THE POWER OF THE WORD
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
July 12, 2020
One Summer when I was in the Seminary, I spent 3 months
working as a kind of intern at a small parish in southern Colorado. The pastor
there, who graciously took me in, was a Benedictine monk from the nearby Abbey
in the town of Canyon City.
My eyes and ears were wide open during that experience,
because I knew I had a lot to learn about being a priest and living in a
pastoral setting. So I noticed things about how the pastor would engage
situations and parishioners, and how he spent his time, and what he chose to
prioritize. He was generous in sharing his wisdom and his home with me, and I
remain grateful to this day.
But one of the things I noticed, struck me as odd –
especially for a monk. When he was in the house, he always needed there to be
background noise. He had the bathroom electrical system rigged up so that every
time you turned on the light switch upon entering, the talk radio station would
come on. Since my bedroom was right next to the bathroom, I noticed it a lot.
And this was decades before ear pods became a thing, or electronic noise became
incessant among some people. I wondered why he felt the need for voices blabbing
as part of the environment, especially since it obviously didn’t matter what
those voices were saying at any given moment. I suppose that for the pastor,
there was some vague comfort taken just from knowing that he wasn’t all alone
in that small town and in that big house. He lived away from his monastery, so
I guess that made some sense.
I recalled that
experience while I was reflecting upon today’s Scripture readings, because they
also invite us to consider the distinction between really hearing the summons
to God’s kingdom, on one hand, and listening to the words as just a kind of
inconsequential soothing noise, on the other hand. The prophet Isaiah today is
emphatic that, when God speaks, something of importance is supposed to result
among those who listen. “My word will not return to me void,” he says. He
compares God’s word to the rain and the snow. Those aren’t just weather events
to be observed. They change the world – especially in a semi-arid climate like
Israel, where precipitation means the difference between eating and starving;
between having crops in the fields or not.
God’s word is not “background noise” to soothe our spirits.
God’s word is a summons to make our lives different, more just, more peaceful.
Jesus says much the same thing in today’s Gospel, in the parable of the Sower and
the seeds. God’s expectation is that the world changes as the result of His
sowing, even though very many who hear the Word – whether here in church or
elsewhere – won’t take it seriously enough to do anything about it. We consider
it background noise.
But Jesus also tells us that it doesn’t take very many of
those who truly listen, hear, and understand to make up for what the rest
didn’t or won’t do. The seed that falls on good ground, he says, will yield a
reward of a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold. The challenge for us is truly to
believe it – and to order our lives on that belief. That can require a fair
amount of trust in times when God’s Kingdom doesn’t seem to be carrying the day
– like now maybe.
In the middle of this Gospel, Jesus’s disciples ask why he
speaks in parables, and there a right way and a wrong way to understand his
response. The wrong way would be to interpret Jesus as saying that some people
have been given some sort of infused divine understanding by God’s own
inscrutable and random choice, while other simpletons have been left out.
That’s not it. In fact, our church formally defined that sort of thinking as
the heresy of “Gnosticism” almost 2,000 years ago.
The right way to understand Jesus’s response is to recognize
that many people hear the same words from his mouth that we hear, and decide
that they really aren’t very important, or at least not as important as other
shiny things.
Parables are intended deliberately to be ambiguous – open to
many possible meanings depending upon the life situations of those who hear
them. Like us.
The seed in this parable is not corn or beans or flowers for
us in Minnesota in the year 2020. Other than Deacon Al Schroeder, I’m not aware
of anyone here at Pax Christi who is an actual farmer today. But that doesn’t
mean that those words are just noise or entertaining stories.
It means the demand to think about what we are called to be
and to do, both individually and as a community in concrete response to the Gospel
word that we have just heard, in our own time and place – a time of COVID-19,
entrenched in racism, division, and political hatred, violence, despair. This Gospel
speaks to us now. When Isaiah and Jesus talk about listening but not hearing,
seeing but not understanding, they are speaking about those who hear these
vital words and who think of them as background noise, demanding nothing – as
radio chatter in the bathroom.
Our Scriptures today are a summons to Christian
responsibility, however and wherever our circumstances require it – in our
homes, our neighborhoods, our relationships, our church, our nation, or our
world. Boy do we need it now.
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