Fr Matthew Reese

“As for what was sown on good soil, this is he who hears the word and understands it; he indeed bears fruit, and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”
—Matthew 13:23

Dear Friends in Christ,

Today, in the thirteenth chapter of St Matthew’s Gospel, we find Jesus on a boat. 

He has been teaching in the country, but this morning, he goes out of the house and sits on the beach along the Sea of Galilee. Then, as the crowds begin to throng, he steps into a boat, and begins a new discourse from the deck, a little ways off from shore. 

It must have seemed strange that instead of a nautical metaphor—with which Scripture is replete—Jesus picks an agricultural one.   

This is the “Parable of the Sower:”

The seed that is sown along the path is scattered by the evil one. The seed on rocky ground “is he who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet he has no root in himself, […] when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately he falls away” (Mt 13:20-21). The seed among thorns is the man whose love of the Word is choked by the delights and riches of the world. But the seed that is sown on good soil, “this is he who hears the word and understands it.”

Jesus’s typology of hearers-of-the-word is very much alive today, especially the middle two; The fair-weather Christian, the God-or-Mammon? Christian, these are knowable types, though we are perhaps more likely to find them on the airwaves than faithfully in the pews.

But it is a very hard thing to be truly receptive to the Word, as the good earth is receptive to the seed. It not only requires us to be open to transformation, it not only requires us to resist the most obvious distractions and temptations that will draw us away from God, but it also requires us to nurture our faith, to tend it, to water it, to allow it to bear fruit.

The Christian life is not about one-and-done transformation, it is about a constant re-orientation towards the life of Christ, towards the Word of God, towards the promise of Resurrection. 

So today, and every day we encounter the Word, let us try to have ears to hear.

—Fr Matthew