LEARNING TO SOW AS JESUS DID
It wasn’t easy for Jesus to carry his project forward. Real soon he met with criticism and rejection. His word didn’t have the welcome he might have expected. Among his closest followers discouragement and mistrust were beginning to be awakened. Would it be worth it to keep working alongside of Jesus? Wasn’t all that an impossible utopia?
Jesus told them what he was thinking. He recounted for them the parable of a sower to make them see the realism with which he was working and the unquenchable faith that encouraged him. Both things. There’s certainly a fruitless work that can go to waste, but God’s final project won’t fail. There’s no room for discouragement. We need to keep sowing. At the end there will be an abundant harvest.
Those who heard the parable knew that he was speaking about himself. That was Jesus. He sowed his work wherever he saw some hope that it could germinate. He sowed acts of goodness and mercy even in the most unexpected places: among people very far from religion.
Jesus sowed with the realism and the trust of a farmer of Galilee. They all knew that the sowing would end up lost in more than one place on those lands that we so uneven. But that discouraged no one: no farmer stopped sowing for that reason. What’s important was the final harvest. Something similar happens with God’s reign. There’s no lack of obstacles and resistances, but God’s power will produce fruit. It would be absurd to stop sowing.
In Jesus’ Church we don’t need harvesters. Ours isn’t to harvest successes, conquer the street, dominate society, fill churches, impose our religious faith. What’s lacking to us are sowers. Followers of Jesus who sow wherever words of hope and acts of compassion are happening.
This is the conversation we need to promote today in our midst: go about passing from the obsession of «harvesting» to the patient work of «sowing». Jesus left us the inheritance of the parable of the sower, not that of the harvester.
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
