Year A

Jan 12 2025

Who Knows?

It was early spring. The master gardener was really busy. A kind friend offered to weed her perennial garden while the weeds were still small. She was very grateful. He was an expert on tulips. He knew what tulip leaves looked like. So he diligently weeded that garden clean. When he was done, the tulip leaves proudly stood out from the bare soil that surrounded them. As spring unfolded in the garden, though, there were no forget-me-nots. The coreopsis was gone. There were no more buttercups. The tulips grew strong and died back. The next year, that same friend offered to help. “Let me do the weeding,” the master gardener said.

We really don’t know what we don’t know. Sometimes we assume that we know ourselves and others. The research, however, reveals that we create stories in our minds based on partial pieces of information. We do not have all the evidence on anything. If you and I had the job of weeding out the good and the bad in a group of people, we may see the acts that a person does and judge accordingly. But moral theologians tell us that moral blame is based on act, circumstance, and intention. We can and must judge acts as morally wrong or right, but we do not have enough information to pass further judgment on a person. Only God knows the circumstance and intentions behind an act.

Why doesn’t God ask us to do the weeding? Little leaves that come up in early spring do not look like the flowers they will be when they are mature. We would often pluck out the wrong things if it were up to us. We don’t know what we don’t know. Jesus offers today’s parable so that we will practice mercy, not judgment.

“Let me do the weeding,” the Master Gardener says.

Consider/Discuss

The most beautiful flower in a garden may look like a dead stick in early spring. Think back to some of the ugly things you may have done in your life. How has God helped you to grow so that you mature and blossom?
We tell stories about people in our minds. Have you ever had an “aha!” moment when you’ve said, “How could I have been so wrong about that person?”

Living and Praying with the Word

Good Gardener of us all, sometimes we look just like dead sticks or tiny weeds. But you have a vision of what we can become. Affirm our strengths. Challenge our weaknesses. Never let us stop growing. And today, assist us in revising our story about someone. Reveal to us where we are impatient or unmerciful or unkind or uncharitable, for we want to see others as you do.

Jan 12 2025

Scripture Study for

Because of God’s unparalleled and unchallenged power, the wicked are given opportunity to repent; divine forgiveness is not coerced (“Neither out of fear for anyone did you grant release for their sins” [Wisdom12:11]). God’s sovereign power ensures that God does not need to explain or justify either condemnation or forgiveness, and is “lenient to all.” There is no divine ego at stake, giving God freedom to act generously. This divine mercy is a lesson to God’s people, who learn that God’s justice is not opposed to kindness, but actually manifests itself in kindness. God’s absolutely free justice is ground for hope in God’s mercy.

Paul reminds the Romans that through the Spirit they have been adopted as God’s children and now “groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:23). The guarantee of this hope is the gift of the Spirit, who not only leads and transforms the faithful, but also helps them pray. Human beings, as the agents of God’s redemption of all of creation, are called to intercede with God, but as they are (for the time being) subject to corruption and death, they are weak and do not know exactly how to intercede. The Spirit dwelling in each believer makes up for this weakness by expressing the groaning of creation and “the holy ones,” and is heard by God.

Three parables illustrate the kingdom of heaven. At least on this side of eternity, it is a mix of the good and the bad. Readers have taken the weeds and the wheat to represent either individuals or the tendencies within each heart. In the first case, the warning is to let God sort out the sinners from the saints; judgment is God’s prerogative (Matthew 7:1–5). In the second case, the assurance is that while there are within us both the good and the bad, God is patient and, in God’s way, removes that which needs to be removed. The other two parables reflect the biblical insistence that God’s greatest works have small, hidden, unlikely beginnings. The kingdom (God) works in ways that we often cannot appreciate.

Jan 12 2025

Sowing Seed—Attentively

Farming has changed. Imagine, just for a moment, how Jesus might have told this parable differently today:

A sower went out to sow. The seed was the Word of God, precious and life-giving, too good to be scattered about without careful preparation. Therefore, the Sower paid careful attention to the soil: where it was rocky, he dug out the rocks; where it was too acidic or too alkaline, he adjusted the pH. Late in the autumn, he added three inches of manure and planted a cover crop, which he then turned under in early March. When planting season came, he set the seeds one by one in rows spaced six inches apart. Where the seeds dropped on the rocky path, he placed them back into the rich loam. He sent the sun to shine. He watered the seeds carefully. He asked the Holy Spirit to breathe on them each day. And before the weeds got too big, he hoed the soil, being careful not to damage the roots of the Word of God plants. With such personal care, the seeds grew tall and bore fruit, a hundred-fold to the glory of God.

What do you think? In Jesus’ original version, the message is that our receptivity to the Word of God is what matters. In the modern version, as God’s hands, we share in sowing the Word of God. Do we “scatter the Word of God” without attending to the soil? As much devotion needs to go into what is being received as to what we are saying. Sometimes we have to be willing to sacrifice our own assumptions to nurture the growth of others. More nourishment, a little less acidic, a bit of weeding . . . the care with which we plant the Word of God: it matters.

Consider/Discuss

We cannot make seeds grow; that is God’s job. But we can attend to the conditions within which growth is most likely to occur. What have you yourself seen? What “soil conditions” have most helped your faith to grow?
The reign of God is worth our best efforts. Yet throughout Christian history, because of this parable, “they’re not good soil” has excused ministry that has not borne fruit. (To be fair, some soil is so acidic that nothing will grow.) Rather than pointing a finger at others’ unreceptivity, how can we ourselves become more adept at preparing soil?

Living and Praying with the Word

Lord, you give us rain from heaven to water the earth. Your showers keep the earth soft. You want your word to bear fruit; you want it to achieve what you sent it for. We, in turn, want to serve you and your Word. Teach us what we need to know so that the words that we say will be living and effective. Holy Spirit, come to the aid of our weakness so that we bear fruit that will last.

Jan 12 2025

Scripture Study for

The first reading concludes chapters 40–55 of Isaiah, most of which come from the end of the exilic period. This section of Isaiah, which focuses on God’s intention to restore a people under judgment, begins with attention to God’s “word” as sure and effective (40:5, 8). What God announces will happen simply because it is the word of God. Now God promises that repentant sinners will find mercy because, unlike human beings, God does not nurse grudges but is instead “generous in forgiving” (55:7). Those who cannot believe in God’s mercy or in the divine intention to save are exhorted to trust in the always-efficacious word of God.

Continuing his line of argument from the last couple of weeks, Paul reflects on what it means to have died with Christ. Not only have the baptized, now “in Christ,” been released from slavery to sin and death, they have also been adopted as God’s children and heirs along with Christ. But this inheritance, which is their glorification, comes with a price, suffering (8:14–17), which is nevertheless a small price to pay for what awaits them. And not only them, but all of creation, which right now is also subject to death. Just as “the children of God,” who in their physical bodies share in the corruption of the created world, will one day experience the “redemption of our bodies,” so too will all creation be redeemed.

Jesus’ parable describes the three classic obstacles to doing the will of God: the evil one, who prevents the word from being truly heard; the flesh, that part of the human person that will abandon God’s will if it means struggle or trouble; and the world, those aspects of human society that are opposed to God, yet appealing to the flesh. Jesus speaks in enigmatic parables because the kingdom is only for those who are willing to put in the time and struggle to understand its proclamation, which cannot be appreciated on a single, simple hearing. The medium, then, is the message: the kingdom of God, in which the will of God is known and lived, is for those who are willing to sacrifice to enter it. This has been Jesus’ message from the beginning.

Jan 12 2025

Burdens Borne by Love

I lie in bed half awake and half asleep, thinking about “my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” In this blurred mental state, scenes flash through my head.

The burden is light? Ponderous chords from the musical Les Misérables say not. Prisoners sweat in the sun. Their backs are hopelessly bent. How can the yoke be easy? Oppression and misery and pain; there is so much bondage in the world.

In the darkness behind my eyelids, my mind zooms to yesterday. I see my friend. I recall the hospital bed in her living room: a time she will never forget. Her husband died in that bed while they were saying the rosary.

I see a young mother and her six-month-old son. Rocking and feeding, playing and interacting—all day and all night, she is yoked to that boy. Babies are hard work.

So why are some yokes easier to bear? There was a deep love between my friend and her dying husband. There was warmth in my daughter-in-law’s eyes yesterday when she looked into the eyes of my grandson. We will do difficult things for love. Love makes the burden light.

Sin makes the burden heavy. We cannot act as though everything is not so bad after all. Oppression is wrong. Misery harms. Prisoners matter. We carry the burdens of others—not nameless faces in a movie, but the needy folks who surround us. Yet the joy of discipleship is that we do not carry that weight alone.

Now I am ready to wake up. The love of this world is strong. The burden of the world is heavy. This is a paradox bigger than I can shoulder. I get out of bed, grateful that this world has a Savior, and more grateful that it is not me.

Consider/Discuss

God is the one who wants to save us, to carry our burdens, to set us free. How do we resist that? How do we burden ourselves down?
The joy of love makes life lighter. Who has helped you to carry your cross?

Living and Praying with the Word

Jesus, you ask us to be childlike, to trust you to carry our burdens. Love has lifted us up. Sin has torn us down. You know that we have experienced both. Lord, give us the strength this day to do all that we can today for whomever you put in our path. We are willing to work hard to make a difference in this world, but you are going to have to carry it, for we cannot. Come, Savior of the world, come!