In the simplicity of his vision, my little great-nephew didn’t grasp the glorious potential of seeds. I, on the other hand, didn’t grasp in my flights of fancy that seeds require some careful tending before they can be called flowers. The challenge before us, Jesus implies in the parable of the sower, is to recognize the potentiality hidden in the present--and to tend it.
In the Gospels, the parables of Jesus are themselves like seeds: mysterious, enveloped in a tough, hard-to-crack shell, difficult to categorize and to understand. Like the truth that they carry within them, the parables are deceptively simple and unremarkable in appearance. At the same time, they are bearers of enormous transformative power. They mean to break through our ordinary ways of seeing until we find ourselves changed.
Unfortunately, rather than hearing the parables in their transforming truth, we, like Matthew in today’s Gospel, tend to allegorize Jesus’ strange tales. We want to tame them so that the elements line up logically and the stories mean just one thing. In the parable of the sower, so often we turn—like Matthew does in verse 18—to focus on the soil, rather than on the more nebulous potentiality of the seed itself. We immediately start to judge our own spiritual soil, or the soil of our neighbors, weighing who might treat the seed well and who might squander its gifts. With a gardener’s precision, we measure the depth of our thoughts, the fecundity of our hearts, the size of the pebbles blocking our wills. We want to reassure ourselves that we will be among those who will welcome the word with a dark, rich loam, the kind found deep beneath an ancient forest floor. And we imagine how the hard-hearted unbelievers next to us will only squander God’s word upon the rocky soil of their inadequate souls.
Yet Jesus begins his parable with a wide-open image. As he was speaking to the crowd by the sea, his first listeners knew that they were surrounded by Galilean farmers in the nearby hills—by farmers who were casting seed upon the ground in a timeless, simple gesture of sowing. Jesus tries to wake his listeners up, to encourage them to look at the farming scenes around them in a new and different light. He shouts, “Listen up! Pay attention! Right now, as you watch your neighbors sow their fall crops, tiny, compact seeds of God’s Kingdom are being sown, as well. At this moment. All over. In all kinds of places. Not just in the places you would expect. Not just in the favorable places, or in the places where you like to look for them, but everywhere.” In his parable, Jesus presents to our imaginations not only the seeds that withered and the seeds that were choked, but he opens our minds to the seeds that are still growing up and increasing, with ever greater and greater yields.
The catch is that, no matter how hard we try, we, like my little great-nephew, have trouble seeing potentiality. When faith tells us one thing and we seem to see another, we can be left squinting and rubbing our eyes. We believe, for example, that the Church is the body of Christ—yet often when we gather in community, we see individuals struggling to work together. We talk about Eternal Life and Resurrection, and yet we watch loved ones suffer and die. We read about signs of the kingdom of God breaking forth, yet every day we pass by signs of injustice and poverty. How much easier it is to walk through the fields and point out the worm-eaten sprouts and shriveled leaves around us than it is to speak confidently of the absurdly-abundant, hundred-fold yield that will come from clusters of grain that haven’t yet sprouted.
Seeing potentiality, and living by it, is a spiritual discipline. Not long ago, I came across the night-time prayer that Eleanor Roosevelt used as she took a key role in the creation of the universal declaration of human rights. This strong woman of action prayed at night, “Make us sure of the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us because we do not try to understand them. Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new.”[1]
It’s interesting to note that Roosevelt’s drive to work for change in the world was accompanied by her nightly practice of praying to be made aware of potentiality. She was sitting, day after day, week after week, in a room full of stinging cold War rhetoric. She was dealing with soaring egos, stubborn governments, and impossibly lofty ideals. It was her nightly prayer that kept her eyes open to the potentiality of one-hundred fold yields. Seeing the world as God sees it, as “a world made ever new,” Roosevelt was able to persevere in her work, to respond to what she saw, and to work for human rights, for God’s Kingdom on earth.
Can we train ourselves to see the potentiality of God’s abundance? Can we look at St. Ambrose like a seed about to break out of its shell? Can we gather each week as if we’re gathering in a world made new in Christ? Can we yield fruit more abundant than seems logically possible? Yes, we can. It will take time, and prayer, and practice. It will take coming together with hearts open to see what lies beneath the surface of things. Living into potentiality doesn’t mean just sitting back and imagining some vague and easy flowering that will come someday, without any effort on our parts. Neither does it mean flinging dirt around like my great-nephew, ignoring the seeds that God has planted in our midst. We can look at our parish and see cracks and weeds. Or we can look at our parish and see God’s light shining through who we are and what we do. We can start listing God’s potential within us, rather than our troubles. We can pray that we, and others, will be able to see us as God sees us, filled with light and infinite possibilities.
As Jesus cries out to us, “Pay attention! The seed is being scattered here!” I pray that we will have all been trained by faithful spiritual practice to stand on untilled soil and to respond, “Let’s join in the harvest!”
[1] In Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001), unnumbered page.
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