by CCW | 12 February 2023 10:00
Not just a parable but the explanation of the parable! We are often as not, at least if we are honest about ourselves, much like the disciples, asking in our hearts, “what might this parable be?” Yet here on this Sexagesima Sunday we are given a parable and its meaning. Jesus is didaskalos, the teacher and the substance of the teaching. “The seed is the word of God”, and he is the logos, the Word and Son of the Father opening out to us a way of thinking about our lives in pilgrimage.
The imagery is down to earth; it is agricultural. It has very much to do with the idea of cultivation in terms of the question ‘what kind of ground are we?’ That is the challenge for us. It demands a kind of self-examination, a metanoia, which means at once repentance and a thinking upon what has been revealed, literally, ‘a thinking after’. Constantly we are being challenged to call to mind, to think after or upon the things of God. What this parable and its interpretation provides belongs to the radical nature of our lives as spiritual and intellectual beings who are embodied and embedded in the particularities of cultures and places. It is a strong message to us about who we are and how we act in the cultures and places of our lives. It is an illusion to think that we are utterly independent and free from the restraints and features of our world and age; but nor are we simply determined or condemned to a social, economic, political and ideologically driven world. Unless we ourselves choose to be. So here is a parable and its interpretation which perhaps can help us to better understand ourselves as the children of God and to our growing up in the truth of God’s Word.
We are the ground upon which God’s Word, like a seed is sown, and sown for a purpose and one which requires something from us; the cultivation of that word within us and in our lives with one another.
The American poet and writer, Mary Oliver, remarks that “I am, myself, three selves at least.” There is, she says, the child that never goes away, that is always with us, and which, perhaps, shows its presence in childish ways of egotism, pettiness and immaturity but is yet always part of us. Then there is “the attentive and social child” who “seeks certainty” in routines and patterns, in the ordinary and regular structures of life, the “ordinariness” which, as she says, “makes the world go round.” That is important and has its place but “whether it gathers as it goes some branch of wisdom or delight, or nothing at all, is a matter with which it is hardly concerned.”
But then there is the child of wonder, the self which is open to wonder, the child who is not “the child of the hours”, she says. “This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time” because “it has a hunger for eternity.” That self belongs most of all to things intellectual, spiritual, and creative. It doesn’t refute or deny the ordinary; “it is simply something else.” It doesn’t so much try “to help the world go round, but forward”.
I have been thinking about her words in relation to this Gospel passage. It seems to me that we are all these different kinds of grounds, different selves, as it were, at different times. We are more often than not the ground of “the way-side,” those who hear but do not attend to what we hear, and so what we hear quickly disappears from our minds and hearts. And are we not, at times, “the rocky ground” which hears and receives but only for a time, and then, when things get tough, as “in time of temptation,” fall away? And even more often than not in our age of distraction, are we not precisely “the thorny ground”, having heard but then “choked with cares” and fears, if not the “riches, and pleasures of this life,” and as such “bring no fruit to perfection”? It is really a question about our relation to the Word which is heard.
“The seed is the word of God,” Jesus says, the Word which is sown and planted in our souls. Something is required of us, namely, our attention to that Word and to the purpose of its being sown in us. It is meant to grow and increase in us. To what end? To the glory of God and the good of his Church and people, would be one answer. Certainly it is not for self-interest and self-promotion, not for getting ahead in the world by dominating others because that is not what the parable and its interpretation means by the “good ground” as “an honest and good heart” which “bring[s] forth fruit with patience.”
There is the paradox of language. We often say that someone is ‘down to earth’ meaning by that something positive and good, a person who is honest and has a good heart. Here it takes on a deeper meaning more akin to Mary Oliver’s third self, a good and honest heart that hungers for something more than the comforts of certainty in the ordinariness of each day. The self which hungers for eternity, come what may in the ups and downs of the world. “Attention,” she says, “is the beginning of devotion.”
Paul in the Epistle is abundantly clear about the world in which we are called to bear witness to Christ. It is a world of persecution and hostility, of cares and fears, of worries and responsibilities, and a world in which we can only be aware of our own infirmities and weaknesses and so not deceive ourselves about ourselves. The Collect reminds us that God “sees that we put not our trust in any thing that we do”, meaning trusting in ourselves alone. It is not about trusting in the ordinariness of the world but about being open to eternity, knowing that it is by God’s grace and power alone that we “may be defended against all adversity.”
It is not that there aren’t adversities; it is about how we face them. The challenge as Timothy Findley puts it is “to clarify who you are by your response to when you lived”. That is, too, really the question about the ground of ourselves as spiritual and intellectual creatures, made in the image of God and called to love and to grow in wisdom and maturity; in short, to “bring forth fruit with patience” through our hunger for eternity. Such is the love that never faileth, as Paul will remind us. As a fragment from a lost play by Euripides teaches, “never that which is shall die”. It is all about our openness to the eternal word of God sown in our hearts. “The parable is this.
Fr. David Curry
Sexagesima, 2023
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2023/02/12/sermon-for-sexagesima-sunday-2/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.