Today’s readings: Isaiah 55, 10-11; Romans 8, 18-23; Matthew 13, 1-9

It is no easy task to name the present and come to terms with all that makes the soil of our human nature open or closed to the spiritual dimension of our being. For quite a long time, Christianity in the West has shaped the understanding of our nature and our relation to the surrounding universe. But the Modern Age has reordered all that and now, with the fourth industrial revolution, something more radical is happening and giving shape to who we are.

We’ve lived in times when faith and culture were identified as one; when our culture was our religion and our faith outlook was our culture. Perhaps it was never meant to be that way because Christianity was born to challenge and provoke culture rather than to become a culture.

When religion was our culture, we felt secure and safe because the values underlying our religion were sanctioned by mainstream culture and even our legislators had to conform themselves to those values. Now we are rediscovering our vocation to be prophetic, not to be introvert and exclusive; to be provocative particularly in the face of whatever tends to ignore the hidden dimension of our humanity.

The mandate of the Gospel is one to cultivate the soil in the hearts of people so that the distractions and concerns of life do not suffocate God’s seed and block human growth. This is the message the prophet Isaiah and the Gospel parable highlight today. The Church exists to be a sign and instrument of God’s love for the world. If that is inverted and the means becomes the end, that would be distorting the mandate of Christianity.

God has a history and His history is the history of humanity. There are no two histories, one sacred and one profane, because the history of humanity is of itself sacred. In today’s text from Romans, St Paul writes: “The whole creation is eagerly waiting for God… it still retains the hope of being freed from its slavery to decadence.” This is the one great act of ‘giving birth’, it is the hunger for wholeness that is underlying the evolution of the universe and that characterises our personal growth.

Both the metaphorical rain that waters the earth in Isaiah and the seed that falls on the ground in the Gospel parable of the sower, caution us on a Church mandate that is introvert or exclusive. The message from both texts seems to affirm that, independently of who and where we are, God makes Himself present and His presence is never futile. The issue is not what religion or faith we belong to, but what in our being human determines our openness or resistance to the presence of the divine.

This spiritual dimension of our humanity is the monopoly of no one religion or faith. What God breathed in man and woman alike at the time of creation is not the Christian or the Buddhist or the Islamic faith. He breathed in us the soul that makes us who we are and His call to each one, irrespective of religion, is the call to be fully human and receptive of His presence.

The Christian values that emerge from the Gospel of Jesus Christ are basically human values, the values that commit us to build a more humane world. The ground, or the soil, where the seed of God falls is the heart, and the more the seed finds fertile ground and good soil, the more liveable the world becomes.

The Church’s mission is not to change people or to impose its beliefs on them, but rather to cultivate the ground so that the seed that is God’s action can yield fruit and give birth to a redeemed creation.