15th Sunday of Ordinary Time
The Australian social researcher, Hugh Mackay once gave a reflection on how difficult it is to get other people to hear what we are trying to say.[1] As he observed, how many times have we said in frustration, “If I’ve told them once, I’ve told them a hundred times. It just seems to go in one ear and out the other!” As Mackay says, what we may be really saying, of course, is, “Guess what, I know a message that never works. It doesn’t seem to matter how often I say it; it never has any effect on the people I’m talking to. But I don’t give up easily. It’s such a good message that I’m determined to get into their heads, so I keep trying. Fifty times, 60 times, 100 times. No worries. Sooner or later it will get through!”
The logic operating is that communication is all about saying what we want to say and that our message has some kind of innate power which, if unleashed in the head of another person, will cause an amazing transformation to take place: once they’ve heard what we have to say, people will think what we want them to think, believe what we want them to believe – and most importantly – to do what we want them to do. Mackay points out that this is, however, “communication by injection.” It is based on the assumption that messages put meaning and ideas into people, whereas what usually happens is precisely the opposite. People put their own meaning into messages, based on the ideas which are already in their minds.
There is a law of communication, then, which runs like this: it’s not what our message does to the other person, but what the other person does with our message that will determine whether or not we’ll communicate with each other. The really powerful part of the communication process is not the message itself, but the mind of the person on the receiving end who can accept or reject what is said and make it mean what he or she wants it to mean. This is why two people will give very different accounts of a meeting they both attended, or of a film they saw, or of a sermon they heard.
One of the hardest lessons to learn about communication is that other people are generally not in a state of eager anticipation to hear what we’re going to say. Most of us are more interested in what we think than in what anyone else thinks, and it’s much easier to defend our own ideas than to entertain the ideas of another person which always carries the risk that we might have to change our own minds.
Not listening is far more comfortable than listening. Listening is a dangerous, courageous business which is why we are good at avoiding it. It means we have to empty ourselves in order to receive something, putting aside our own ideas, our own fears.
God wishes to communicate with us. God’s communication is in many forms all around us. But that message, like any other, is not in some form that it simply injects into our minds. God’s message like any other, in order to be truly heard, means we must listen. And listening is not easy: it is one of the hardest things for us to do. It means that we will need to stop, it means that we will have to give time, it means that we will have to ask questions to get to its full meaning; it means that we will have to let go for a while of all our own resistances. Yet, when we do listen, the outcome can be truly surprising.
This then brings us to the parable we have heard in the Gospel today. We are well used to placing the focus of interpretation on the soil. We identify with one type of soil or other. But let us also focus on the beginning and the end of the parable, since the beginning and the end of this parable are what gives it its particular edge. The parable begins with the sower and ends with the yield. For anyone broadcasting seed, the actions of the sower are unusual. He is broadcasting the seed everywhere: there is a recklessness, almost a carelessness about his sowing. Seed was not cheap in ancient Palestine. A wise sower would be careful where the seed landed. He would not want to waste any of it. But God, the Divine Sower, is not so wise. There is lavishness, a carefreeness, in his action. God sows everywhere, yes, even in those places which at first seem most unlikely to be able to yield. There is no great discrimination that occurs in the mind of God the Sower. There is seed in abundance; he is not miserly, counting the cost. There is plenty to go around. It is the very carefreeness and generosity of God that yields an abundant harvest at the end of the sowing. Generosity begets generosity. Much is given, and much is shared. The generosity of the sower is linked to the generosity of the yield at the end of the parable. In ancient Palestine, it was a yield of 2-8% that was considered good. Here Jesus is talking about 30, 60, 100-fold. It is unheard of to a Palestinian farmer. Jesus is suggesting that, mirroring the generosity of the Sower, a ready field will yield more than what could ever be imagined. And the field that is ready, is the heart that is truly seeking to listen.
Do we dare to listen to God’s communication? It means that we may need to change. Do we really want to?
[1] Hugh Mackay, “Beat of a different eardrum,” The Australian Weekend Review, 1-2 October 1994.