The Gospel for Sexagesima unlocks the parables and the Kingdom of Heaven. The parables of Our Lord are not Aesop’s fables. They do seek to teach the world. They are meant instead to hide the Gospel from unbelievers, that seeing they may not see and hearing they may not understand. But to those whom it has been given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom the parables reveal how God is not like us. And that is the key: God is not like us. The exegetical fruit of the parables is finding the distinctions not the similarities.
The world sees this parable and thinks the point is that a harvest comes where the soil is good, that Christians believe because they have good and noble hearts. They think the point is to use the types of soil as a categories for different types of men and figure out where they fit. They are wrong.
The point is the Sower does not sow as men sow. No man sows seed where it cannot possibly grow, on the trodden path, rocky ground, or weed-infested patch. Men choose good soil and then prepare it further that they would not waste the seeds. This Sower is as foolish as a rancher who dies for cows. He is seemingly reckless.
But the seed is the Word of God. It has the power within itself to transform bad soil and to produce a harvest. What else does it mean that Our Lord receives eats with sinners? And we to whom the mysteries of the Kingdom have been given, where do we fit, what sort of soil are we? We are all the types. We are attacked by the devil, suffer temptation, and endure the threats of cares, riches, and the pleasures of life. We have succumbed, in one way or another, at one time or another, to all of them. But we are also transformed by grace, watered with Baptism, and declared good and noble. Here is the chief mystery, the main foolishness, of the Kingdom: it comes by grace, undeserved and unexpected. Who would have thought that our sinful hearts could become Temples of the Holy Spirit, that the Lord Jesus Christ would enter into us in His Flesh, that we would dare to address the God of Abraham as “Our Father?” Us? Inwardly turned, full of lust and greed, of fear and selfishness? How can we possibly be loved by Christ, forgiven our sins, made new in Him? By grace, and by nothing else. And by that grace the Lord reaps a harvest: faith and good works.
