13 June 2021

Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Today’s readings for Mass involve a great deal of agricultural imagery. In the first reading from Ezekiel (17:22-24), the Lord uses the image of a gardener planting a cedar cutting to describe how he will bring the exiles back to Israel, and in the Gospel (Mark 4:26-34), Jesus offers his listeners two parables to describe the kingdom of God, one of a sower who scatters seed and the other about a mustard seed. In each case, the growth of the plant is mysterious or miraculous: both the cedar cutting and the mustard seed become plants that are home to all kinds of birds, and the land on which the seed was sown yields fruit “of its own accord.” The fruitfulness of these different plants is abundant.

Today’s readings can be helpfully applied to our own lives in two ways. First, as Christians, we are called to bear fruit in our lives through prayer and acts of charity, so that we “flourish like the palm tree” or grow “like a cedar of Lebanon,” as the Psalmist says (Ps 92:13-14). Second, we can recognize that any fruit we bear is first and foremost God’s work within us and is not something which we can credit to our own efforts,  since it is God alone who is able to “bring low the high tree, lift high the low tree, wither up the green tree, and make the withered tree bloom” (Ez 17:24). We can examine ourselves, then, to see how our lives are bearing fruit, and we can ask the Lord to grant us his grace to be fruitful Christians.