15th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Is 55:10-11
Second Reading: Rom 8:18-23
Gospel Reading: Mt 13:1-23
“God is the supreme Spirit, who alone exists of himself, and is infinite in all perfections,” says the Penny Catechism. He is called almighty, “because he can do all things.”
He is called Creator because “he made Heaven and earth, and all things, out of nothing, by his word.”
“He always was, he is, and he always will be”; he is “everywhere”; he “knows and sees all things.”
“Nothing is impossible with God,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. “He is the Lord of the universe, whose order he established, and which remains wholly subject to him and at his disposal. He is Master of history, governing hearts and events in keeping with his will.”
“Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!” St. Paul exclaims. “How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counsellor? Or who has given him anything, that he may be repaid?”
It is impossible for us to realize who God is. He is utterly beyond our comprehension or imagination. However, it is only if we make the attempt that we can appreciate the amazing assertions in this Sunday’s readings.
“You care for the earth, give it water, you fill it with riches,” we say in the psalm. “You provide for the earth; you drench its furrows; you level it, soften it with showers; you bless its growth.”
However, God does more. Like the rain and the snow with the ground, his word accomplishes his purpose: to set his creation “free from its bondage to decay” and give it “the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”
By nature, we are God’s artifacts, his handiwork. Now a craftsman’s handiwork does not have the same nature as the craftsman; it is a different kind of thing, as a potter’s pots are different from the potter.
However, God’s purpose, St. Paul says, is to adopt us as his children and endow us with his nature – as if the potter were to bring his pots to life.
To carry out this purpose, God went so far as to become one of us, walking among us and revealing himself to us. “The Sower went out to sow.”
“Could God go farther in his stooping down, in his drawing near to man?” Pope John Paul II asks in his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope. “In truth, it seems that he has gone as far as possible. He could not go further. In a certain sense God has gone too far!” Because Christ called God his Father, because he revealed him so openly in himself, he could not but elicit the reaction that it was “too much.”
We listen but do not understand, Christ complains; we look but do not perceive; we have shut our eyes and covered our ears and hardened our hearts, lest God “divinize” us, as the Catechism says.
As Catholics, we have listened and looked, but today’s society makes hearing and seeing difficult. Let us consider, this Sunday, how we have responded to God’s word.
Have we heard it without understanding it, without even seeking to understand it, so that we abandon it at the first challenge? Have we accepted it with joy but valued it less than acceptance by the world, so that we fall away when we face trouble or persecution? Have we heard it and accepted it but allowed it to be choked by the “cares of the world” and the “lure of wealth”?
More and more, it looks as though persecution is coming. Let us pray, in the words of this Sunday’s opening prayer, that all of us who follow Christ will reject what is contrary to the Gospel, remembering that “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory” God designed us for.
