The Seed Has To Die

Nobody plants a seed expecting to get the seed back. You push a bare grain of wheat into the dirt in October and walk away, and what comes up in April looks nothing like what you buried. Paul says that is how the resurrection works, and then he says the harder thing: what you sow does not come to life unless it dies. Today’s readings put two sowers in front of you. In the First Reading, Paul answers the Corinthian who wants to know how a corpse could possibly come back, and his whole answer is a seed. In the Gospel, Jesus tells a crowd about a farmer who throws seed on a path, on rock, among thorns, and on good soil, then explains that the seed is the word of God and the soil is you. Today the Church also remembers Saint Januarius, a bishop beheaded around the year 305, whose blood the city of Naples has kept in a sealed glass vial for 17 centuries because Catholics believe a body is worth keeping. Put the three together, and the question gets personal. God has already sown something in you. Whether it dies and rises, or just dies, depends on the ground. So which ground are you?

The Readings

First Reading: 1 Corinthians 15:35-37, 42-49

But some one will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain.

So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual which is first but the physical, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.

Gospel: Luke 8:4-15

And when a great crowd came together and people from town after town came to him, he said in a parable: “A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell along the path, and was trodden under foot, and the birds of the air devoured it. And some fell on the rock; and as it grew up, it withered away, because it had no moisture. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns grew with it and choked it. And some fell into good soil and grew, and yielded a hundredfold.” As he said this, he called out, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

And when his disciples asked him what this parable meant, he said, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but for others they are in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand. Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. The ones along the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, that they may not believe and be saved. And the ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy; but these have no root, they believe for a while and in time of temptation fall away. And as for what fell among the thorns, they are those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature. And as for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bring forth fruit with patience.”

Scriptural Analysis

Paul has spent the first half of chapter 15 proving that the dead are raised. Now a new objector steps up, and Paul plays both parts: an imaginary student and a teacher who can answer that student without insulting the actual Corinthians in the room. The student asks two things: how the resurrection happens and what kind of body shows up. Paul takes them in reverse order, opening with “You fool,” which Collins notes is the only time that word appears in the letter.^[1] The question wasn’t stupid in the first century. Greek thinkers, at their most generous, believed the soul survived. A body coming back was a Jewish idea, and even the rabbis who held it argued about whether the risen would be clothed or naked, perfect or imperfect.^[2]

So Paul reaches for a seed. Even a dull student knows a grain of wheat has to go into the ground and rot before anything grows, and that what comes up looks nothing like the kernel that went in. George Montague catches the two things Paul is doing at once. First, God gives the body. A gardener would say the seed produces the plant; Paul says this miracle of nature is God’s work, and he knows the comparison limps at one point, since a dead human body does not sprout on its own. That is the point. What God does for the wheat in the order of nature, he can and will do for you in the order of grace.^[3] Second, the acorn becomes an oak and stays an oak. “My risen body will be my own, not someone else’s,” Montague writes. You don’t lose your identity by rising; you find it in a new way.^[4] Collins adds something I’d never noticed. Paul’s three analogies, seeds, then kinds of flesh, then sun, moon and stars, march through the third, fifth and sixth, and fourth days of Genesis 1. Paul is quietly telling the Corinthians that the resurrection is a new creation, done by the same God who gave every creature its body the first time.^[5] The Lectionary skips the stars, but the word Paul uses for their differing brightness is doxa (DOX-ah), glory, the word he will use for the risen body a few verses later, and Montague draws the pastoral point: each of the faithful will differ in glory like the stars, and every one of us will give God a glory for all eternity that no one else can give.^[6]

Then come the four contrasts, and Collins points out that each one is six words in Greek, three on each side, built as a crescendo.^[7] Sown perishable, raised imperishable: the body that decomposes will never decompose again. Sown in dishonor, raised in glory: even the most beautiful body becomes dishonorable once decay sets in, and Montague stresses that the resurrection transforms the body into the kind of brilliance the disciples saw on Tabor (Matthew 17:2), which a mere resuscitation could never do. Sown in weakness, raised in power: the risen Jesus passed through locked doors and disappeared at will, and Paul does not tell us what else the risen body can do.^[8] The fourth contrast is the one the whole passage was built to deliver. “Sown a physical body, raised a spiritual body.” Montague is blunt that the RSV’s “physical” does violence to the Greek. The word is psychikon (psoo-khee-KON), “soulish,” a body run by a soul, which is what Genesis says Adam became. Its opposite, pneumatikon (pnyoo-mah-tee-KON), does not mean a ghost. It means a body fully inhabited and transformed by the Holy Spirit. The contrast is between this life and the risen life, with all our God-given physicality kept and transfigured, the way Jesus’ body was.^[9] The Catechism says the same in a line I’d put on the wall of every funeral home: Christ is raised with his own body, “but he did not return to an earthly life,” and we will be changed into that same spiritual body. It then adds that our participation in the Eucharist already gives us a foretaste of it.^[10] Saint Augustine put the objection to rest in one sentence. God made all things from nothing; is it so much more wonderful that he makes a heavenly body from human flesh?^[11]

Paul closes with Adam. Genesis 2:7 says the first man became a living soul. The last Adam, Paul says, became a life-giving spirit, and Montague locates that moment on Easter morning, when Christ’s glorified body became the source from which the Spirit is poured out on everyone joined to him (Acts 2:33).^[12] Dust came first, then heaven, and the order matters because it is your order too.^[13] Collins notes that Paul seems to have coined a word here, choikos (kho-ee-KOS), “dusty,” to keep the contrast sharp, and that “last Adam” means final and ultimate.^[14] Then the closing verse, which the best manuscripts read as an exhortation: “let us also bear the image of the man of heaven.” Collins prefers that reading, and the Fathers preached it that way.^[15] Bearing that image is something you begin now.

Now the Gospel. Notice that Jesus reaches for the same seed metaphor. Luke has just told us that Jesus is moving town to town with the Twelve and a group of women who fund the mission from their own possessions (Luke 8:1-3), and now a crowd gathers from every town. Johnson notes that the ancient farmer broadcast his seed before plowing, so seed on the path, on rock, and among thorns was ordinary. Luke keeps the seed singular, one seed scattered everywhere, and drops Mark’s thirty and sixtyfold to keep the eye on the yield that maturity brings.^[16] Gadenz sees a farmer who generously casts his seed, knowing some ground is poor, yet he tries to use all the land anyway.^[17] The Fathers ask who this farmer is, and Bede answers that the sower is none other than the Son of God, going out from the Father’s bosom into the world.^[18] Chrysostom notices the thing that would get a real farmer fired: nobody sows on rock and expects a crop. But in the things of the soul it is otherwise, because a rock can become good earth, a path can stop being trodden, and thorns can be pulled.^[19] The Catechism reads the parable the same way: parables are mirrors, and the question they put to a man is whether he will be hard soil or good earth for the word.^[20]

Then Jesus explains it, and Gadenz makes the point that matters most for you: the four soils are four kinds of hearers, while also being the same hearer on four different days.^[21] The path is the word that never got in. Cyril of Alexandria says a path is dry and packed hard because everyone walks on it, and an unteachable heart is the same; the devil takes the seed off the surface like a bird.^[22] The rock is the word received with joy and no root. Bede says the rock is the hard, unbroken heart, and the missing moisture is the oil of the wise virgins, love and steadfastness.^[23] Luke’s word for what breaks these hearers is peirasmos (pay-rahs-MOS), testing, the very word used of Jesus in the desert. Johnson points out that Luke deliberately swaps out Mark’s “tribulation” so the disciple’s trial looks like the Master’s.^[24] The thorns are cares, riches, and pleasures, and Johnson notes Luke’s small edit here: he adds “the pleasures of life,” so the choking comes from what you enjoy as much as from what you fear.^[25] Gregory the Great is sharp on the riches. It is strange to call riches thorns, since thorns prick and riches delight, but they are thorns, because they lacerate the mind with anxious thoughts and strangle the throat of the heart until no good desire can get in.^[26] Saint John of the Cross said the same in the Ascent: the Lord calls temporal goods thorns because whoever handles them willingly will be wounded.^[27]

And the good soil. Luke says these hearers have “an honest and good heart,” which Johnson identifies as the Greek ideal of kalokagathia (kah-lo-kah-gah-THEE-ah), nobility of character, an appropriate way to describe these hearers considering that Luke is writing for the Greek world.^[28] Two verbs finish the sentence. They “hold it fast,” katechō (kah-TEH-kho), to grip something like a prized possession, and they bear fruit en hypomonē (en hoo-po-mo-NAY), with patience, endurance: the same word Jesus will use when he says “by your endurance you will gain your lives” (Luke 21:19).^[29] Johnson’s summary of the whole passage is that in Luke everyone hears the word; only faith saves, and faith means fidelity and perseverance, a faith that does not wither in testing or suffocate under the delights of the world.^[30] Gregory says it more briefly. The good ground bears fruit through patience, because nothing we do is good unless we bear patiently the evils nearest us.^[31]

Put the two readings side by side, and they form one cohesive sentence. A seed goes into the ground. If it dies there, God gives it a body. If the ground refuses it, it dies anyway, and nothing comes up.

Daily Application

Here is the interior movement the readings ask of you today, and it’s the one most of us resist. Let the word go deep enough to die in you. That is the whole difference between the path and the good soil. The seed on the path never went under. It sat on the surface, visible and intact and useless, until a bird took it. The seed in the good soil disappeared. It was buried, it split, it stopped being a kernel, and only then did God give it a body. Paul says your resurrection works that way. Jesus says your faith works that way. The honest question is whether God’s word has ever penetrated so deeply as to “die” in you, or whether you have kept it on top where you can still see it and still control it.

Gadenz notes the four soils are the same person on different days, so don’t run the examination once, file it, and never run it again. Run it tonight. Where did the word bounce off you today because you had already decided what you thought? Where did you receive it with joy and then drop it the moment it cost something? The Catechism, drawing on this very parable, says that if your prayer is dry because the word fell on rocky soil and never rooted, the fix is conversion, and it warns that Christians who never meditate on Scripture come to resemble the first three soils.^[32] That is the practice: 10 minutes a day with the Gospel, read slowly, held the way Luke says, katechō, gripped like something you’d hate to lose. Then the harder part, hypomonē. The fruit comes with patience, and patience is measured in seasons. You bear with the marriage, the parish, the diagnosis, the child who isn’t coming back to Mass yet. The seed keeps working underground where you can’t see it.

The thorns deserve their own examination, because Luke’s thorns are pleasures, and pleasure doesn’t feel like an enemy. Gregory’s image is the useful one. Riches delight, and that is exactly why they choke. Ask what has quietly closed the throat of your heart, and be specific. The streaming queue, the second glass, the account balance you check before you pray. Each of those is innocent on its own, and each becomes a thorn the moment the word can’t breathe under it.

Saint Januarius is the right companion for a day about bodies. He was beheaded in Diocletian’s persecution, sown in dishonor by any measure the empire understood, and the Christians of Naples gathered his blood and kept it, because they believed what Paul told the Corinthians: his body is going to be raised. The Church has never required anyone to believe the vial liquefies by a miracle, and Franciscan Media is honest when it calls out the fact that the phenomenon may be unexplained without being unexplainable. But it makes the better point that a Christian who thinks God is too scientific to work a wonder has stopped noticing the everyday ones, “sparrows and dandelions, raindrops and snowflakes.”^[33] After today’s readings, we should all add wheat to that list. Every field you drive past is a sermon on the resurrection, and Paul thought you were a fool if you couldn’t read it.

So today, let something die. The opinion you were sure of, the pleasure you have been protecting, the version of the faith you keep on the surface so it won’t ask too much. Bury it. Then be patient, and watch what God gives it.

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Notes

1. Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 563, 565; George T. Montague, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 278. ↩
2. Collins, First Corinthians, 563. ↩
3. Montague, First Corinthians, 278-279. ↩
4. Montague, First Corinthians, 279. ↩
5. Collins, First Corinthians, 563-564. ↩
6. Montague, First Corinthians, 279-280, 282. ↩
7. Collins, First Corinthians, 565. ↩
8. Montague, First Corinthians, 280. ↩
9. Montague, First Corinthians, 280; Collins, First Corinthians, 567. ↩
10. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), nos. 999-1000. ↩
11. Augustine, Sermon 264.6, quoted in Montague, First Corinthians, 281. ↩
12. Montague, First Corinthians, 281. ↩
13. Montague, First Corinthians, 281. ↩
14. Collins, First Corinthians, 569-571. ↩
15. Collins, First Corinthians, 572; Montague, First Corinthians, 282. ↩
16. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 131-132. ↩
17. Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018), 156. ↩
18. Bede, in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected out of the Works of the Fathers, vol. 3, St. Luke, trans. John Henry Newman (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1843), on Luke 8:4-15. ↩
19. John Chrysostom, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, on Luke 8:4-15. ↩
20. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 546. ↩
21. Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 157-158. ↩
22. Cyril of Alexandria, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, on Luke 8:4-15. ↩
23. Bede, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, on Luke 8:4-15. ↩
24. Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 132; Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 158. ↩
25. Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 133. ↩
26. Gregory the Great, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, on Luke 8:4-15. ↩
27. John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel 3.18.1, quoted in Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 158. ↩
28. Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 133. ↩
29. Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 133; Gadenz, Gospel of Luke, 159. ↩
30. Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 134-135. ↩
31. Gregory the Great, in Aquinas, Catena Aurea, vol. 3, on Luke 8:4-15. ↩
32. Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 2707, 2731. ↩
33. Franciscan Media, “Saint Januarius,” Saint of the Day, https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-of-the-day/saint-januarius/. ↩

Books Cited

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• Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Liturgical Press, 1999)
• George T. Montague, SM, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2011)
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Doubleday/Image, 2003)
• Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke, Sacra Pagina 3 (Liturgical Press, 1991)
• Pablo T. Gadenz, The Gospel of Luke, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2018)
• Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, 4-volume set (Baronius Press)