“They … having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience”
“As all the fruits of the season come to us in their proper time, flowers in spring, corn in summer and apples in autumn, so the fruit for winter is talk.” The quote is from Basil the Great, one of the outstanding fourth century theologians, one of the Greek Cappadocian Fathers who has shaped so much of the intellectual and spiritual history of Christian thought and life, both east and west. I love the image. The idea that talk is the fruit of winter. Something is meant to be alive and growing in us, in the soil of our hearts, even in the frozen wastes of a Canadian winter!
The analogy is straightforward: good ground and good heart and, as a result, good fruit brought “forth with patience.” How wonderful in what is, literally, the bleak mid-winter, to be reminded of springtime and flowers, of the fruits of summer and fall! Already Marilyn is consulting the seed catalogues and planning the vegetable and flower beds. But how wonderful too to be reminded that we are the ground in which God’s Word has been sown. What kind of ground will we be? And what will be the fruit of our planting? In Basil’s image, our talk, too, is the fruit borne out of our winter’s evenings, huddled by our fires in the long nights of winter.
But what kind of talk, we may ask? After all, this is a world of too much talk, a Panglossian world of all talk and no action, of talking heads, and talk, as is so often said, is cheap, not to mention dangerous and destructive of lives and careers. Yet Basil’s image, so appropriate on this Sexagesima Sunday, reminds us of two things: the seed which is the Word of God and the ground which is our heart in which it is sown. Yet there can be no fruit on a winter’s evening that is not borne out of an honest and good heart, as Luke so powerfully suggests. Therein lies the challenge that is our part.
The talk which is the fruit of winter, in Basil’s sense, must surely be our talk of God, the talk which allows God’s Word to have its sovereign sway within our lives, the talk which lets God’s Word shape our hearts and minds. Only because that Word has been planted and sown within us but if neglected and ignored? What then?
That is the point of the parable. There can be no fruit without the planting and without our nurturing of what is planted in us. The great parable of this day is the parable of the sower. “A sower went out to sow.” We are given the wonder of the parable and then, there is the greater marvel of the interpretation of the parable. Deeds and words, we might say; things done and things thought upon. Jesus gives us both in Luke’s account. This points to a particular kind of challenge which belongs to the season of the ‘gesimas’. There is what God makes known and provides, to be sure, but then there is the question about our taking a hold of his Word and truth; about it living in us. Something is required of us. Such is the great and surpassing dignity of the Christian faith. It is about God with us and us with God and with the good order, too, of creation. That is about the disciplines of spiritual life in attending seriously and thoughtfully to the things of God, bringing them to fruition in our lives.
There is the question about the way in which we take hold of what has been given to us. It is a question about the quality of our engagement with God’s Word. We are not merely passive recipients. Something is required of us, namely, our active engagement with the Word of God. The ‘gesimas’ recall us to the ancient wisdom of the cardinal virtues as transformed by divine charity to become the forms of love in us. The readings for Sexagesima Sunday show us the virtues of courage and prudence as transformed by the divine charity; such is grace and glory. There is the boldness of Christian witness as seen in Paul’s almost excessive account of his ministry in 2 Corinthians. There is the practical wisdom or prudence of a good and honest heart that “having heard the word, keep[s] it, and brings forth fruit.” It means acting upon what we have received. It requires discipline and labour or struggle on our part.
This year Sexagesima Sunday follows after Candlemas, itself the great feast of the transition from Christmas to Easter, from light to life, if you will. It is a wonderful conjunction of a feast of Mary and a festival of Christ. The infant Christ is taken to Jerusalem forty days after his birth by Mary and Joseph; it is his first visit to Jerusalem but points us to his last visit, to his Passion and to the form of our participation in it as well. “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,” Mary is told by the patient and waiting Simeon. He was “waiting for the consolation of Israel,” as Luke so marvelously puts it. In seeing the infant Christ, Simeon wonderfully and prophetically proclaims “mine eyes have seen thy salvation.” He sees God in the infant Christ in Mary’s arms.
Her whole attitude and approach must be ours. In the Christmas mysteries, Mary is said to have “kept all these things,” the things that were said about her son, “and pondered them in her heart.” There her great ‘yes’ to God but there is her constant attention to the ways of God with us. She is the great exemplar of that “honest and good heart” which “having heard the word, keep[s] it and bring[s] forth fruit with patience.” The fruit of her womb becomes our winter’s talk, the talk of Christ and the wonders of his grace and glory. But not without the experience of pain and suffering through her and for us, too, in our participation in Christ’s Passion. What is that Passion but a kind of patience, literally, suffering in the sense of being acted upon but which Christ wills to endure? It belongs to our journey and pilgrimage as well to be like Mary at once pondering upon the Word of God and being pierced by what we learn and see in that Word. Only so will there be the possibility of the good fruit of our winter’s evenings.
The parable challenges us to be not the ground of the wayside, indifferent and totally ignorant of God’s Word and Truth, not the rocky ground of rootlessness and shallowness, not the thorny ground of endless distractions and confusions, choked with the “cares, and riches, and pleasures of this life,” a telling indictment of our world and culture, it may seem, but rather to be “the good ground,” imaged as “an honest and good heart,” which “having heard the word, keep[s] it,” just like Mary, and so like her, “bring[s] forth fruit with patience.” The seed is the Word of God but so too is the fruit, especially that fruit in us. Such is the talk of a winter’s evening. Such is the holy fruit of God’s Word planted in us. Be the good ground. Let all our talk be of God and his Word.
“They … having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience”
Fr. David Curry
Sexagesima Sunday 2024