by CCW | 23 February 2025 10:00
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.
Septuagesima Sunday presented us with the parable of the labourers in the vineyard to make the unambiguous point about the absolute priority of God’s grace. The charity of God is the highest and truest form of justice, the justitia dei, that orders the whole of creation to God. Sexagesima Sunday focuses on the ground upon which the seed of the Word of God is sown, the terroir, we might say, and upon the virtue of prudence as ordered to the wisdom of God in his Word. Quinquagesima Sunday will remind us that we go up to Jerusalem only by the divine charity which sets our human loves in order but that is already the premise and condition of the virtues themselves. We go up from wherever we are in the good order of God’s creation. The ‘gesimas’ remind us of our life in the land of God’s grace and of the conditions of our labouring.
Sexagesima Sunday recalls aspects of the pastoral ministry. At issue is not just the sowing of the seed. There is also the preparing of the ground in which the seed is sown. Both belong together. The seed is scattered but the quality of the ground is essential for the seed to sprout and bear fruit. Both go together, God and Man, we might say. The seed is the Word of God but we are the ground. Our life together as a Parish is about the constant work of preparing ourselves to “hear and receive thy holy Word” (BCP, p. 76).
Preparing the ground and sowing the seed. We are being exhorted to consider what kind of ground we are. We are being called to account with respect to our nurture of God’s Word which has been sown in our souls. How? By the Word proclaimed and the Sacraments celebrated. By the quality of our life in Christ. And that, too, as Paul reminds us in the Epistle reading, is a matter of courage, a matter of where our hearts are and that is not about self-promotion and calling attention to ourselves but about Christ in us whose glory is shown even in our infirmities, our weaknesses, not in our pretensions.
The Epistle and Gospel for Septuagesima Sunday suggest the interplay of the virtues of temperance and justice; the Epistle and Gospel for Sexagesima suggest the interplay of the virtues of courage and prudence. Courage without prudence, without a kind of wisdom, is mere bravado and folly and easily leads to vanity and nonsense. This is why Paul is careful to counter any sense of self-glorification, pointing not only to his infirmities but ultimately to God’s grace as the underlying principle of what has sustained him in the trials of his ministry, even “the care of all the churches.”
We are not simply passive in relation to God’s word and grace. We are to be active and to work with God as co-operators, even as co-creators in the sense of being secondary creators, namely, as working with what God has fashioned and given to us. Sexagesima signals something of the work of our humanity as being God’s work of the sixth day. Sexagesima, the week of the sixtieth day before Easter, is a poignant reminder of our humanity as being the work of the sixth day in creation. Here our creation is being thought about dynamically, that is to say, in the light of human activity as ordered to God in wisdom and truth, in the profound interplay of courage and prudence as shaped by love.
There is the bad ground, as it were, imaged first as the way-side upon which the seed is sown but nothing takes root; secondly, as the rocky ground upon which the seed is sown but nothing can be nourished and so everything withers and dies. Then, thirdly, as the place where the seed is sown but what springs up is choked by the thorns. In contrast, the good ground is where the seed is sown and grows up bearing fruit in great abundance.
Yet the marvel of this Gospel parable is more than the parable itself. For here – and this is what is especially significant – the parable is explained in terms of how we receive or rather fail to receive and work with the Word of God sown in our hearts. First, there is our refusal of the Word, a denial of God. This is the evil or the devil in our hearts that denies what God seeks for us in belief and salvation and opposes the will of God through indifference and wilful ignorance. Secondly, there is the shallowness or lack of our commitment and awareness about what God has given to us, a failure to commit and thus to persevere. Thirdly, there is the constant and prevailing problem of our simply being choked with cares, so completely preoccupied and defined by the immediate “cares, and riches, and pleasures of this life,” as if they were absolute. They aren’t and thus no fruit comes to perfection and we are left with a profound sense of emptiness and futility which is perhaps one of the dominant forms of disorder and despair in our culture and day, a form of nihilism. All of these forms of the ‘bad ground’ are really us in our refusal to receive and act upon what we are given. In that sense they are all a denial of the givenness of things, including our very being and life, and thus a frustration of what God seeks for us.
By way of contrast, the good ground are those who hear and keep the seed of the Word, honouring it and bringing forth fruit to the glory of God. It is not about boasting in our own achievements. It is not about putting our trust in any thing that we do of ourselves, as the Collect puts it. It is about our working with what God has given us faithfully. It is simply the Word of God alive in us to the glory of God. What kind of ground will we be? This is the question and challenge of Sexagesima Sunday.
Fr. David Curry
Sexagesima Sunday 2025
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