16th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A - 7/19/26
By Father Adam Booth, C.S.C.
In today’s parables, Jesus uses the natural world to teach. One thing to learn from this is that we need to pay attention to the natural world, just as Jesus did. As humans, it’s spiritually and naturally healthy for us to spend time enjoying plants, trees, and activities like gardening and cooking. Appreciating nature is a way of practicing wonder and awe, instilling trust in God in us. Participating in caring for his creation and using it to serve others (gardening, cooking) teaches us that God gives us a role to play in the caregiving role that is most fully His.
There are so many saints who would have been rejected as weeds if we judged them in their youth. Think of Augustine, the womanizing Manichean, who went on to become a Doctor of the Church. Think of Dorothy Day. If you met her when she was young, you would have met a communist college dropout. But there was a seed in her, a blessed hunger for justice, that had not yet found its direction. She was arrested at a protest and given a Bible in jail. She was fascinated by the Psalms, especially those in which the psalmist cries out to God with deep emotion. This seed grew and matured into faith. Once she had become Catholic, she founded a newspaper, the Catholic Worker, to promote the Church’s social teaching. The unhoused population of New York then started to call on her to practice what she preached, and she started providing food and shelter. Seeds grow. What looks like weeds can be wheat that feeds the world when we let God work.
Family life gives us so many opportunities for love, but also so many opportunities to be frustrated with one another. Our loved ones’ missteps frustrate us more than a stranger’s precisely because they matter to us so much. The stories Jesus tells today help ground us in the kind of hope we need to keep on loving in the face of normal frustrations: seeds become trees ... yeast yields bread ... what look like weeds might not be ... God provides, and God surprises. Reflect on how God has surprised you in the past. Ponder with hope how a situation that frustrates you now might be an occasion for another surprise from God.
God provides, and God surprises. Start with trust (built on gratitude, wonder, and awe) and then see how you might be called to cooperate in God’s work.
• Encourage everyone to do their part in the production of food for the family. Does that look like cooking, or helping to cook, planting something you’ll be able to eat later, cleaning up, or even just expressing more gratitude for those who do more work in this area?
• How can you provide nourishment or space for those who lack these things? Could you donate food to your parish, deliver food with St. Vincent de Paul, cook at a Catholic Worker House, invite a friend or relative who might be isolated for dinner?
God of wonderful surprises - who provides for us and calls us to provide for others - give us the shelter and nourishment we need, physically, spiritually, and in every way, so that we might be missionary disciples who trust You to hold us so we can reach out. We ask this through Christ, our Teacher and our Lord. Amen.