Sermon for Sexagesima Sunday
“The seed is the word of God”
The ‘gesima’ Sundays belong to the Lenten pilgrimage of our souls to the source and end of our lives in Christ. The readings for Septuagesima and Sexagesima complement one another in the metaphors and images about the nature of our lives in faith. They are all about the nature of our labours and activities in relation to the free gift of God’s grace and love. The kingdom of heaven is likened to a vineyard in the Gospel for Septuagesima and that agricultural image is further developed in today’s Sexagesima Gospel with the parable about the sower and the seed.
Such images concern the relation of human labour with the natural order of creation but extend that labour to ethical and spiritual matters. But more than just the parable itself in today’s Gospel, we have the unpacking of its meaning, the explication of the sign and the thing signified, as it were. If we are really serious about the challenge of living in the word proclaimed and celebrated in our liturgy then we have to pay close attention to the way in which ideas are made known to us so as to live in us. “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear,” Jesus tells us at the conclusion of the parable. That is the challenge for us. Contrary to popular belief, the parables of Jesus are not all that simple and easy to grasp. They have to be interpreted in order for us to enter into their meaning. It requires learning how to think our way into the images and metaphors and to begin to appreciate their radical power and vitality.
Life is in the seed as a kind of potency towards its actualization in the fruit. Life, in all its rich diversity, is something given but for it to come to fruition something is required by all living things. And so, too, for us as human beings. We have to work with the gift of life that is given to us in order for that life to come to fruition in us. The lovely metaphor of the seed as the word of God is complemented by the wonderful and humbling metaphor of our humanity as the ground in which the seed is planted and grows. Something is required of us in working with the grace of the gift of life and the gift of light, of illumination by grace. The ‘gesima’ Sundays belong to the interplay of the classical virtues of temperance, courage, prudence, and justice with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity which transform all of the virtues into forms of love.
Those who strive for mastery have to be temperate in all things, as the Epistle for Septuagesima shows in pursuit of an “incorruptible crown” in contrast to the passing and “corruptible” crowns or goods of this world. We labour in the vineyard whether long or short but receive “whatsoever is right” or just from the standpoint of the eternal justice of God whose will is not constrained to our expectations and thoughts about what we think we deserve and want. In other words, as today’s Collect says, we “put not our trust in any thing that we do.” It is not us in our boastings about ourselves but the working of God’s grace in us, as Paul makes quite clear in today’s Epistle.
