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When we lose something important, the first question is: What am I looking for?
If you don't know what an object looks like, it's difficult to begin searching for it. Before you can find something, you need some idea of what you're trying to find. Jesus says that the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed—tiny, easy to overlook, hidden in plain sight. Imagine that I place a mustard seed into a bottle of muddy water and shake it vigorously. Then I hand it to you and say, "Find the seed." Most of us would say, "That's impossible." And if I gave you only ten seconds, you would be right. The water is clouded. Everything is moving. The seed is too small. But suppose I gave you a minute. Suppose we set the bottle down and simply waited. Gradually, the dirt would begin to settle. The water would become clearer. And slowly, the seed would appear. The seed was there the whole time. The problem was never the absence of the seed. The problem was our inability to see it. I think this is one of Jesus' deepest insights about the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom is not merely a future destination. It is not only something God will bring about someday. It is already here—already present, already growing. Like the mustard seed, it is often hidden beneath the turbulence of our lives. Our minds are constantly stirred up by worries, plans, memories, fears, regrets, and distractions. The water becomes cloudy, and because we cannot see clearly, we assume the seed is not there. But the seed remains. The spiritual life is learning how to recognize it. That is why prayer, silence, meditation, and attentive presence matter so much. At some point, each of us needs at least a glimpse of God's presence—a taste of it, an experience of it. Otherwise, how would we know what we are seeking? Sometimes that glimpse comes unexpectedly. Perhaps while listening to a beautiful piece of music. Perhaps while watching a sunset. Perhaps while sitting beside someone we love. Perhaps in prayer. For a brief moment, the constant stream of thoughts quiets. We are simply present—awake, attentive, receptive. That quality of attention is precious. It is the soil in which awareness of God grows. And like any skill, it requires practice. The breath can help us. Not because breathing is magical, but because it gathers our scattered attention into a single place: one breath, this moment, here and now. Little by little, the water settles. Little by little, we begin to notice what has been there all along. The mustard seed. The Kingdom of God, the presence of Christ already at work within us. Most spiritual growth is not about acquiring something new. It is about waking up to what is already present. The Kingdom is not hidden because God wishes to conceal it. The Kingdom is hidden because our lives are so noisy. So be still. Let the waters settle. And the seed will reveal itself. Each one of us carries a world of our own. We may think we live in the same world, but the way we inhabit it is unique to each person. The world our body dwells in is perceived and interpreted through our body and our mind.
What’s encouraging about this morning’s Gospel is that the good seeds—the children of the kingdom—are planted by God’s own hand. They are God’s inner presence within us. Let’s consider these children as the skillful habits, the virtues, that grow from the presence of God dwelling in us. (This is a different question from asking exactly who the children of the kingdom are, or whether we count ourselves among them.) In the world each of us inhabits, the world we call our life, these virtues are the seeds God has planted. What makes them good is that God’s presence is in them. They carry something that helps us move beyond ourselves: generosity, compassion, empathy, grace. So the good news is always the presence of God within us. But the parable also gives us hard news—there are weeds. These are sown by the evil one. On its face, this looks like a battle between good and evil. But let me tweak the frame a little and speak instead of the skillful and the unskillful. Here’s why. When we imagine weeds growing in this field we call our life, it can breed a kind of guilt that turns into self-punishment. And self-punishment rarely changes the unhealthy behavior. By attacking ourselves, we’re tricked into feeling we’ve somehow paid the price—when nothing has actually changed. So let’s reframe it: skillful and unskillful. And the way to tell one from the other is to take the long view—to look at where a behavior leads. Rage, for example, can become almost addictive. It makes us feel powerful, in control. But it can wound others and make the situation worse. Notice that Jesus’s own way of sorting weeds from wheat is itself deeply skillful. He tells the servants not to tear the weeds out. We cannot simply correct ourselves by force, and this is not about moral self-improvement either. We’re asked to let both grow until the harvest. And that means we first have to see what is in us. What inner voices am I listening to? What stress am I quietly creating for myself? Until we notice how these thoughts arise and shape us, we take them for granted and assume they’re simply true. I want us to rest in the presence of God within. In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul distinguishes life according to the flesh from life according to the Spirit. And “Spirit” here becomes wonderfully concrete when we remember that the word also means breath. By the breath of God, we live. So we anchor ourselves in that breath and watch how the weeds and the wheat come to grow—skillful thoughts and unskillful ones, skillful actions and unskillful ones. Life according to the Spirit begins with training our eyes to see what is happening inside. Once we can see them stirring within us, we can choose. Life according to the Spirit begins with training our eyes to see—and, seeing clearly, to choose the wheat. Choose what’s skillful. What if today's parable is Jesus's instruction on how to embody his gospel? Let me try the pop quiz one more time—this makes five. What is the message of Jesus's gospel? The kingdom of God has come near; repent. In other words: the presence of God is within you—so change the way you look at yourself, at others, and at the world.
If that is the gospel, then this parable is the instruction manual. It teaches us how to cultivate that very presence of God within us and embody it. Our whole body becomes the ground where the seed is planted. But there is one warning before we follow this instruction: no judgment about where the seed lands. The parable is not a verdict on people—it is a map of the terrain we all carry within us. Hold onto that warning; it shapes everything that follows. So here is my instruction to Jesus's instruction—how the presence of God can be cultivated, skillfully. 1. The Seed: What is this seed? It is God's presence in you. And what exactly is that presence? Is it tangible, or just a metaphor? What if I never sense God's presence—especially in those personal struggles I cannot share even with family and friends? Am I simply supposed to take it on faith that it's "just there"? No. God's presence is so tangible that our life physiologically depends on it. It is our breath. Without breath, we cannot sustain life. Scripture knew this long before we did: the Hebrew word ruach and the Greek word pneuma both mean breath, wind, and Spirit. God breathes into the first human's nostrils the breath of life; the risen Jesus breathes on his disciples and says, "Receive the Holy Spirit." Breath is the doorway to a presence that has always been in us—not only in our minds, but in our bodies. So let's try it. Take a deep breath in—one that relaxes you and energizes you. Don't worry about breathing out; the body will do the rest. Now close your eyes and do it again. How do you feel? What is it like? Do you notice the tension in your body easing a little? Do you feel drowsy? Has anybody yawned yet? 2. The Path: Not knowing this breath—not knowing that God's presence is as near as our next inhale—is the seed sown on the path. The seed lies on the surface, and life snatches it away before it can take root. But once we have tasted this calm, this quiet energy in mind and body, the seed has landed somewhere it can grow. 3. The Rocky Ground: We receive this practice with joy. But joy alone is not sustainable. We forget. Recall the moments when we panic—the first thing we forget is to breathe. Pausing to breathe is not merely a mental-health tip; it is a spiritual practice. It is like Jesus calming the storm while his friends panicked around him. The rocky ground, then, becomes an invitation: to create a gap between the trigger and our reaction of panic. We breathe in. We let God's breath clear the way. This doesn't make our troubles disappear, of course. But it clears our heads so we can deal with them skillfully. Panic has its place—the body sometimes needs that surge of blood pressure in genuinely life-threatening moments—but those moments are rare. Most hardship is not an emergency. It is an opportunity to root ourselves more deeply in the presence of God. 4. The Thorns: But we shouldn't stop there. We want to keep expanding this practice of embodying God's presence—because thorns grow quietly. Thorns are rarely dramatic temptations. More often they are the fatigue that never quite lifts. The restlessness we can't name. A quiet dissatisfaction humming beneath days that look, from the outside, perfectly fine. Jesus calls them "the cares of the world"—not scandalous sins, but ordinary weights that accumulate so gradually we never notice the seed being choked. In some ways these thorns are harder to recognize than the rocky ground. Panic announces itself; weariness doesn't. Thorns don't feel sharp. They press in softly from every angle until we sense a vague void—and we reach for something, anything, to fill it. But every filling gives birth to another void. Never satisfying. Never ending. Never fulfilling. So hear this: fatigue, restlessness, and dissatisfaction are not failures to be ashamed of. They are signals—the body and the heart telling us we have stopped breathing God's breath. The practice here is not to try harder. It is simply to notice, and to return to the breath. 5. The Good Soil: Jesus's metaphor of the different grounds is meant to help us take stock of where we are spiritually. And here is the good news hidden in it: it is not that some people are simply born with good soil, destined to bring forth a hundredfold, sixty, or thirty, while the rest of us are stuck with paths, rocks, and thorns. Rather, the soil of our hearts develops from one condition to the next. It is gradual progress. The path can be broken open. The rocks can be cleared, one breath at a time. The thorns can be uprooted. And the seed—God's presence, as close as your breath—is already sown. 6. The Harvest: When we come to realize our breath as the breath of God—when the presence of God is breathed in, every second of our lives—we embody the gospel of Jesus. We become his body and blood. Imagine: we become the host, consecrated every Sunday on this altar. As Augustine told his congregation as they came to the table, "Behold what you are and become what you receive.” And wherever we go, we carry this longing—that those around us might feel the presence of Christ through us. So breathe. And let it grow. Jesus paints a picture of children in the marketplace. One group pipes a wedding tune — no one dances. Another wails a funeral dirge — no one mourns. Nothing pleases them. "This generation," Jesus says, is like that.
Then he holds up two men, as different as two men can be. John the Baptist fasts in the wilderness — "He has a demon." Jesus eats and drinks with sinners — "Look at this glutton, this drunkard." Same crowd. Opposite messengers. Same rejection. That's the tell. If it were really about John's strictness, Jesus's freedom should have been a relief. If it were really about Jesus's company, John's discipline should have been a comfort. But no tune satisfies, because the problem was never the tune. When music is played and someone doesn't dance, it isn't always because they don't know how. Sometimes they know exactly how — they just refuse it, because it isn't the music they came to reject. We know this posture. It's the complaint of someone who was never really asked, content to stand at the edge and critique rather than step in and help carry something — not the same as feedback, which comes from someone with skin in the game. What Jesus names here is an objection that exists to protect itself from being moved, no matter what plays. And notice: this isn't aimed at the far-off or uninformed. It's aimed at people watching John and Jesus up close. So the failure isn't a failure of knowledge. It's a failure of heart — refusal dressed up as discernment. That's the hinge into what Jesus prays next: "I thank you, Father, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and revealed them to infants." Not the ignorant — the wise, the credentialed, the ones with the vocabulary to explain exactly why every tune is wrong. What closes them off isn't a lack of intellect. It's a heart too defended to be surprised. What opens the "infants" is precisely that they have nothing left to protect. So the real question isn't "did they get the facts about Jesus?" It's: what rules you? What governs your judgments, your appetites, your refusals — and where does that come from? Jesus doesn't answer with a new rulebook. The teachers of the law had already given the burdens — the fine print of a good life before God, tithed down to the herbs in the garden. Jesus goes underneath that. He doesn't offer a lighter list. He says, "Come to me... learn from me... for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls." Just before that, he prays: "No one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him." Jesus is the Son here. But sonship, as he lives it, isn't a possession locked to one man — it's a pattern, a way of being so transparent to God that the Father comes through undistorted. Jesus shows that pattern its full shape, then opens it outward, revealing it generously to whoever he wills. Not something anyone simply helps themselves to, but an invitation extended wherever this sonship appears — a door that opens toward people. Which is why what follows isn't "believe facts about me." It's "learn from me" — learn the posture that let this presence live so unguarded in him, so it might take shape wherever it's welcomed. That's what "rest for your souls" means. Not information about God, but a return to the place beneath the labels the world has stacked on you — back to some untouched place, back even to the beginning, to the wind of God sweeping over the waters before the world had words for anything. Jesus went into that depth and found the Father fully at home there. He calls us to the same depth, promising we'll find the same thing. Rest isn't self-discovery in isolation — it's discovering the ground beneath the self was always God, waiting to be noticed. That's why the Church has never let go of one small, ancient sentence: Dominus vobiscum — the Lord be with you. Said so often it can turn into furniture, recited without being heard. But it was never a pleasantry. It's a wake-up call to a room that keeps falling back asleep — the reminder that the tune Jesus plays is not John's tune or the world's, wedding or dirge, easy or hard. It is his own presence, offered again, right now, to people weary and carrying more than they were built to carry. The wise and clever will keep arguing about the music. The rest of us are just invited to notice who is playing it, and let ourselves, finally, be moved. The Lord be with you! |
Paul"...life up your love to that cloud [of unknowing]...let God draw your love up to that cloud...through the help of his grace, to forget every other thing." Archives
August 2026
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