Even we city kids knew something about seeds sprouting, growing and bearing fruit. My grandfather didn’t buy tomato plants, as I did a month ago for our garden. Instead, he started his plants from seed in his glass-covered seed bed. We, his grandchildren, got to see the process that yielded those August beefsteak tomatoes we sliced and put on our sandwiches, or my grandmother used for Sunday tomato sauce (“gravy”). It was amazing how many tomatoes came from the plants his seeds produced. Of course he had enough smarts not to put the fledgling plants on rocks, the path or in shallow soil.
My grandfather would have scoffed at the sower in Jesus’ parable. “Such a waste of seed!” he would say. But grandpa wouldn’t know that in Palestine the custom was to scatter seed first, then till the soil to “plant” the seed. Jesus would have gotten the method of sowing right; but his more experienced farmers would have ridiculed his description of the yield, “hundred or sixty or thirty fold. “Impossible,” they would say, “the best we get is sixteen or eighteen fold.” Of course, they would be right. But Jesus isn’t teaching agronomy to farmers, he is teaching us about the surprising yield the Word of God produces.
There is a certain abandon in the parable–seed cast willy-nilly, here and there. But the yields suggest there’s another force at work when we humans listen attentively to God’s Word–as we are doing at today’s liturgy. It seems such an ordinary event, a word proclaimed and people listening–as ordinary as seed cast out into the air to land on potential, receptive soil. But Baptism, with its gift of the Holy Spirit, opened our ears and prepared the soil to hear God’s Word. Today we listen with the hope that this Spirit will produce a hundredfold fruit in our lives; that the fruit might take the shape of what we have traditionally named the gifts of the Holy Spirit — wisdom, understanding, counsel, courage, knowledge, fear of the Lord and piety.
Then, as hearers of the Word and recipients of the gifts of the Spirit, we have to ask ourselves: how am I now the seed that God is planting in the world? Where am I called to speak the Word of God in my daily life? These questions are not limited just to us preachers or other “official ministers.” All Christians are the fertile soil into which the seed has been planted and each of us, in turn, are now sowers.
It’s about planting. How do we plant a word in the world and how fruitful will it become? Words like: “I forgive you.” “I love you.” “I’ll be there when you need me.” “Welcome.” These words have their origin in Jesus, the complete Word of God to us. He teaches us to speak them by his actions and his words. He spoke a word of welcome to outsiders; a word of healing to the sick; a word of forgiveness to sinners; a word of acceptance to the least; a word of hope to the despairing, etc.
We might imitate the parable and try a little sowing. We will keep eyes and ears open for a chance, in some overt or subtle way, to speak a word to the curious, weary, despairing, doubting and searching. Who knows what the results of such seed-sowing might be? But the results are not under our control, are they? We are those who sow, wait and look for surprising results.
Jesus is the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy; he is the Word that comes forth from God’s mouth and does not return to God empty. As Isaiah promised, Jesus achieved the ends for which God sent him. The words he spoke are planted in us gathered today for praise and petition. In this assembly we hear words of hope, forgiveness, love, acceptance and division.
With these words now planted in us we are ready to speak similar words in our world. When they are received they will continue to bear fruit; where they fall on unaccepting soil, they will wither. But resistance to our words will not prevent us from trying again, keeping in mind Jesus’ optimistic expectation of the outcome — “a hundred or sixty or thirty fold.” We have welcomed God’s Word into our lives and have been shaped by it. What Jesus began in his life we, formed by the Word and enlivened by the Spirit, hope to put flesh on in our lives.
I don’t know a preacher who hasn’t turned to today’s Isaiah reading more than once in their lives. I can’t number the times it has been used by us women and men Dominicans at our preaching conferences and prayer services. And, I am sure, we are not the only ones to take comfort and heart in Isaiah’s poetic vision of the fruitfulness of God’s Word. Catechists, facilitators of scripture groups, those praying scriptures at the side of the sick and dying, etc. also receive solace from the prophet’s assurance.
Parents and grandparents who speak to their offspring about “going to church” need to trust that their faith-inspired words are supported by more than the force of their own determination. God’s Word does not return void. That Word has been implanted in us and, who can count the many ways the seed of that Word sprouts in the lives of those we have touched with them? We may not see instant results, nor did the farmers to whom Jesus spoke. But faith is the reason we plant and hope sustains us in our wait for the grain to appear–“a hundred or sixty or thirty fold.”