the parable of the sower in Matthew’s gospel seems to highlight another important aspect of God where we are concerned. God waits on us. He is patient. He is even considerate about our situations and even when we are hard-headed.

It is through the successes and failures, through our falling and rising again that we experience God’s love and infinite mercy as ever present in our life.

In our faith experiences are extremely conditioned by the world around us and by whatever questions we carry inside our restless hearts. Not that we are always free of guilt in whatever choices we make and the consequences we face. But today’s parable is in no way concerned with highlighting our culpability.

The seed that falls on the ground and in such different conditionings, symbolises perfectly our personal struggle to let God’s word accomplish in us what it has been sent for.

Probably Jesus could not find a better imagery than that of the seed and the soil to depict how patient he is with our situations and how considerate he is about all that can turn upside down our very good intentions. Listening to and receiving God’s word is difficult, at times even impossible.

This parable in Matthew evokes an inner-Jewish situation the Christian community was going through towards the end of the first century. But it addresses powerfully also the situation of contemporary society and culture in the way they condition our responses to God’s kingdom.

There was a time when what gave shape to Christianity and to our faith was uniformity in worship, doctrine and discipline. But today this uniformity has given in to pluralism, to the extent that we can respond differently to God’s word. We need not like this situation. But we need first to acknowledge it.

Faith and belief are not just a question of the mind. It’s not simply an issue of believing or not believing, without any grey area. Faith and belief probably in the first place belong more to the heart, to what we feel and how we feel. And this is something we very often ignore. The soil in the parable stands for the heart which hardly can be thought of in stable terms.

As human beings we form an integral part of that creation “groaning in one great act of giving birth”. And Paul insists “And not only creation, but all of us who possess the first fruits of the Spirit, we too groan inwardly as we wait for our bodies to be set free”.

Our redemption is always work in progress. Our act of believing, or even the Spirit we once received, never bypass or over-rule the body. Our perfection is in becoming. Gregory of Nyssa, an Eastern spiritual master way back in the 4th century, affirmed that believing harder will not make one stop being an imperfect human being.

This is precisely the thorny problem Jesus is addressing in today’s parable. Fulfilment increasingly eludes us as we work our way forward and as we become conditioned by our own anxieties, absurdities and vanities.

The good news about the gospel is that it offers a strategy for happiness. The bad news is not that we are sinners, but that it is extremely easy to undermine that same strategy just by not caring for the soul in us.