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Sowing seed in good soil

By Father Dennis Meinen
View from the scooter

We may be surprised the size of the harvest at the end of time.

Did you ever have a similar experience? I remember when my brother and I were in the early years of grade school. We used to watch cartoons on TV and we always liked to watch the cartoon “Popeye” because we were always impressed with how powerful he was after eating spinach. One day we begged Mom to buy some spinach so we could try it too. And when the big day came and “it” was placed on our plate, we quickly discovered that it neither looked like nor tasted like the food Popeye ate to make him strong. It was then that we heard the phrase, “If you put it on your plate, you eat it.” I don’t believe my mother ever knew this and doesn’t care now in heaven, but we flushed it down the toilet the first chance we had when mom went out to the kitchen.

The word “waste” means to get rid of something that is still useful. Probably many of us think of food being wasted, although our parents said, “If you put it on your plate, you eat it.”

Remember in a recent Sunday Gospel we heard about a farmer who went out to sow seed. He seemed to be wasteful because three-fourths of his seed that was sown was sown on a footpath, rocks and among thorns. It would be the same as if our farmers let Father Meinen do their planting. But something happened that we didn’t expect. We would think that the one-fourth of the seed that was sown on good soil would produce a small yield. But this is not what happened. We’re told that the harvest from only one-fourth of the seed was thirty, sixty and a hundred fold. The obvious question is, “How could this happen?”

The answer is that that’s the way it works in the reign of God, which is a mystery. While people might think that three-fourths of humanity might seem to be wasted, because they include those who are disabled or poor or can’t offer anything useful to humanity, God will work in our lives and He will produce an incredible yield. According to the Gospel writer Matthew, God was extravagantly wasteful, but we may be surprised the size of the harvest at the end of time.

We haven’t made it to harvest time yet and God is still in the process of sowing. We have before us the example of Jesus. God the Father was extravagant in giving us Jesus in the flesh. Jesus, in turn, sowed
extravagantly in calling everyone to follow Him, even the disabled. What might look like an extravagant waste will yield a rich harvest even though we haven’t seen the results in over 2,000 years. The message for us today is, “Heed what you hear—and be patient.