Suy Niệm Chúa Nhật thứ 15 Thường Niên Năm A.
“Kẻ có, thì sẽ được cho thêm mà dư dật; còn kẻ không có, thì điều đó cũng bị giựt mất. Bởi thế mà Ta dùng ví dụ nói với họ: vì họ nhìn mà không nhìn, và nghe mà không nghe, không hiểu. “(Mt 13:12–13)
Làm sao có người nhìn mà không thấy, nghe mà không nghe, không hiểu? Điều này chỉ có thể thực hiện được khi mắt và tai của một người hoạt động tốt, nhưng tâm trí bị phóng dật, không chú ý đến những gì mắt thấy tai nghe. Ví dụ, giả sử chúng ta đang nghe người ta đọc một cuốn sách và đột nhiên chúng ta nhận ra rằng mặc dù chúng ta đã nghe những gì được đọc nhưng tâm trí của chúng ta đang ở đâu đó và chúng ta không biết người ta nói gì. Đây là một kinh nghiệm chung cho tất cả mọi người theo thời gian.
Hôm nay, chúng ta hãy suy ngẫm về những câu hỏi quan trọng này và cố gắng trả lời những câu hỏi này một cách trung thực. Nếu chúng ta không thấy mình lớn lên trong đức tin mỗi ngày, mỗi năm mà đã trở nên thực sự giàu có trong ân sủng của Thiên Chúa, thì chúng ta hãy nên biết rằng chúng ta cần phải thay đổi điều gì đó. Trì trệ và hâm hẩm trong đức tin là điều không tốt vì những điều này sẽ dẫn đến chúng ta đến sự mất mát dần dần của mọi thứ. Khi chúng ta suy ngẫm về hành trình đức tin của chính mình, chúng ta hãy cam kết nhiệt thành đón nhận Tin Mừng để tâm hồn chúng ta thực sự trở thành mảnh đất màu mỡ không ngừng sinh ra nhiều hoa trái tốt lành.
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Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A)
“To anyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; from anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because they look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand.” Matthew 13:12–13
How is it that someone can look without seeing or hear without listening or understanding? This is only possible when one’s eyes and ears are working properly, but the mind is distracted, not attentive to what is seen or heard. For example, say you were listening to a book being read and suddenly you realized that even though you heard what was read, your mind was elsewhere and you had no idea what was spoken. This is a common experience for everyone from time to time.
This portion of the Gospel quoted above comes immediately after Jesus spoke the Parable of the Sower to the crowds from a boat. In that parable, seed fell on the path, on rocky ground, among thorns and in rich soil. Only the seed on the rich soil grew and produced good fruit. Therefore, Jesus’ teaching quoted above, as well as His parable spoken before it, teach that there were many who heard the Word of God and witnessed Jesus’ miracles but failed to allow His teachings and miracles to produce faith in their hearts.
This Gospel passage is especially important for those who have been Catholics for many years but have become stagnant in their faith. When someone goes to Mass every week, listens to the Gospel and shares in the Eucharist but fails to continually grow in holiness and understanding of the Mysteries of Heaven, then they will slowly lose even the little faith they have. They will become lukewarm Catholics who go through the motions but fail to produce the good fruit that comes from authentic faith.
When you look back at your life as a practicing Catholic, what do you see from year to year? Was there a time when you were strong in faith but have slowly closed your ears to the Gospel and have drifted away from a deep and prayerful interior engagement with our Lord? Or when you look back do you see that the Lord has continuously given you more and more, leading you to a life of true spiritual riches? Has the Gospel entered not only your ears, but also your mind and your understanding? Do you both see and perceive the action of God in your life and in the world around you? Are you actively engaged with the life of grace and find that you grow closer to God every day? Or, sadly, have you lost interest and zeal and now find yourself slowly drifting away from the fruitful practice of your faith?
Reflect, today, upon these important questions and strive to answer them honestly. If you do not see yourself growing in faith every year and becoming truly rich in the grace of God, then know that something needs to change. Stagnation and lukewarmness in the faith are not good. They lead to the slow loss of everything. As you reflect upon your own faith journey, recommit yourself to a zealous embrace of the Gospel so that your soul will be truly rich soil that continually produces an abundance of good fruit.
Lord, You desire that all people hear Your Word and see Your action in their lives. Please continue to pour forth Your grace into my life so that I will continually grow rich in Your mercy. I pray that my eyes and ears will be open to You more fully every day. Jesus, I trust in You.
15th Sunday in
Ordinary Time, Year A
Opening Prayer: Lord Jesus, may my heart be always open to receive your word and find food for my soul in the Scriptures so that in knowing you I can be an instrument of your grace for the world.
1. Always Sowing and Growing: Jesus came to establish his Kingdom. He desires that the seed of his truth, love, and mercy take root and grow in every heart, family, and community. He is always sowing with absolute confidence, knowing that his Kingdom will endure and withstand any obstacle. As to where the seed falls and what type of soil it takes root in, this is up to us. Jesus wants the soil of our hearts to be fertile. Since the Kingdom of Christ is alive and is always taking root and growing, how in my heart is this soil rocky, thorny, or rich to receive it?
15th Sunday in
Ordinary Time, Year A
Today, we have the Sower. Now we have just read to you what Jesus had read to the people.
The story is very simple. The Sower prepares the field. He prepares the field to receive the seeds which are the word of God. The Sower now sows the seed and here’s where it begins. If you look carefully at the Sower, he seems to have no negative emotion about what he is doing. What he does is he has this huge bag full of seeds and he’s flinging them all over the land that he had to prepare. And he’s going up and down and flinging it, like showering the whole field full of seeds. And he thinks nothing of it.
And when he does this and he fills the whole area with seeds, he also includes the thorn bushes, and he also includes the places where the people walk, and he also includes the areas where the seed will find rocky soil and will grow just a little bit and then suddenly it will disappear because it has no roots.
And so it is that the Sower is sowing seed even though any good farmer would say, “You’re wasting your seed. You must plant carefully like we do.”
You know, I worked on a potato farm and we used to plant potatoes. And you had to put the potatoes in very carefully. You had to measure them and put them down in the row and no potatoes could be lost. And you had this kind of a feeling that if they weren’t put straight down the line properly, and all the rest of it, that something terrible was going to happen.
Now this is in great contrast to the way Jesus describes the Sower, because the Sower is taking all of the seeds and throwing them up in the air, all in every direction, and they are falling into places where they don’t belong, and all the rest of it.
And why do you think that is?
Because the Sower is more than a Sower. He’s not just sowing seeds. Everybody knows that later on what you do is you plough all these seeds under if you belonged to that era in Palestine. You threw the seeds on the ground and all around and then you ploughed it under and that’s how it was done in those days.
But it’s more than that. He’s kind of prodigal. He’s kind of like almost happy to be in the field flinging these seeds around. And if you’re very carefully when you read this — now remember, you’re supposed to get your own impression — and one of the impressions that comes out is it is prodigal.
He wants to seed. It doesn’t matter if they only last a day. It doesn’t matter if they’re in the wrong place. It doesn’t matter as long as those seeds hit the earth some place, or even the sidewalks or what have you. Why?
Because the seed is the word of God and the first lesson, we learn from this parable is everybody should be covered by the word of God. You just don’t pick up with Catholics or Protestants, or this or that, all the things we think would be appropriate for this farmer to be doing.
He is prodigal. No-one is outside; even those who are choked, choked by the cares of the world, even those that are trampled down and they seem like people who nobody loves or cares for.
It’s not a place for the best of the best if we want a nice, huge wonderful harvest, you see. It’s a place where God comes. And He comes everywhere in every kind of way.
Why? Because Jesus is the Sower and the seed is the word of God and the word of God gives life.
And then also is included in this now is that every seed must die. And Jesus, the one who is throwing all these seeds down, has told, at another time, the Son of Man must also die, for the seed must die in order to give new life.
Well, now we have a whole different understanding. We begin to realize that you can take a parable, a simple little story, and you can begin to see that behind it is an introduction to the heart of God.
God has no biases. To God, each and every seed is precious in His eyes, and each and every seed does not have to be tenderly cared for but it has to feel that it belongs.
And so what the Sower says, the Parable of the Sower says that the field is the whole world and everybody in it, and Jesus is there sowing the word of God.
And what is the word of God?
“Come to me, all you who are needy and tired and weary, and I will refresh you. I have come to heal you, to save you, to make you once again proud of yourselves and feel that you are indeed the children of God and not the riff raff that ordinary people (inaudible). So that’s the first thing.
The second thing though is, if you’re thinking this way now, you can argue one way or the other, if you’re thinking this way, there’s a very important understanding that you also …
Say you bring this home and you read the whole thing about the seeds etc and you’re sitting there all by yourself in the living room. And then, if you’re wise like the old Jewish scholars were wise, you would know that Jesus is sitting with you and that God is in the room.
And, suddenly, the field is not this vast place that is being filled with the seed of God just for the whole world, but another interpretation is that the field is your own heart. Your heart, that is what the field is. And Jesus invites you to come with him and to ready the field for the ordinary work of the field. And then you’re to join as he sows the seed.
And he sows it through you, even more than through himself. And you are to shower your own heart with the seed of God and recognize that it can change you and it can change the whole world, if you recognize that the seed is God Himself.
Nice story, eh? It’s more than that. It’s the meaning of why Jesus came. It’s the meaning and understanding of what role God plays in our world, the meaning and understanding that we have a central part which begins in our own hearts, for to go out and save the world is not necessarily a good thing, but to go out filled with God’s love and knowing that to just walk and be with the people that you meet is like a light.
Remember, Jesus says this: Do good when the good that you do you must do, because the people will see the wonderful lovely things you do. And what will they do? They will turn to God in heaven and praise Him.
This is what you can do with a couple of seeds in a very poor country and by a few words. And it can do all this and it can change the world.
And this is why we treasure these words that have been handed down by half-illiterate men two thousand years ago to poor people who somehow or other remember that, yes, the seed must die, but it is dying that creates new life, and in the new life the world is healed and saved.
I had something to read, but I forgot it.
Approach these parables on your knees and don’t be afraid of them. It’s not telling you what Matthew thinks or what someone else thinks. It means that you read them, each one, and say, “Yes, this is a mystery to be discovered, and I walk with Jesus into this mystery, and if I pray over it and if I listen to it again and again and I see different ways that it’s teaching me, it will give me a whole library of understanding.”
And Jesus said, “I have come to save the world.”
And he does it through parables.
Suy Niệm
Chúa Nhật 15 Thường Niên Năm A
Trong bài đọc Tin Mừng hôm nay, chúng ta nghe Chúa Giêsu nói với chúng ta rằng: Lời Chúa thực sự là những hạt giống được gieo vào tâm hồn của chúng ta và hạt giống chỉ nẩy mầm, lớn lên và phát triển nếu nó tìm thấy trong chúng ta một sự tiếp thu và cởi mở nhất định đối với Tin Mừng của Chúa Kitô. Chúng ta cần chuẩn bị cho bản thân của chúng ta để chúng ta có thể nhận được Lời Chúa một cách hữu hiệu. Chúng ta muốn trái tim của chúng ta là những vùng đất tốt màu mỡ, nơi mà Lời Chúa có thể được gieo trồng trong chúng ta và phát triển để sinh hoa kết trái và có được những vụ mùa bội thu.
Trong việc cử hành Bí tích Thánh Thể này, chúng ta hãy cầu xin Chúa Thánh Thần ban cho chúng ta có sự kiên trì, trung thành trong việc sống theo lời Chúa Kitô, để vương quốc Chúa sẽ phát triển một cách tốt đẹp hơntrong tâm hồn của mỗi người chúng ta.
Sunday
15th of Ordinary time
In today’s Gospel reading, we hear Jesus tells us that: The Word of God is indeed a seed that is planted in our hearts and it will only grow and flourish if it finds in us a certain receptivity and openness to the Gospel of Christ. We need to prepare ourselves so that we are able to receive the Word of God. We want our hearts to be fertile places where the Word can be planted in us and grow to produce a rich harvest.
We know very well that if we are not open to the Word it will not flourish. Our hearts can then be compared to that rocky soil and the Word of God will not grow in us; it will be crowded out by the cares of the world.
The Parable today is very profound and we need to reflect on our own lives and ask ourselves whether our hearts are rocky ground or whether it is filled with thorns.
What we want is our hearts to be rich soil/ which will allow God’s Word to yield a plentiful harvest. We need to be good soil. We have to cultivate the Presence of the Lord in our lives, and serve God no matter where we go. We can fight off anything that tries to destroy our determination to live in union with Jesus Christ.
Today, Jesus warns us that even if we have heard his word, worldly anxiety or greed can destroy our Christian life. In the celebration of the Eucharist we pray that the holy Spirit will grant us faithful perseverance in living according to Christ’s word so that God’s kingdom will flourish beyond measure.
“Kẻ có, thì sẽ được cho thêm mà dư dật; còn kẻ không có, thì điều đó cũng bị giựt mất. Bởi thế mà Ta dùng ví dụ nói với họ: vì họ nhìn mà không nhìn, và nghe mà không nghe, không hiểu. “(Mt 13:12–13)
Làm sao có người nhìn mà không thấy, nghe mà không nghe, không hiểu? Điều này chỉ có thể thực hiện được khi mắt và tai của một người hoạt động tốt, nhưng tâm trí bị phóng dật, không chú ý đến những gì mắt thấy tai nghe. Ví dụ, giả sử chúng ta đang nghe người ta đọc một cuốn sách và đột nhiên chúng ta nhận ra rằng mặc dù chúng ta đã nghe những gì được đọc nhưng tâm trí của chúng ta đang ở đâu đó và chúng ta không biết người ta nói gì. Đây là một kinh nghiệm chung cho tất cả mọi người theo thời gian.
Hôm nay, chúng ta hãy suy ngẫm về những câu hỏi quan trọng này và cố gắng trả lời những câu hỏi này một cách trung thực. Nếu chúng ta không thấy mình lớn lên trong đức tin mỗi ngày, mỗi năm mà đã trở nên thực sự giàu có trong ân sủng của Thiên Chúa, thì chúng ta hãy nên biết rằng chúng ta cần phải thay đổi điều gì đó. Trì trệ và hâm hẩm trong đức tin là điều không tốt vì những điều này sẽ dẫn đến chúng ta đến sự mất mát dần dần của mọi thứ. Khi chúng ta suy ngẫm về hành trình đức tin của chính mình, chúng ta hãy cam kết nhiệt thành đón nhận Tin Mừng để tâm hồn chúng ta thực sự trở thành mảnh đất màu mỡ không ngừng sinh ra nhiều hoa trái tốt lành.
Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A)
“To anyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; from anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because they look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand.” Matthew 13:12–13
How is it that someone can look without seeing or hear without listening or understanding? This is only possible when one’s eyes and ears are working properly, but the mind is distracted, not attentive to what is seen or heard. For example, say you were listening to a book being read and suddenly you realized that even though you heard what was read, your mind was elsewhere and you had no idea what was spoken. This is a common experience for everyone from time to time.
This portion of the Gospel quoted above comes immediately after Jesus spoke the Parable of the Sower to the crowds from a boat. In that parable, seed fell on the path, on rocky ground, among thorns and in rich soil. Only the seed on the rich soil grew and produced good fruit. Therefore, Jesus’ teaching quoted above, as well as His parable spoken before it, teach that there were many who heard the Word of God and witnessed Jesus’ miracles but failed to allow His teachings and miracles to produce faith in their hearts.
This Gospel passage is especially important for those who have been Catholics for many years but have become stagnant in their faith. When someone goes to Mass every week, listens to the Gospel and shares in the Eucharist but fails to continually grow in holiness and understanding of the Mysteries of Heaven, then they will slowly lose even the little faith they have. They will become lukewarm Catholics who go through the motions but fail to produce the good fruit that comes from authentic faith.
When you look back at your life as a practicing Catholic, what do you see from year to year? Was there a time when you were strong in faith but have slowly closed your ears to the Gospel and have drifted away from a deep and prayerful interior engagement with our Lord? Or when you look back do you see that the Lord has continuously given you more and more, leading you to a life of true spiritual riches? Has the Gospel entered not only your ears, but also your mind and your understanding? Do you both see and perceive the action of God in your life and in the world around you? Are you actively engaged with the life of grace and find that you grow closer to God every day? Or, sadly, have you lost interest and zeal and now find yourself slowly drifting away from the fruitful practice of your faith?
Reflect, today, upon these important questions and strive to answer them honestly. If you do not see yourself growing in faith every year and becoming truly rich in the grace of God, then know that something needs to change. Stagnation and lukewarmness in the faith are not good. They lead to the slow loss of everything. As you reflect upon your own faith journey, recommit yourself to a zealous embrace of the Gospel so that your soul will be truly rich soil that continually produces an abundance of good fruit.
Lord, You desire that all people hear Your Word and see Your action in their lives. Please continue to pour forth Your grace into my life so that I will continually grow rich in Your mercy. I pray that my eyes and ears will be open to You more fully every day. Jesus, I trust in You.
Opening Prayer: Lord Jesus, may my heart be always open to receive your word and find food for my soul in the Scriptures so that in knowing you I can be an instrument of your grace for the world.
1. Always Sowing and Growing: Jesus came to establish his Kingdom. He desires that the seed of his truth, love, and mercy take root and grow in every heart, family, and community. He is always sowing with absolute confidence, knowing that his Kingdom will endure and withstand any obstacle. As to where the seed falls and what type of soil it takes root in, this is up to us. Jesus wants the soil of our hearts to be fertile. Since the Kingdom of Christ is alive and is always taking root and growing, how in my heart is this soil rocky, thorny, or rich to receive it?
Today, we have the Sower. Now we have just read to you what Jesus had read to the people.
The story is very simple. The Sower prepares the field. He prepares the field to receive the seeds which are the word of God. The Sower now sows the seed and here’s where it begins. If you look carefully at the Sower, he seems to have no negative emotion about what he is doing. What he does is he has this huge bag full of seeds and he’s flinging them all over the land that he had to prepare. And he’s going up and down and flinging it, like showering the whole field full of seeds. And he thinks nothing of it.
And when he does this and he fills the whole area with seeds, he also includes the thorn bushes, and he also includes the places where the people walk, and he also includes the areas where the seed will find rocky soil and will grow just a little bit and then suddenly it will disappear because it has no roots.
And so it is that the Sower is sowing seed even though any good farmer would say, “You’re wasting your seed. You must plant carefully like we do.”
You know, I worked on a potato farm and we used to plant potatoes. And you had to put the potatoes in very carefully. You had to measure them and put them down in the row and no potatoes could be lost. And you had this kind of a feeling that if they weren’t put straight down the line properly, and all the rest of it, that something terrible was going to happen.
Now this is in great contrast to the way Jesus describes the Sower, because the Sower is taking all of the seeds and throwing them up in the air, all in every direction, and they are falling into places where they don’t belong, and all the rest of it.
And why do you think that is?
Because the Sower is more than a Sower. He’s not just sowing seeds. Everybody knows that later on what you do is you plough all these seeds under if you belonged to that era in Palestine. You threw the seeds on the ground and all around and then you ploughed it under and that’s how it was done in those days.
But it’s more than that. He’s kind of prodigal. He’s kind of like almost happy to be in the field flinging these seeds around. And if you’re very carefully when you read this — now remember, you’re supposed to get your own impression — and one of the impressions that comes out is it is prodigal.
He wants to seed. It doesn’t matter if they only last a day. It doesn’t matter if they’re in the wrong place. It doesn’t matter as long as those seeds hit the earth some place, or even the sidewalks or what have you. Why?
Because the seed is the word of God and the first lesson, we learn from this parable is everybody should be covered by the word of God. You just don’t pick up with Catholics or Protestants, or this or that, all the things we think would be appropriate for this farmer to be doing.
He is prodigal. No-one is outside; even those who are choked, choked by the cares of the world, even those that are trampled down and they seem like people who nobody loves or cares for.
It’s not a place for the best of the best if we want a nice, huge wonderful harvest, you see. It’s a place where God comes. And He comes everywhere in every kind of way.
Why? Because Jesus is the Sower and the seed is the word of God and the word of God gives life.
And then also is included in this now is that every seed must die. And Jesus, the one who is throwing all these seeds down, has told, at another time, the Son of Man must also die, for the seed must die in order to give new life.
Well, now we have a whole different understanding. We begin to realize that you can take a parable, a simple little story, and you can begin to see that behind it is an introduction to the heart of God.
God has no biases. To God, each and every seed is precious in His eyes, and each and every seed does not have to be tenderly cared for but it has to feel that it belongs.
And so what the Sower says, the Parable of the Sower says that the field is the whole world and everybody in it, and Jesus is there sowing the word of God.
And what is the word of God?
“Come to me, all you who are needy and tired and weary, and I will refresh you. I have come to heal you, to save you, to make you once again proud of yourselves and feel that you are indeed the children of God and not the riff raff that ordinary people (inaudible). So that’s the first thing.
The second thing though is, if you’re thinking this way now, you can argue one way or the other, if you’re thinking this way, there’s a very important understanding that you also …
Say you bring this home and you read the whole thing about the seeds etc and you’re sitting there all by yourself in the living room. And then, if you’re wise like the old Jewish scholars were wise, you would know that Jesus is sitting with you and that God is in the room.
And, suddenly, the field is not this vast place that is being filled with the seed of God just for the whole world, but another interpretation is that the field is your own heart. Your heart, that is what the field is. And Jesus invites you to come with him and to ready the field for the ordinary work of the field. And then you’re to join as he sows the seed.
And he sows it through you, even more than through himself. And you are to shower your own heart with the seed of God and recognize that it can change you and it can change the whole world, if you recognize that the seed is God Himself.
Nice story, eh? It’s more than that. It’s the meaning of why Jesus came. It’s the meaning and understanding of what role God plays in our world, the meaning and understanding that we have a central part which begins in our own hearts, for to go out and save the world is not necessarily a good thing, but to go out filled with God’s love and knowing that to just walk and be with the people that you meet is like a light.
Remember, Jesus says this: Do good when the good that you do you must do, because the people will see the wonderful lovely things you do. And what will they do? They will turn to God in heaven and praise Him.
This is what you can do with a couple of seeds in a very poor country and by a few words. And it can do all this and it can change the world.
And this is why we treasure these words that have been handed down by half-illiterate men two thousand years ago to poor people who somehow or other remember that, yes, the seed must die, but it is dying that creates new life, and in the new life the world is healed and saved.
I had something to read, but I forgot it.
Approach these parables on your knees and don’t be afraid of them. It’s not telling you what Matthew thinks or what someone else thinks. It means that you read them, each one, and say, “Yes, this is a mystery to be discovered, and I walk with Jesus into this mystery, and if I pray over it and if I listen to it again and again and I see different ways that it’s teaching me, it will give me a whole library of understanding.”
And Jesus said, “I have come to save the world.”
And he does it through parables.
Trong bài đọc Tin Mừng hôm nay, chúng ta nghe Chúa Giêsu nói với chúng ta rằng: Lời Chúa thực sự là những hạt giống được gieo vào tâm hồn của chúng ta và hạt giống chỉ nẩy mầm, lớn lên và phát triển nếu nó tìm thấy trong chúng ta một sự tiếp thu và cởi mở nhất định đối với Tin Mừng của Chúa Kitô. Chúng ta cần chuẩn bị cho bản thân của chúng ta để chúng ta có thể nhận được Lời Chúa một cách hữu hiệu. Chúng ta muốn trái tim của chúng ta là những vùng đất tốt màu mỡ, nơi mà Lời Chúa có thể được gieo trồng trong chúng ta và phát triển để sinh hoa kết trái và có được những vụ mùa bội thu.
Trong việc cử hành Bí tích Thánh Thể này, chúng ta hãy cầu xin Chúa Thánh Thần ban cho chúng ta có sự kiên trì, trung thành trong việc sống theo lời Chúa Kitô, để vương quốc Chúa sẽ phát triển một cách tốt đẹp hơntrong tâm hồn của mỗi người chúng ta.
In today’s Gospel reading, we hear Jesus tells us that: The Word of God is indeed a seed that is planted in our hearts and it will only grow and flourish if it finds in us a certain receptivity and openness to the Gospel of Christ. We need to prepare ourselves so that we are able to receive the Word of God. We want our hearts to be fertile places where the Word can be planted in us and grow to produce a rich harvest.
We know very well that if we are not open to the Word it will not flourish. Our hearts can then be compared to that rocky soil and the Word of God will not grow in us; it will be crowded out by the cares of the world.
The Parable today is very profound and we need to reflect on our own lives and ask ourselves whether our hearts are rocky ground or whether it is filled with thorns.
What we want is our hearts to be rich soil/ which will allow God’s Word to yield a plentiful harvest. We need to be good soil. We have to cultivate the Presence of the Lord in our lives, and serve God no matter where we go. We can fight off anything that tries to destroy our determination to live in union with Jesus Christ.
Today, Jesus warns us that even if we have heard his word, worldly anxiety or greed can destroy our Christian life. In the celebration of the Eucharist we pray that the holy Spirit will grant us faithful perseverance in living according to Christ’s word so that God’s kingdom will flourish beyond measure.
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