Today’s readings: Isaiah 55, 10-11; Romans 8, 18-23; Matthew 13, 1-23.
Our landscape – social, political, and maybe even religious – is that of post-truth. It means that we live in the midst of organised misinformation that creates and disseminates lies in the service of political agendas. This is an ever-growing industry which unfortunately can take over even in our faith assemblies, where the rich soil mentioned today by Jesus is lacking and hence where God’s word can hardly do its job.
This should sound very shocking for us. But we can become used to it, to the extent that very often even God’s word says nothing to us. This is what today’s Scriptures are precisely addressing. If words in a post-truth society have become empty, God’s word is never empty. As Isaiah says, when uttered, God’s word never returns to Him empty “without carrying out His will”. In a nutshell, this is also what Matthew’s gospel is conveying today when it highlights how we can look without seeing and listen without hearing or understanding.
In Isaiah’s imagination, God’s word is likened to the rain and the snow coming down from the heavens, constantly uttered to sustain our growth, to respond to our groaning, and to strengthen us where we fail and falter. God’s word comes to us as words and deeds, as signs and events, and it can be powerful enough to evoke in us a response. But when domesticated, it loses that power, it doesn’t even touch us in our situations, it has nothing to reveal to us and we remain in darkness.
This is the tragedy not of unbelief, but of a belief that is superficial, mere external religiosity, a faith or even a religion that does not empower us and which almost has nothing to say on the present way we live. Jesus, the word made flesh, is for us God’s way of speaking in its fullness. God’s word is actually an event, a happening, it becomes a human being like us.
This manner of speaking on the part of God, the way He spoke in Jesus and the way He continues to speak in the concreteness of our everyday life, is part and parcel of that process St Paul refers to in Romans when he speaks of creation “eagerly waiting for God”, or creation “still retaining the hope of being freed”. But very often we fail to grasp this simple biblical and divine truth, that God’s transcendence is to be found in His immanence.
God became man. He spoke our language, He took on Himself our nature, with its “groaning in one great act of giving birth”. This is what our faith is about: it empowers our human nature so that we can give birth to something beautiful, to something that goes by far beyond our limitations. This is what we call the seed God Himself put in us, the potentiality to transcend who we are and to become who we were called to be.
In today’s gospel parable, Jesus identifies the different phases of our personal journeys. We can stop on the edge of the path, we can settle down on patches of rock where there is no soil, we can even be content to live in the midst of life’s thorns, with a feeling of helplessness. These can be choices we ourselves make. They all have consequences, not only for our faith-growth, but most importantly for our human growth.
In contrast with the fourth and last phase Jesus mentions, that of the rich soil which can yield a rich harvest, all the three other phases are symptomatic of a superficiality that keeps us from aspiring for more, making us interrupt our journey and settle down in patches where we are literally off God’s radar.