Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
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Today's Readings
Is 55:10-11; Ps 65:10, 11, 12-13, 14; Rom 8:18-23; Mt 13:1-23
Read today's readings at USCCBReflection
You have visited the land and watered it, greatly enriched it. God's watercourses are filled; you have prepared the grain. Drenching its furrows, breaking up its clods, softening it with showers, blessing its yield. The psalm describes the agricultural abundance that results from the Lord's visitation of the earth - the year crowned with bounty, the hills clothed with rejoicing, the valleys blanketed with grain.
We ourselves groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. The groaning is not the absence of the firstfruits - we have the firstfruits of the Spirit. The groaning is between the firstfruits and the full harvest. It is the labor pain of the world that has received the word and is becoming what the word is making it.
Blessed are your eyes because they see and your ears because they hear. Many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it. The gift of the seeing eyes and the hearing ears is the gift of living on the near side of the Incarnation - the word that was sent and did not return void.
Prayer of the Faithful
- For those in the groaning of the labor-pain season - who have the firstfruits but are waiting for the full adoption - that the groaning would be received as labor rather than as abandonment, we pray to the Lord.
- For those in whom the thorns of anxiety and the lure of riches are at this moment stealing the light from the planted word, that the pulling of the thorns would begin, we pray to the Lord.
- In this Precious Blood month, for the rain and snow of the Precious Blood that waters the earth of human hearts and does not return void, we pray to the Lord.
Something to Do
My word shall not return to me void. Name the specific word that has been planted in your life - a Scripture, a promise, a teaching - that has not yet produced visible fruit. Receive tonight that it has not returned void. The achieving of the end is in progress.
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