21 September 2018 - seeds of life

Today's Readings (Audio)

The LORD gives us seed. He does not give the fruit of the kingdom fully ripened. Because he gives it to us this way our response in nurturing it becomes essential. We must be like good soil, letting the word deep within, where it can take root and be nourished. It isn't so much that our actions cause the seed to grow. Rather, by our actions we are free to be the sort of soil in which the seed can grow.

And some seed fell on good soil, and when it grew,
it produced fruit a hundredfold."

We would certainly prefer to receive the end result rather than go through a process. But it is by the process that the LORD confirms whether or not we really want the seed and its fruit. We might like fertilizer to speed the process. But nothing we ourselves can do can speed the growth of the seed. This is the humility we learn from it. All we can do is give it space, attention, and care. We can't make it grow. Yet there is fertilizer after a fashion. The more we involve the Holy Spirit in our lives the more fruit we bear, for all good fruit is from him.

The seed within us is the imperishable seed of eternal life

since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God (see First Peter 1:23).

Along the way this seed bears the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace and the rest (see Galatians 5:22-23). But the ultimate fruit comes only when the seed of our entire life if sown.

What you sow is not brought to life unless it dies.
And what you sow is not the body that is to be
but a bare kernel of wheat, perhaps, or of some other kind.

Knowing about the destiny of our seed should change how we think of ourselves. It ought to change our perspective. It isn't that we don't care about this life and only care about the world to come. This life becomes something precious which nurture, but not for its own sake. We do it for the sake of the fruit, and ultimately, for the sake of eternal life.

Just as we have borne the image of the earthly one,
we shall also bear the image of the heavenly one.

This eternal perspective gives us great confidence. There is nothing for us to fear.

For you have rescued me from death,
my feet, too, from stumbling;
that I may walk before God in the light of the living.