Today’s readings: Isaiah 55, 10-11; Romans 8, 18-23; Matthew 13, 1-23
There is always a truth about ourselves that has to come out some time or other. It can be a painful truth, so many choose to avoid it while others are ready to face the pain as long as it helps them grow up.
The prophet Isaiah and Matthew’s gospel today speak of God’s Word in our life and of our personal growth which that Word can stimulate. As St Paul explains in the second reading from Romans, growth is our “inward groaning as we wait for our bodies to be set free”.
God created us and His Word is creative, it communicates to us the inner power we need to achieve and maintain the right perspective on life. The imagery of the seed is very significant because while the seed signifies the potentiality in us, the soil or the condition of the ground signifies the fragility on our path to face up to life.
Jesus contemplates four types of hearers of the Word which represent not necessarily four different types of people but different phases we go through in life that can be empowering as much as suffocating. It is all about hearing with the heart, and when the heart is troubled that hearing becomes distorted and hard to bear.
The heart is ultimately the most secure place for the Word of God in our lives. But the heart can all of a sudden become very insecure. For the seed to bear fruit, it has to take root in us, it needs rich soil, otherwise spiritual life can be very superficial. It also needs time to grow. There is a process that is in itself very natural and which makes of spirituality a very natural process indeed.
The Scriptures read human history in terms of a history of salvation. Faith is not an estrangement from our humanity. It rather makes us connect more in depth with our own being human. True faith redirects us to the roots of our deepest human aspirations.
Yet we live in times of immediacy, of instant gratification, even of a growth that the way we conceive it is very superficial and hence illusory. We are impatient with ourselves and with our children. We do not even let our children take their time to grow up as they should. We expect them to be and treat them like grown-ups when they are not. This is what many a time happens also in our spiritual growth when we become impatient with our own humanity.
Jesus provides the key for us to understand our humanity in depth and gradually to come to terms with ourselves. It is in him and through him that we grow up according to our potentiality and with the respect due to God’s image and likeness in each and every one of us.
Thomas Green writes that knowledge of God goes always hand in hand with a painful self-knowledge. Our growth in faith, our relating with God in truth occurs in the measure we come to terms with our own humanity. In the spiritual life, this necessitates our letting go of misconceptions about God, about Jesus Christ, and about Christian living.
We cannot keep Jesus imprisoned in our historical and social conditionings, or in our cultural and religious frames of mind. What is unfolding in the mystery of Jesus is the very mystery of our humanity. It is a mystery, precisely because it goes beyond our own possibilities and limitations to reach out to infinite possibilities of growth.
As today’s readings reaffirm, there is an inward groaning on the part of each and every one of us towards true freedom. We all yearn to be set free from whatever enslaves us to belong to the truth out there that completes us. It is the need for redemption that we all groan for, it is the emptiness in the heart that calls to be filled up.
In the face of all the anxiety and absurdity that can mark our lives, we cannot afford to simply give in and believe that life is beyond redemption. On the other hand, we cannot even make ourselves believe that life can be free from all anxiety and absurdity. The big truth for the believer is that there is only one story we live and that is the human story which in itself is sacred.