Now’s not bad, but April or May is really the right time for this parable of the sower and the seed. That’s the time of year when you can feel the picture that’s being presented here. It’s when you go out and look at your car or your outdoor furniture and run your hand along it and you see that yellow film of millions of grains of pollen, and you may be sneezing or you may not be, but what you notice is that there are so many you can’t possibly count them. Or maybe you see the field of dandelions across the street from my house, placed there just to dare me to treat the lawn, the wind blows every spring and the air is just thick with all those seeds, just flying everywhere, without regard to where they’re going to fall. Enough of them seem to get where they’re going, and just through sheer numbers, things happen.
This parable, among the other messages it has for us, is here to remind us that God is like that. Not just in nature, whether it’s here or in the sea or even in the desert, but in God’s nature. That total generosity is the way God is.
Sometimes people talk about God, and the way God works, as if the opportunities to see him, or to understand him, or to follow him, are rare, events that come along once in a great while, maybe in special people who are granted visions or devoted people who pray all the time. The implication for us is that somehow, if we’re looking the other way, if we’re preoccupied, we’ll miss it, and it may not come along again for a long, long while.
But that’s not the way God is. What we’re really doing when we think God is like that is projecting the way we are onto the way God is. We’re the ones who are so careful about where we plant things, making sure that we only work in a familiar place that’s going to be well fertilized. We’re the ones who are worried we’re going to make a mistake, waste our efforts, get burned for extending friendship, or forgiveness, or money, or time a little too often. We’re surrounded with advice that suggests to us that we shouldn’t be dumb and waste our seed, that there are people and places around us who won’t yield back anything. Of course, the advice is right: we’re going to get burned sometimes. Or rather, our seed won’t turn out to have done much. God could look at the world, and our lives, the same way. But apparently, God wants to resist that temptation.
God’s generosity isn’t an easy concept. It’s not easy to apply to our own lives, maybe because we don’t often see it in God. And yet, the gospel tells us it is there. It takes practice, or insight, to be able to see the world around us as countless individual events, each with its own significance. Even in those places where God seems absent, somehow, if what a seed is is pure opportunity, the word of God in the world today, there is opportunity there for us. Every time we see someone failing to make a success of their life, or someone with an illness that has changed them forever, all the events of life we can barely keep track of, we see suffering, yes, but no one can doubt that isn’t God reaching out to us, looking for us to be someplace new, to be something other than what we are or to understand what we are. God’s generosity takes strange forms, strange to us, not much like a field of flowers at all, on the surface, but just as full of a picture of God, speaking to us.
It’s true we might miss it, might not be ready for it, might not even notice it, but the air is just thick with it. St. Paul says in that second reading that creation around us is constantly in labor pains, just groaning to give birth to something. Our stingy life is not God’s life, not at all the one that God is out there throwing open to us.