Receiving communion is our response to God’s Word. Receiving Christ is akin to God planting a seed of grace in us. This seed is planted to bear fruit for God’s Kingdom. This insight is revealed when, at the end of Mass, you are dismissed with words like “Go and announce the Gospel of the Lord.”1 Being sent in this way is what makes the Church truly apostolic. In Greek, “apostle” simply means one who is sent. Apostolicity is much more than a controversial and likely dubious historical claim.
Mass is the privileged place for reading, hearing, discussing, and responding to God’s word. It is how Christ continues Christ to sow the word of the Kingdom. Perhaps we can think of the Liturgy of the Word, which immediately precedes the Liturgy of the Eucharist, as the way we prepare the soil of our hearts to fruitfully receive communion. Of course, Jesus is really and truly present in the proclamation of word as he is the consecrated bread and wine. This means the readings we hear are in no way extraneous but are essential to the Eucharist. Preaching, when done well, aids our comprehension and appropriation of the divine word.
Our reading from Isaiah tells us God’s word does not return empty but accomplishes what God desires.2 Elsewhere in scripture we learn God desires “everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth.”3 As those who profess not only to believe in God but to follow his Son, each of us should ask ourselves, “What do I desire?” We then need to examine your honest answer in light of God’s desire, asking, "Is my desire God's desire?"
It is worth noting that in today’s Gospel Jesus addresses a large crowd. It was so large that to effectively teach them, Jesus had to abandon the beach for a boat, which could be pushed away from the shore, creating a kind of amphitheater allowing him to address the entire crowd. These were people eager to hear this man from Nazareth.
When reading the scriptures we often miss details that are both obvious and important. What is easy to miss in today’s Gospel is how provocative Jesus’s message is in its given context. Perhaps more provocative is the Lord's reply to the question posed by his disciples concerning his reason for teaching in parables.
It seems that the concern of Jesus’s disciples about him teaching in parables is that people might fail to understand the message he intends to convey. Not only that but, as subsequent Christian history amply demonstrates, parables can be misunderstood and misapplied. Beyond this concern, there is another question that arises from what might be described as our meta-perspective. If it is God’s desire that “everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth,” does Jesus really want to hide the truth from some people?
At least from a Christian perspective, this is something of rhetorical question the answer to which is “No.” Jesus wants those who hear the word of the Kingdom, especially those who listen grudgingly and whose hearts have grown crass, to hear with new ears and understand with their hearts. In other words, he desires that upon hearing the word of the Kingdom they will repent and turn back to God and by doing so be healed.
The Sower at Sunset, by Vincent Van Gogh, 1888
Just prior to receiving communion, we humbly acknowledge our unworthiness and profess that if the Lord will but say the word we will be healed.4 Jesus speaks the word of healing as often as we ask. But to receive it we must listen. Otherwise, you are just taking it for granted, being presumptuous.
Sadly, we often hear without listening. Listening requires attention and intention. To really listen to someone takes a lot of energy. Again, given our meta-perspective, which, in this instance, we gain by “hearing” Jesus unpack the parable for his disciples, think about how it might seem if all you heard was the parable without the explanation. Holding the answer card makes Alex Trebek seem like a Jeopardy master. Without what you heard you likely would not know what the parable is about. What is the seed? To what does the soil correspond? Through the scripture Jesus pulls you close, revealing to you the mysteries of the Kingdom.
This meta-perspective is another way of referring to what Jesus indicates when he says to his disciples “many prophets and upright men yearned to see the things you see… and to hear the things you hear…”5 By your hearing today, you are privileged in that you are one of the disciples for whom Jesus breaks this parable down. This privilege contains the same call to discipleship, the call to yield fruit for God’s Kingdom. So, you are without excuse except to say, "I wasn't listening."
How is the soil of your heart cultivated? At least in part and only in part, the answer consists of one-word: suffering. Christians can endure suffering because we have hope. It often bears noting that hope lies beyond optimism. According to Saint Paul, hope is gained by the conviction that our present sufferings cannot hold a candle to “the coming glory that will be revealed to us.”6 The sufferings to which the apostle refers include even those that arise from our failures.
That the suffering to which Paul refers is all-inclusive is indicated by his insistence that “creation was made subordinate to pointlessness” by the Creator.7 God subjected creation to futility so he could liberate it from death and sin. Fundamentally, this is why hope lies beyond optimism. Without hope existence is absurdity. The difference between optimism and hope is the difference between seeking to realize your own desires and bearing fruit for God's Kingdom. As Americans, we've grown far too lazy in seeing what I want as God's will for my life.
At the great Easter Vigil, in the ancient hymn known as the Exsultet, sung at the beginning of this most important of all liturgies, the Church proclaims: “O truly necessary sin of Adam... O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a redeemer!”8
While it is assured, our redemption is still a work in progress as is creation itself. The “turn” about which Jesus speaks is often a slow one, one that includes turning back like “'The dog returns to a dog to its own vomit' and 'The bathed sow returns to wallowing in the mire,'” to cite scripture.9 Keeping in mind we’re often our own worst enemy, let us not forget what Paul wrote later in the same chapter from which our second reading is taken: “If God is for us, who can be against us?”10
God is for us! This is the Good News, my friends. Let us receive it today anew so that by grace we reflect the Father’s love given in and through his Son, which reflection is the work of the Holy Spirit. To this end and confident in God’s promise that his word will not return empty, let’s continue to cultivate the soil of our hearts by listening to, reading, praying with, and responding to God’s word, listening with our hearts, humbly letting ourselves be provoked, challenged, changed, converted. This is how you bear fruit for God’s Kingdom.
1 Roman Missal, The Order of Mass, The Concluding Rites, sec. 144.↩
2 Isaiah 55:11 in Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, Prophets, 808.↩
3 1 Timothy 2:4.↩
4 Roman Missal, The Order of Mass, The Communion Rite, sec. 132.↩
5 Matthew 13:17 in David Bentley Hart The New Testament: A Translation, 25.↩
6 Romans 8:18 in The New Testament, 303.↩
7 Romans 8:20 in The New Testament, 303.↩
8 Roman Missal, The Easter Vigil, sec. 29.↩
9 2 Peter 2:22.↩
10 Romans 8:31.↩
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