Day: February 23, 2025

“The good ground are they which in an honest and good heart having heard the word keep it and bring forth fruit with patience”

Sexagesima Sunday recalls us to our origins and to our end. It signals our identity in God’s will and purpose for our humanity. We are recalled, yet again as last week, to creation but more explicitly this week to the dust, to the ground of our lives. We are in a profound sense “of the earth, earthy,” for such is Adam and we are all in Adam, literally, “of the ground,” adhamah. And yet, we have a heavenly vocation, namely, to be the dust transformed or as our gospel parable puts it, to be “the good ground.” It is a metaphor for ”an honest and good heart” which “having heard the word keep it and bring forth fruit with patience.” The echoes of Genesis are all too evident. The teaching is explicit; the seed is the word of God. We are the ground but what kind of ground?

Sexagesima Sunday brings out the deeper dynamic and meaning of the doctrine of Creation. As created beings we have a relation to the dust of the ground. Dust here is an image for the most basic elements of the material world, the dust out of which God has made and fashioned everything else. Long before the metaphors of ‘quarks and antiquarks’, as it were, there was dust, the dust of the ground of God’s own making. Our humanity too is understood to be made in God’s image but also “formed of dust from the ground,” the dust into which God has breathed his spirit. Thus the idea of our selves as created beings requires the realization of our special relation to the Creator, to God. So there are two things, our relation to the dust of the ground, and our relation to God; both belong inescapably to the idea of creation.

We are the dust into which God has breathed his Spirit. Will we turn to the dust or to God who raises us up from the dust? Only if we nurture the life-giving and spirit-forming Word that has been sown in the dust and ground of our souls can we be raised up. The ‘ground of our being’ is not simply the dust of the earth. More profoundly, it is the Word and Will of God as sown in the ground of God’s creation, in us as human beings.

Today’s gospel presents us with the parable of the Sower and the Seed. To put it bluntly, we are dirt. That is not an insult. It is a salutary reminder. It is a call and a challenge because it asks us, ‘What kind of dirt? What kind of ground will we be? The good ground or the bad?’

On these “gesima” Sundays, the emphasis is on human activity, or to put it more precisely, on the activity of the virtues of the soul which belong to the truth and purpose of our humanity as spiritual and intellectual creatures. They belong to the ways in which human activity is taken up into God’s greater activity and perfected. The “gesima” Sundays place us on the ground, in the land. Such too is the meaning of our Parish. We are here and not elsewhere. This land, this place, this community, is the place where God’s Word has been sown. What kind of ground will we be? The question is both for each of us individually and corporately.

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