| Online: | |
| Visits: | |
| Stories: |
| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Homily Notes: 15th Sunday Year A
Saturday, July 12, 2014 1:16
% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.
St Augustine once said that “God creates us without our consent, but will not save us without our consent.” There is another phrase that says “You can take a horse to water but you cannot make it drink.” I have baptised many people over the years but as they are given the gift of God’s life I cannot make them embrace it and live it. The frustration in ministry can be that results are not happening quickly enough. The message of the gospel is preached, taught, encouraged and yet many choose not to bother to take it on board and some may take it on board for a while, before allowing the gospel to drift to the back of their thinking.
The temptation is to despair, and then we read the gospel today about sowing seeds and we begin to relax a little. For it is not about me, Jesus is at the heart of the message, and he says that faith is all about the sowing of seeds. The seeds are sown, that is important. How those seeds take root is often beyond our control. We have to take it on trust that when the gospel is preached, faith will manifest, and if it does not, then don’t give up but trust more fully in Jesus.
There is a choice involved in faith. When seeds are sown, many conditions come together to enable growth. If faith is to take a root in us then those conditions are to be attended to. Choice is key, for we are to decide firstly what do we choose in life? Good, bad, right, wrong, ourselves or others? We are to be uncluttered enough in our living to allow the seeds of faith to take a hold of our living. So as not give in to selfishness, personal ambition, the pursuit of glory, of wealth, of status, esteem from others, power or control either, for this is where the seed of faith withers as it finds no suitable good soil to grow within. Creating the conditions for the seeds of faith to grow takes time, patience, love, endurance, hope, humility, giving, caring, a genuine concern for the justice and welfare of all people.
I heard a priest preach about this gospel and it made an impression upon me he spoke of being an “Apple Tree” Catholic and I would hope to aspire to that state, a state that takes a life time to cultivate. The Apple Tree Catholic he says goes a little like this:
“The good soil is the soul which accepts Christ’s commands and humbly takes up the cross, the cross so alien to the soft life of today’s cocktail circuits. These are the “Apple tree Catholics” who, like the apple tree, stand quietly, naturally and no big show, but are always giving. The apple tree gives beauty in the spring for poet and painter, shade in the summer for the traveller, and fruit in the autumn for everyone. It is a strong tree that will bend, shudder, and groan during a winter storm, but since its roots are firm, deep and strong, it does not fall, and it is always growing.”
Let us be the good soil wiling to allow the seed of God’s word to grow and flourish in us in each and every season of our living.
Source: http://humblepiety.blogspot.com/2014/07/homily-notes-15th-sunday-year-a.html
