“Why do you speak to them in parables?”  Today the disciples ask Jesus a very intriguing question, one that we perhaps ask God many times ourselves in one way or another.  Often we might express it in terms like, “God why are you so hidden in our world?  Why is it so hard to understand you and your ways?  Why don’t you speak more plainly to me and just tell me what to do?  God, why is your word not more effective in the world, perhaps you could use an amplifier?  Why can’t all people see you as I see you or why can’t I see you as clearly as others seem to be able to see you?”

     How often have we gone to mass and listened to the readings, the Word of God proclaimed, and realized that we can’t remember what they were about?  Perhaps we were distracted while the Word was being proclaimed or our mind was wandering off into some other territory.  It would be interesting to see by a quick pop quiz after the readings how much people really retained of what they heard.  I would venture to guess that it would be a pretty low percentage.  Hearing the Word and truly listening and understanding the Word are very different processes.

     I think that we can begin to get an understanding of the parable that Jesus tells us today about the sower and the seed.  In this parable three out of four times the seed fails to accomplish its true purpose and yield a harvest.  It would be very easy for us to focus on this failure and become depressed.  It is disheartening for us to see at times how little effect the gospel message has on our world today, even within the Church.  Jesus points this out by quoting from Isaiah the prophet, “they look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand.”  Jesus is placing himself in the line of the prophets of Israel.  So often there was a general failure by Israel to really receive the message of the prophet and allow it to change their behavior.  Today the same sad result exists as so many people hear the Word of God proclaimed and expounded and yet it doesn’t seem to penetrate their hearts and effect their behavior.  In the time of Jesus, because of the cross, it seems ultimately that Jesus was a failure.  Today in our world it can at times seem the same again, that the Church is a failure and has failed to achieve true change in our world.

     The parable of the sower though is certainly not about failure but about ultimate success.  What seems like failure to the world is often the hiddenness of God’s greatest successes.  When the seed finds good ground it takes root and produces an abundant harvest.  There is a great power in the Word of God to reveal God and his purpose in the world.  The more that we allow God’s Word into our lives the more we will grow and produce good fruit in the world.  There may be many failures along the way but eventually God’s Word will accomplish its purpose.  The prophet Isaiah promises us this in our first reading, “my word shall not return to me void, but shall do my will, achieving the end for which I sent it.”

     The Holy Father Emeritus, Pope Benedict, speaks about the mystery of God and his kingdom hidden in the parables and why it is so difficult for us to see and understand.  He remarks that when we see things through the eyes of the world and from its perspective in modern terms then, “To believe in him as God and to live accordingly seems like a totally unreasonable requirement.  In this situation, the parables really do lead to non-seeing and non-understanding, to “hardening of heart.”  This means, though, that the parables are ultimately an expression of God’s hiddenness in this world and of the fact that knowledge of God always lays claim to the whole person – that such knowledge is one with life itself, and that it cannot exist without “repentance.”  For in this world, marked by sin, the gravitational pull of our lives is weighted by the chains of the “I” and the “self.”  These chains must be broken to free us for a new love that places us in another gravitational field where we can enter new life.  In this sense, knowledge of God is possible only through the gift of God’s love becoming visible, but this gift too has to be accepted. In this sense, the mystery of the Cross is inscribed right at the heart of the parables.”

     We cannot simply see and hear and hope to understand.  Our seeing and our hearing must penetrate the boundaries of this world’s limitations and encounter the hidden God awaiting our response.  Only then will our lives bear much fruit.