Dear Friends,
I am having a few days off at the moment while the School is on holiday and I am battling with the nasty cough and cold that has afflicted some of you. Thank you to all of you who are keeping the flag flying, especially during these very cold days. If there is an urgent need in the next few days, please phone Judy Tait at the Parish Office or People’s Warden Claire Anstice (wk 364 1218, hm 352 4854), or one of the clergy.
On Sunday 27 July, a week into the new term, the School community will join us at the 10:00 am Mass to celebrate the School Founders’ Day. We are delighted that the Revd Mandy Neil will return to preach on that day.
Don’t forget the Parish Review event on the morning of Saturday 16 August, to be led by the Revd Paul Dyer. It aims to help us see where our Church community is going, as well as to satisfy the Diocesan requirement that we be reviewed every few years.
The parable of the sower, which is today’s Gospel reading, seems very cut and dried as we have learnt it as children. But as with all the parables of Jesus, it can go on producing new nourishment for us all. Here is what Fr Brendan Byrne, an Australian Jesuit, says of it:
“ As is typical of the parables told by Jesus, the sower parable moves directly from ordinary, everyday life. In the Palestine of his day the sower scattered the seed around in fairly casual fashion. By no means all the seed landed in good soil. Quite a bit could land in the three situations –on a path, on rocky ground, among thorns – where it suffered the fate described. Nonetheless, the hearers are no doubt arrested and struck by the waste the three losses entailed. The surprise comes in the three outcomes for the seed that falls upon good soil; hundredfold is a fantastic yield; even thirty-fold seems away over the top.
Jesus ‘sows’ the word of the kingdom in a way that is similarly casual and ‘wild’. In a great many hearts the word suffers the fate of the seed in the three losses. But when it finds a receptive heart and truly strikes home, the way is set for the arrival of the kingdom in the extraordinary fullness described… Like the sower, Jesus continues to throw the word about widely because of his confidence that when and where the ‘seed’ does strike home, the harvest for the kingdom is so overwhelmingly great as to more than compensate for all the earlier losses. The parable can stand, then, by itself as a statement of hope, of confidence in the liberality and power of God.”
May God bless you all.
Peter Williams
