Ep 96 – The Seed That Waits

In this episode of Brother from Another Father, Fr. reflects on the Parable of the Sower and explores why God's Word rarely transforms us overnight. Like a seed, it requires time, patience, and attentive hearts to bear fruit. In an age of endless scrolling, instant entertainment, and shrinking attention spans, this episode invites listeners to rediscover the forgotten art of lingering with Scripture, trusting that the slow work of God always produces a rich harvest.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to episode 96 of Brother from Another Father as we celebrate the 15th Sunday in ordinary time. In Matthew's Gospel, the parable of the Sower serves to explain to the Christian community why people had such different reactions to Jesus. The community was trying to process why it was that they had been set alight by Jesus' words, their imaginations captured, whereas their friends and relatives were seemingly indifferent to Jesus. The answer, according to the parable, lies in the fact that the Word of God takes time to bear fruit in our lives. The attraction of Jesus and of the kingdom of God is an attraction that is not immediately apparent. I want to try and illustrate this with a story. A primary school teacher asked her pupils to write an essay on A Wish You Want from God. At the end of the day, the teacher collected all the essays given by her pupils. As she was marking the essays, one in particular stood out for her, written by one of the girls in her class. It went like this Oh God, make me into a television. I want to live like the TV in my house. In my house, the TV is very valuable. All of my family members sit around it. They are very interested in it. When the TV is talking, my parents listen to it very happily. They don't shout at the TV. So I want to become a TV. The TV is the center of attraction in my house. I want to say receive the same special care that the TV receives from my parents. When my dad and mom come home, they immediately sit in front of the TV, switch it on, and spend hours watching it. If I become a TV, then they will spend their time with me. If only God's word were like a TV, we would all be glued to the Word of God and give God all the attention God deserved. However, we all know that this is not the case. We are far more attracted to our devices and our screens than we are to our Bibles. Why is this? Well I think it's because if God's compelling beauty was something that was instantly available to us, we would not be free to choose it. This is why God has designed the word in such a way that we have to work at it in order for it to bear fruit in us. This is why Jesus speaks in parables, so that those who hear may not understand immediately or instantly, and so that those who see may not perceive immediately or instantly. But that we would all have to put in time and effort to stay with the word in order that it bear fruit in our hearts. For if God's beauty were instantly and immediately available to us, we would instantly choose it. In fact, it would be so compelling that we would not really have a choice. We would kind of be like drug addicts to God's beauty. And God doesn't want this to be the case. God wants us to be free to choose God, because we have realized on our own the beauty and the compelling attractiveness of God and God's word. And so this takes time to appear in our lives. We need to allow the word to sit and germinate in us in order for us to apprehend that compelling beauty. And I think that what this parable is telling us is that in order for God's word to become attractive to us, we need to chew over it, to meditate on it. This becomes apparent when we understand the parable in the context of the farming methods employed in first century Palestine, which were very different from our own. In most modern methods of farming, it was traditional to begin by ploughing the land and then sowing the seed, such that the seed lands in fertile ground that has been churned up already to receive it. In first century Palestine, however, the order was reversed. The farmer would begin by sowing the seed, and then only after having sowed the seed would he come along and plough the land. During the dry months of the year when the fields would lie empty, people on their journeys would take shortcuts by walking through these fields, meaning that at the beginning of the planting season the fields would be crisscrossed by a whole lot of ad hoc paths where the earth had been beaten down by people taking shortcuts. The sower would naturally sow seed onto these paths, knowing that he would come around with his plough and plough them up, churning the seed into the soil. Whether such seeds would actually end up bearing fruit would depend on whether the seed would be able to avoid getting eaten by the birds in the interval between the sowing and the ploughing. This is the challenge in our lives too. Are we able to keep God's word in our minds and on our tongues long enough for it to one day bear fruit in our hearts? This is what the monastic practice of meditation is all about. As they go about their day, monks will chew over the word of God that they read in the morning, ruminating on it, allowing it to sink deeper and deeper into their hearts, until it bears fruit, until it opens up its beauty before them and becomes part of their lives. The parable today is telling us that God's word is not like instant coffee, it takes time to brew. It is a seed which takes time to grow and needs proper care in order for it to do so. It is because the word is not immediately attractive that we often prefer to go to other more instant joys, like television or chatting with friends, or reading a novel. This is where we let the devil steal the seed of the hardened earth of our hearts. In the age of TikTok, where algorithms are designed to keep us entertained and deliver specifically and individually tailored content to our personal devices, boredom has become something that we are able to easily dismiss. If a clip does not immediately grab our attention, we simply swipe to the next clip or change the channel. The algorithms that deliver us the content we consume are slowly teaching us to simply dismiss and ignore any content that does not immediately grab our attention. To put it in terms of the parable, we are being trained to give our attention to that which grows the fastest, which are the thorns and the weeds. This parable is teaching us that it is not necessarily always that which grabs our attentions the fastest that will necessarily always bear fruit in our hearts. Indeed, perhaps it is the case that our generation needs to recapture the ability to be bored again, to sit quietly in a chair without reaching for our devices, and allow God's word to sink into the soil of our hearts. For when God's word does sink into our hearts and find good soil, it bears an incredible harvest, some thirtyfold, some sixtyfold, and some a hundredfold. In ancient Palestine, a sevenfold harvest was considered a good one, a tenfold harvest was considered excellent. Jesus' use of a hyperbole here, by talking about unheard of yields, sixtyfold and a hundredfold, ends the parable on a note of great hope, almost as if these bountiful yields make up for all the wasted seed that didn't bear fruit. Where God's word does bear fruit in our lives, we have the responsibility to let it make up for all the ways that it doesn't bear fruit in the other parts of our lives and in the lives of those around us. God bless and have a good Sunday.