Sermon for Sexagesima
“But that on the good ground are they which in an honest and good heart,
having heard the word, keep it and bring forth fruit with patience.”
The parable of the sower and the seed focuses our attention on the quality of the ground upon which the Word of God is sown. It recalls the story of the Fall. The ground is cursed. Adam, who at once signifies our humanity collectively and as an individual, is told “cursed is the ground because of you, in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.” The ground is cursed because Adam and Eve succumbed to the beguiling wisdom of the serpent and thus lost the ground of their standing with God. The ground of creation becomes the place of alienation from God. Our labour, as we saw last week, is based upon this sense of separation yet becomes a part of the work of redemption. We are returned to God but only through our awareness of our connection to the ground, to the dust of creation.
Recall the story from Genesis. In a lovely image, God is said to have “walked in the garden in the cool of the day”, but where were we? We had hidden ourselves from his presence. Why? Our fear is the beginning of an awareness of our self-willed separation from him. It is important to understand something of what this means.
The story of the Fall seeks to explain the origin of sin and evil, of suffering and death. It locates the problem not in the material universe – the problem is not with the dust of nature – but in the disobedience of man. As disobedience, it is an act of the will against what is known as good. Creation as a whole and in its individual parts is emphatically and unambiguously declared to be “good”; in fact, “very good.” The commandment given to man – and only to man – is also by definition good. It is implicitly known as good.
Alone of all creation, the Adam – our humanity – is said to be made in the image of God. Less abstractly but in a complementary image, man is said to be “formed from the dust” and to have had God’s spirit “breathed into him”. He is a spiritual creature with a relation to every other created being and with a special relation to the Creator. The Fall is about the disorder of that relationship. As made in the image of God, man is capable of knowing God. Hence he is given to name the things of creation, which is to say, he is capable of knowing God’s knowing of the things he has made. And he is given a commandment.
