Eventide & Altar

Paul answers a question tonight that gets more urgent with every year added to a life: how are the dead raised, and what kind of body do they have? His answer is agricultural rather than philosophical. What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. Something goes into the ground unrecognizable from what eventually comes up, and yet it is genuinely continuous with it - the same seed, transformed rather than replaced.

That image is worth more to you now than it would have been at thirty. A body that has carried you faithfully for decades is not what it once was, and Paul is not offering false comfort about that. He is telling you plainly: it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. The weakness is not a design flaw to be embarrassed about. It is the sowing. What comes after is not a repair of this body but a transformation of it, the way a stalk of wheat is not a repaired kernel.

The Gospel gives you a second image to sit beside the first, and it asks a harder question of a long life than of a young one. Four kinds of soil receive the same seed, and only one produces a harvest. You have had decades to find out which soil you actually are, in various seasons - sometimes rocky, sometimes choked by the exact things Jesus names, cares and riches and pleasures, sometimes, if you are honest, genuinely good ground that held what was planted and let it mature slowly, without drama, over years.

Ember Saturday closes tonight, the old day the Church set aside for ordinations after an all-night vigil. Something planted long ago, in darkness, becoming visible only after years of hidden growth - that is not only true of a man being ordained. It is true of whatever in your own life took decades to bear anything, and only now, this late, do you get to see what it actually grew into.

The Sorrowful Mysteries tonight. Offer a decade for anyone whose harvest you planted the seed of, decades ago, and have never lived to see.

• For the grace to trust that what is sown in weakness will be raised in power, we pray to the Lord.
• For all who are discerning a vocation, that they would find good soil, we pray to the Lord.
• For all who have died, that what was sown a natural body would be raised a spiritual one, we pray to the Lord.

Name one thing you planted, in the broadest sense, decades ago - a habit in a child, a word spoken to someone, a small faithfulness kept without recognition - whose harvest you are only now able to see, or may never see at all. Give thanks for it tonight regardless.