for September 19
Saturday of the Twenty-Fourth Week of Ordinary Time

I was reading a little history about the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt. (I’m something of a history buff.)  In the 1930’s a major political issue that got all the attention was the economic condition of farmers.  The issue was not so much the food supply (there was no real shortage) but the economic and social conditions farmers themselves were facing. This concern was based on the very large segment of the American work force engaged in farming. Producing food in those days was a labor-intensive segment of the economy.

We forget that this has been true through most of human history, certainly in New Testament times. That’s why agrarian imagery is so prominent in the gospels and epistles, especially in the preaching—and parables—of Jesus. The audience was full of farmers. And today’s readings are a case in point.

In the first reading we are continuing our reflections on St Paul’s famous chapter 15 of his first letter to the Corinthians Here Paul is expounding on the mystery of the resurrection, the heart of Christian faith. His emphasis is on the fact that our own resurrection into eternal life is the consequence of our sharing in the life of Christ, who is the first to rise from the dead. The precise question Paul is raising concerns how to understand the transformation that takes place in us from natural life to the supernatural. Here Paul appeals to something very close to the experience of his audience—how crops grow. The process begins with a seemingly lifeless seed that must be buried in the ground. What can strike one as more distant from real life than a small seed that gets buried in the earth? Yet this process that revolves around a lifeless particle in fact ushers in the vibrant life of the full stalk of wheat that nourishes us. Of course, for this imagery really to work we have to look at this as the ancients did. We have to suspend our contemporary scientific understanding and look on this with the eyes of a poet. Every farmer could understand the imagery. For Paul, the full life process begins with all the lowly beginnings of the natural process. But life is irrepressible. Through the grace of God, real life always flows through and leads to a new and much higher dimension. 

Jesus, too, was enamored of farming imagery, especially in his parables. One of the most famous instances of this propensity on Jesus’ part is today’s gospel parable about the sower. There’s a remark from modern scripture commentators that I have always found meaningful. They detect that the parable may well go back to Jesus himself, but the explanation that follows the telling of the parable may more likely be something added by the evangelists themselves or by some anonymous preacher in the early church that predates the gospels. Don’t forget, by the time the gospels were written, there had been forty years or more of preaching by the first ministers in the church. It wouldn’t be surprising if a lot of embellishments were added to the original tradition even before the evangelists came on the scene. So, according to this theory, the parable may be original and the explanation may have been the work of preachers through the decades. Anyway, what I have always found most meaningful is an alternative meaning to attach to the parable, not contradictory or inconsistent, but simpler and less allegorical. Moreover, I think this alternate understanding is especially helpful today in our present circumstances.

Look at all the obstacles that have to be overcome for there to be a harvest. Drought, pestilence, weeds, floods, locusts and everything else. You can just imagine a bunch of farmers listening to Jesus and nodding their heads. All their lives that’s exactly what they’ve been up against. The seed gets scattered, but only a small number of seeds ever produce. And yet, Jesus says, for you the crop comes in. The harvest appears, despite all the forces that want to kill the seeds in the ground and the first shoots that break the soil. That’s the way it is with the Kingdom. Look at the world and you would think that God’s cause has been defeated, that it’s impossible for the Kingdom of God ever to appear. But that’s not true. Look at the field that is overflowing at harvest time. That’s just a hint for us of the way that God acts in the world.

These days I hear a lot of people talking about their present discouragement. The word as we knew it will never come back, they say. And they don’t mean the bad things, but the good things will never come back and are forever lost. But look at the crops that grow in the field, Jesus would say. Sometimes it’s good for us to put on our farmer’s hat and listen to Jesus.
—Walter Modrys SJ

Today’s readings can be found at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops website.