This blog follows the daily bible reading of the Catholic Church

Reading 1, Jeremiah 3:14-17

14 “Come back, disloyal children, the Lord declares, for I alone am your Master, and I will take you, one from a town, two from a family, and bring you to Zion.

15 I shall give you shepherds after my own heart, who will pasture you wisely and discreetly.

16 Then, when you have increased and grown numerous in the country, the Lord declares, no one will ever again say: The ark of the covenant of the Lord! It will not enter their minds, they will not remember it or miss it, nor will another one be made.

17 When that time comes, Jerusalem will be called: The Throne of the Lord, and all the nations will converge on her, on God’s name, on Jerusalem, and will no longer follow their own stubborn and wicked inclinations.

breaking the wall of division

There is a strong strain in Judaism that the faith is for one people only, for Jews, and that Gentile peoples may have their own relationship with God and their own Law. It has never really been a missionary religion, at least in its own estimation. On the other hand, the prophetic vision of God’s kingdom always includes the Gentiles sharing Israel’s God. The logic seems to be that if God can have mercy on his disobedient child Israel, he will at the same time welcome the Gentiles; as if, in the discovery of God’s mercy, the prophets realised that God was too good to be kept just to one people.

Gospel, Mt 13:18-23

18 ‘So pay attention to the parable of the sower.

19 When anyone hears the word of the kingdom without understanding, the Evil One comes and carries off what was sown in his heart: this is the seed sown on the edge of the path.

20 The seed sown on patches of rock is someone who hears the word and welcomes it at once with joy.

21 But such a person has no root deep down and does not last; should some trial come, or some persecution on account of the word, at once he falls away.

22 The seed sown in thorns is someone who hears the word, but the worry of the world and the lure of riches choke the word and so it produces nothing.

23 And the seed sown in rich soil is someone who hears the word and understands it; this is the one who yields a harvest and produces now a hundredfold, now sixty, now thirty.

some a hundred, some sixty...

See Monday’s blog vis a vis the relationship of this passage, which I call the parable of the soils, to the parable it purports to explain, the parable of the sower.

In the parable of the soils the focus moves from the sower to the soils that receive the seed. The sower too has changed. Rather than God who sows the seeds of the kingdom, we are now dealing with preachers of the kingdom, that is, disciples of Jesus. The psycho-social analysis of different hearers of the word is quite acute, as anyone who sows the word today can witness. There are still people with shallow roots, others with worldly anxieties, many overcome by the lure of wealth-indeed maybe these are not actually different people but aspects of every hearer, including myself. The promise still remains that where the word is understood, that is, when the message of the kingdom opens up the possibility of God’s rule in our lives, then it is amazingly productive.