Sixteenth Week Ordinary Time Reflections Parable of The Sower

All the Mass readings for today can be found here 
Gospel below is the well known Parable of the Sower  Matthew 13: 1-9and we have the follow-on Gospel here on Friday this week on the same topic.....

On that day, Jesus went out of the house and sat down by the sea.
Such large crowds gathered around him
that he got into a boat and sat down,
and the whole crowd stood along the shore.
And he spoke to them at length in parables, saying:

"A sower went out to sow.

And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path,

and birds came and ate it up.




  








Some fell on rocky ground, where it had 
little soil.
It sprang up at once because the soil was not deep,

and when the sun rose it was scorched,
and it withered for lack of roots.

 
Some seed fell among thorns, 


and the thorns grew up and choked it.

But some seed fell on rich soil, and produced fruit,
a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.

Whoever has ears ought to hear."



















All photos of seeds and sower from  Madison Murphy's photostream on Flickr here

 My reflections  :

As a child I remember getting into a complete spin with this as I tried to work out whether I was the soil, the sower, the seed or maybe the weeds or the birds.

Now I am older and wiser (?!!) I realise I  can get somewhere with it from multiple perspectives.

Jesus has already sown the kingdom of God; we are secondary sowers of the word today.

There are many times when we strangle the emergent seeds of faith through apathy or indifference.
 

Here is Ron Rolheiser's  reading of the parable..

"God, the sower, goes out to sow and scatters seed generously, almost wastefully, everywhere – on the road, among the rocks, among the thorns, on bad soil, and on rich soil. 

No farmer would ever do this. Who would waste seed on soil that can never produce a harvest? 

God, it seems, doesn’t ask that question but simply keeps scattering his seed everywhere, over-generously, without calculating whether it is a good investment or not in terms of return. 

In Saturday's gospel here God shows that He will separate the weeds at the end!!

God has an infinite number of seeds to scatter, perpetually, everywhere. 

God is prodigious beyond imagination.

Among other things, this speaks of God’s infinite riches, love, and patience. For us, there is both a huge challenge and a huge consolation in that. 




The challenge, of course, is to respond to the infinite number of invitations that God scatters on our path from minute to minute. 

The consolation is that, no matter how many of God’s invitations we ignore, there will always be an infinite number of others. 
No matter how many we’ve already ignored or turned down, there are new ones awaiting us each minute.  








When we’ve ignored a thousand invitations, there’s still another one waiting. 


God is prodigal, so are the chances God gives us."