Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A) (Vigil)

July 11, 2020

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.11.20_Landry_ConCon.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday.

* Why among the first apostles did eleven become great saints and one become the most notorious traitor of all time? Why among the students of a poor, inner city school will some kids from down-and-out circumstances go on to become famous surgeons and others end up in jail? Why do some children go on to become great athletes while others with the same coaches and even greater physical coordination and endowments never make it? One of the most basic reasons is because some people are more receptive and more responsive to coaching, to education and to grace.

* This is an important lesson for us all to grasp and it will help us to understand better what Jesus will teaching us on Sunday as he gives us one of his most important parables, the Parable of the Sower and the Seed. Jesus teaches us us crucial lessons about how to be a more fruitful disciple and a more effective evangelist, how to receive God’s grace and how to live in accordance with it. At the end of the Parable, Jesus says, “Whoever has ears to hear ought to hear!,” which is the ancient way of saying, “Pay attention!.” By means of the Parable, Jesus is going to help us to take a soil sample of our hearts, to help determine how well we pay attention, how much we receive and respond to him, what he teaches, and all that he seeks to do in our life.

* To understand what he says, we first need to grasp a little about ancient farming techniques. Sowers would scatter seed on long thin plots before any soil had been turned over. The seed would land on four different types of earth. The first is the hardened land between plots that would serve as the paths on which people would walk. They were the ancient sidewalks and no seed could penetrate. The second is very thin “rocky” soil that would have thick layers of limestone a few inches underneath the surface. Here the seeds take and quickly germinate because the water would be retained within the few inches of soil. Because the roots couldn’t penetrate the stone, however, the sprouts would not be able to last for long, quickly dehydrating and withering as the rising sun grew in intensity. The third terrain Jesus describes as “thorny” soil, which is basically good earth that could bear a lot of fruit if it weren’t covered with thornbushes and weeds that exhaust the nutriets of the soil so that good seed can’t grow. And the last type is good soil that Jesus describes bears much fruit.

* Just as a sower would scatter seed over all four types of earth, so Jesus scatters his word, his grace, his saving deeds over all four kinds of people represented by the respective soil samples. We see all four soil types among his first listeners. We saw in many of the scribes and Pharisees the hardened soil that totally resisted Jesus’ words and the testimony of his miracles, closing their ears and their hearts to his message and actually accusing him of working his indisputable miracles not by God’s power but by the devil. The evil one, as Jesus mentions in the Parable, would come to snatch the seed away before it could ever get planted. We see the rocky or superficial soil in the people for whom Jesus worked the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish. They listened to Jesus for hours, they even followed him after the miracle along the entire upper li...