Contemplating today's Gospel
Today's Gospel + homily (in 300 words)
The Lord shall ransom Jacob, he shall redeem him from the hand of his conqueror. Shouting, they shall mount the heights of Zion, they shall come streaming to the Lord's blessings: The grain, the wine, and the oil, the sheep and the oxen.
Then the virgins shall make merry and dance, and young men and old as well. I will turn their mourning into joy, I will console and gladden them after their sorrows.
“Hear the parable of the sower”
Fr. Josep LAPLANA OSB Monk of Montserrat (Montserrat, Barcelona, Spain)Today, we contemplate God as a good and magnanimous farmer, who has so richly sown his field. He has not spared anything for the redemption of man; He has vested everything in his own Son Jesus Christ who, as the seed sown in the good soil (death and burial), with his saint Resurrection has become our own life and resurrection.
God is a farmer who knows how to wait. Time belongs to the Father, for He is the only one to know about the day or the hour (cf. Mk 13:32) of the harvest and threshing. And God waits. And we must also wait while synchronizing the watch of our hopes with God's design of salvation. St. 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” (James 5:7). God waits on the crop that grows thanks to his grace. And we must also stay on our toes; we must collaborate with God's grace by giving him our cooperation and opposing no obstacles to this transforming action of God.
God's crop, which here on earth, grows and bears fruit, is a feat visible through its effects; we can see them in actual miracles and in clamorous examples of saintliness of life. There are plenty of people that after having heard all the words and din of this world are hungry and thirsty for the authentic Word of God, wherever it is, alive and incarnated. There are thousands who live their belonging to Jesus Christ and to the Church with the same enthusiasm than in the first times of the Gospel, because the divine word “finds the soil where to germinate and bear fruit” (St. Augustine); we must therefore raise our morale and look at our future with the eyes of the faith.
The success of the crop does not depend upon our human strategies or upon our marketing techniques, but upon God's initiative of salvation “rich in mercy” and upon the efficiency of the Holy Spirit, that can transform our lives so we can bear the delicious fruits of charity and of contagious joy.
Thoughts on Today's Gospel
- “The good deeds we do are nothing if we are not capable of patiently enduring the evils as well. The more someone rises in perfection, the more the adversity of the world grows against him" (St. Gregory the Great)
“The Word of God makes a pathway within us. We listen to it with our ears and it passes to our hearts; it does not remain in our ears; it must go to the heart. And from the heart, it passes to the hands, to good deeds.” (Francis)
“But this ‘intimate and vital bond of man to God’ can be forgotten, overlooked, or even explicitly rejected by man. Such attitudes can have different causes: revolt against evil in the world; religious ignorance or indifference; the cares and riches of this world; the scandal of bad example on the part of believers; currents of thought hostile to religion; finally, that attitude of sinful man which makes him hide from God out of fear and flee his call.” (Catechism Of the Catholic Church, Nº 29)
October 6th
Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)
Gospel and commentary video
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The calendar of Saints and Solemnities for October
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