It’s hard to imagine a better set of readings for mid-summer in the northern hemisphere than these.  All of them, in one way or another, put images from nature front and center: God’s word going forth like the rain and snow in Isaiah; gratitude for God’s watering, preparing, and enriching of the land in Psalm 65, our psalm response;  Paul’s teaching in Romans that all of the created world will share in God’s glory at redemption as it was cursed by human sin;  and Jesus’ parable of the sower throwing seed on rocky, thorny and good soil.  And as much as I’d like to ruminate on the beauty and bounty of summer, we all know that in scripture study it’s especially important to pay attention to what is an obstacle for us, what we want to skip over so we can get to the good part, what bugs us.

And for me, that’s Matthew 13:12: “To anyone who has more will be given and that one will grow rich;  from anyone who has not, even what that one has will be taken away.”  I’ve never like that verse.  It’s pretty hard to reconcile that with all of scripture’s insistence that the widow and the stranger must not be forgotten, and the preferential option for the poor.  But I have to admit that Jesus probably said it.  It appears in Mark’s presentation of this same parable as it also does in Luke’s.  Pretty much the exact same words also conclude both Matthew and Luke’s parable of the talents.  Jesus uses the words here, not in the parable per se, but in his explanation of why he’s using parables at all.  He is lauding those- here, the disciples - who use their knowledge well (in the parable of the talents, it’s use of resources) – and dismissing those – in this case, the crowd gathered to hear him – who don’t have the knowledge to understand.  It’s always struck me as unfair if not mean-spirited.

The note for this verse in the Catholic Study Bible says that “God gives further understanding to one who accepts the revealed mystery; from the one who does not, God will take it away.”  A little facile, but OK.  The Jerome Biblical Commentary helps me a little more – maybe just because it uses second person pronouns. “If you open yourself in faith and hope to God’s revelation of the plan of salvation, you make rapid progress.  If you close yourself to it, you can lose the offer.”  While that did make me more able to live with the verse, it also made me laugh.  Have I ever had a period when I enjoyed “rapid progress” in the spiritual life?  Not that I can recall.  It’s all been pretty slow and imperceptible; the growth is only recognized in hindsight.
           
So what does this mean for us?  So far I’ve come up with two ideas – maybe you’ll think of more as the week unfolds.  First, this verse and its interpretation seem a pretty persuasive advertisement for lectio, personal and communal prayer, and contemplation.  We do have to work at being good soil, or perhaps fertilize the good soil already present within us.  As any gardener or farmer knows, it doesn’t just happen.  And as all of us know, and Judy Z. reminded me as she tried to get me going on this homily, we all can surely points to the seasons in our own lives when we were crummy soil: when we let temptation crush our good impulses; when we were not rooted or grounded enough to hold on when things got tough; when we have been choked by “worldly anxieties and the lure of riches” – whatever the anxieties and riches are for each of us.  Being open, rather than closed off, from God is something we need to cultivate.  And secondly, we can take solace in, and count on, the extravagant love of God.  Another thing that always strikes me about this parable is that someone who is sowing on the path and on the rocky ground and thorny soil, as well as on good soil, isn’t being very tight-fisted with the seeds.  God is a sower who understands that it takes a lot of seeds to get a few good plants – and that it takes time and patience and tender care, not just once, but over and over and over again.  Which could prompt us as the soil, the humus that we are, to pray the words of Psalm 65 with renewed vigor: “Prepare me, God!  Drench my furrows and break up my clods!  Soften my hardness with your showers and bless the yield so that I will overflow with a rich harvest.”

Thinking about this slow and unseen growth – even in the “good soil” times – brought to mind words that I cherished in college and found all the better when I looked at them a quarter century or so later.  They, too, are a commercial for contemplation and also my sneaky way of getting a little celebration of summer outside into this reflection.  They are from Walden by Henry David Thoreau:

            I love a broad margin to my life.  Sometimes, on a summer morning,
            having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from
            sunrise till noon, rapt in reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and
            sumacs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness.  While the birds sang
            around or flitted noiselessly through the house, until by the sun
            falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveler’s wagon
            on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time.  I grew in
            those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any
            work of my hands would have been.  They were not time subtracted from
            my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.

Amen!  May we – like corn in the night – open ourselves to the nourishing and extravagant power of the God who invites us to grow and be bountiful.

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