Today, we contemplate God as a good and magnanimous farmer, who sows abundantly. He has not been greedy in the redemption of man, but has spent everything in his own Son Jesus Christ, who as buried grain (death and burial) has become our life and resurrection, thanks to his holy Resurrection.

God is a patient farmer. Time belongs to the Father, because only He knows the day and the hour (cf. Mk 13:32) of the harvest and the threshing. God waits. And we too must wait, synchronizing the clock of our hope with God's saving plan. James says: “See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains” (Jas 5:7). God awaits the harvest, making it grow with his grace. We, too, cannot rest on our laurels; rather, we must work together with God’s grace by offering our cooperation, without hindering God’s transformative work.

The cultivation of God that is born and grows here on earth is a visible reality in its effects; we can see them in authentic miracles and in the resounding examples of holiness of life. Many, after having heard all the words and noise of this world, feel a hunger and thirst to hear the authentic Word of God, where it is alive and incarnate. There are thousands of people who live out their commitment to Jesus Christ and the Church with the same enthusiasm as in the beginning of the Gospel, since the divine word “finds the soil in which to germinate and bear fruit” (Saint Augustine); we must, therefore, raise our spirits and face the future with a gaze of faith.

The success of the harvest does not lie in our human strategies or in marketing, but in the saving initiative of God, who is “rich in mercy,” and in the power of the Holy Spirit, who can transform our lives so that we may bear abundant fruit of charity and contagious joy.