15th Sunday of Ordinary Time, A July 12, 2026
Fr. Alexander Albert St. Mary Magadalen, Abbeville, LA
We’re practically surrounded by farms here, so tell me this: when farmers plant crops, do they just throw the seeds all over the place? Just let them fall wherever as they wander through their fields? What I see are neatly laid-out rows, carefully dug, turned over, well-watered, and seeded in very intentional way. So, what’s the deal with this sower?
He seems unconcerned about the practical and brutal realities of the natural world. Does he not know that “creation was made subject to futility” as St. Paul puts it in the second reading? Does this parabolic sower not know the story of Genesis where God says “cursed is the ground” and “thorns and thistles it shall bear for you?” We don’t live in the garden of Eden anymore where casually tossing seed on the ground would work. Work was always part of the plan, but after Original Sin, work – like planting crops – requires toil and now involves risk.
So, does this seed-sower still see the world like it was before Original Sin? Yes, actually. At least, that’s part of it. Jesus even calls out the disconnect between his parables and how people interpret them: “they look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand.” The crowds look at Jesus’ teachings with fallen eyes, from within the limited perspective of the world broken by sin and death. Jesus is not fallen. He is the perfect man. As Son of God, he existed before original sin. We know the broken form of the world, but Jesus sees that and how it was meant to be. To understand him, we must see the original design.
I’m not saying we ignore the pragmatic realities of a broken and sinful world. Clothing, after all, only exists because of original sin, but Jesus definitely still wears clothes and expects us to. The New Testament is pretty serious about modesty. At the same time, however, if you only ever see a broken car, you would have a hard time knowing how to make it run again. Making a car run requires you to at least be able to imagine what it was like before it was broken.
When Jesus uses parables, he often does it to make us think, to make us work for it so that we appreciate the value of his lessons. He also uses parables to try to shift our perspective out of old, sinful, and fallen ways of thinking into a more heavenly and eternal perspective. Christians should be practical about the fallen world, but we should also know the original plan well enough to be able to correctly evaluate what truly matters in this life, broken and fallen though it is.
Jesus does this with his teaching on marriage. If all you know is the current, broken version of the world, it’s not easy to see why polygamy, divorce & remarriage, and artificial contraception are wrong. From a survival point-of-view, anything that allows you to reproduce more or gather more resources should be good. But Jesus says “from the beginning, it was not so.” In order for an argument like “from the beginning” to have any effectiveness, you have to have some awareness of and some appreciation for what the “beginning” is.
With careful effort, you can make a decent argument even in a fallen world that we shouldn’t mess with the basic formula of one man-one woman for life. And yet, the reason Christianity holds its ground on that isn’t sociology. It is perspective. We know how the metaphorical “car” of marriage is supposed to run – so we can look at the ways the world tries to “fix” marriage and say “yeah, that’s not gonna work.” Even in a fallen world, the original design still matters. Following the original plan often costs us in this broken world, but the long-term value of an eternal perspective ultimately outweighs those costs.
So, when the sower goes trapsing across the field scattering seeds without a plan, it’s a reference to how farming was supposed to work. When only some seed bears fruit, it’s a reference to the truth of our current broken situation. It is a parable, not literal farming advice, so don’t stop using science and planning to run your farms well. The point is that God makes us fruitful when we trust his design more than our own limited perspective. Besides, Jesus tells us what this parable is ultimately about: spread the gospel everywhere!
Don’t rely on worldly ways of thinking in order to share the gospel well. I’m not saying we don’t plan for evangelization. I’m not saying we don’t consider practical things like when, where, and how we can best reach unconverted hearts. But I am saying that a relationship with Jesus Christ – much like God’s plan for marriage – is best understood with a divine perspective and not a worldly one.
10 years in priestly ministry and I’m still amazed at the unexpected ways some people convert. All the time, people come to the Church not because of a good retreat, a clever homily, or a well-planned evangelization strategy – important and useful though those things are. Sometimes they convert seemingly out of nowhere because of a silly anime character made by the Vatican or because of a fantasy novel based on stories a dad told his children. Just this past week we met a woman who dramatically returned to her faith because she just so happened to go on vacation in Italy last year. While googling “what to do in Italy,” she discovered that the 2025 Jubilee was taking place – she had never heard of it til then – and when researching how to participate, she reconnected with the sacraments so deeply that she joyfully stopped a random seminarian in a grocery store parking lot just to say how happy she was to be Catholic and to see another Catholic.
People claim our teaching on contraception is hard to accept, but I know of people who became Catholic because of it. Catholics online today mock Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on AI just like Catholics 100 years ago mocked Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical on industrialization, just wages, and labor unions. And yet both of those teachings draw people into the Church to this very day.
So, let me put it bluntly. If you want to go to heaven, you need to accept the gospel, the whole gospel. That means you also need to proclaim it both by words and by the way you live. If you want to proclaim the gospel, then the most important thing isn’t your strategy. It’s your authenticity. Yes, learn the techniques and make the plans, but don’t forget what the gospel ultimately is: truth and love.
Truth, any truth taught and lived with love can lead people to the gospel, no matter how difficult or “impractical” that truth might seem. Church teaching on caring for the environment, on abortion, on a just wage, on contraception, on immigration, on marriage, on racism, on the liturgy… lots of people pick and choose “sides” from that list of teachings while claiming to be Catholic. That will make your heart into a hardened path or into rocky soil or fill it with thorny weeds.
Use prudence, but never forget you belong to a heavenly garden, not an earthly one. Sow the seed of the gospel in every part of your heart. Strive to accept every teaching of the Church. If you have questions about what is official teaching and what isn’t, go to the catechism, not google AI! And as you go through this fallen world, strive to scatter every seed of the gospel in every part of the world.
Though that kind of life might cause us to suffer, remember how the world was supposed to be. By God’s grace, even the soil itself hopes to “share in the glorious freedom of the children of God.” We are those children and if we trust that hope, if we sow the seed of the gospel with heavenly abandon, then we too shall bear fruit “a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.”