Today’s readings: Ezekiel 17,22-24; 2 Corinthians 5,6-10; Mark 4,26-34.
It is commonplace today to look at reality with cynicism and just let go with a false resignation in the face of different types of determinisms. There is determinism of the market that sets the rules for business, determinism of politics that seems to hijack even what we think, and the determinism of culture, which we very often use as the umbrella concept to cover so many aspects of daily living and in the name of which we condone so much.
All these factors we can very easily consider as hurdles which prevent the Kingdom of God from prevailing, or at least which make things difficult when it comes to belief. Perhaps we need to recover the confidence of which St Paul speaks in Corinthians and which surely calls for serious reflection and revision.
What today we would call ‘evangelisation’ is likened by Jesus in the gospel to a man scattering seed on the ground. We are very often worried by the same questions Jesus poses: how and when can things be put right? How and when can justice prevail? How and when can we recover the strength of proclamation in a world tired of listening?
Even the Church today experiences the feeling of being lost and tired in its mission to reach out and in its struggle to make it as one voice among so many others.
Jesus himself, elsewhere in the gospel in the parable of the sower, made the harvest depend on the good soil and on the strength of proclamation. Now he seems to change version and suggests that once the seed is in the ground, growth takes place of itself.
Even in a secularised Europe, even with a Church that with so many seems to have lost credibility, we are witnessing something which neither psychology nor sociology or the other human sciences can explain.
There is the coming or the return to faith of so many unbaptised and of many others who for so long had lost all contact or connection with the ecclesial community. Secularised, postmodern and post-Christian Europe is not closed to the grace of the gospel even if we judge the ground of culture as not being fertile at all or adequate to receive God’s word.
Against all odds, the Spirit is working and there are people out there who are listening.
A conversion always retains a dimension of mystery because the work of the Spirit and human freedom intersect, without our knowing how, and provoked by who knows what. To those who questioned Edith Stein about her conversion, she simply answered: This is my secret.
The Church’s attitude in accompanying people on their different journeys is not to dissect people and the values they live but to discern and humbly accept the paths of the Spirit in the human heart.
We cannot pretend to know and explain all that goes on in the human heart. That explains why the Church fails whenever it is judgmental with people’s lives.
We have to acknowledge also that the Church, being as Vatican II says a sign and an instrument of God’s salvation, can at times even be bypassed. People can, after all, come to God in spite of the Church rather than thanks to the Church. As Jesus says, the seed can bear fruit quite apart from the efforts of the farmer at cultivation. In this sense, God’s ways of accompanying people remains inscrutable and the growth of the kingdom is neither obvious nor controllable.
In a concluding remark in Mark’s text today, we read that Jesus would not speak to them except in parables.
Many today would never be reached through a preachy Church or through the liturgies we celebrate, but only through the living parables that they live or that are transmitted to them in lived experiences of others.