The associated reading for this reflection can be found in your Every Sacred Sunday Mass journal or online here.
One of my favorite memories of the summer as a child was eating lots of peaches. I loved them. As impatient as I could be, I was very patient with peaches. I would make sure to wait until they were perfectly ripe before eating them, walking around the house with a paper towel in my hand to catch the juice. One day, I decided that my mom’s weekly grocery store run was not meeting my peach demands. So I walked into the backyard, ate my peach, dug a hole with my hands and buried the pit.
Three weeks later, I was eating unlimited peaches. I wish. As you might have guessed, I did not do nearly the ground work required to grow a peach tree. A quick internet search will talk you out of this method and into buying a small peach tree from someone else, or better yet, continuing the store-bought method.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus uses the parable of the mustard seed that grows into a colossal tree with branches large enough to give shade to the birds. This is, of course, a wonderful image of the Church. Jesus gave us the Word in His teaching and His very passion and death. He sent His Holy Spirit upon His Apostles. He is the sower, and we are the beneficiaries of His beautiful tree. We have this Church that provides protection from evil and grace to become the very people we were created to be.
But how often do we run into the yard, do a shoddy gardening job, and blame God when we cannot see the tree in our own lives? To bear fruit, we have to be part of HIS tree. We have to cling to what the Holy Spirit has accomplished for two thousand years. Cling to Scriptures. Cling to the spiritual wisdom of so many saints who have gone before us. Cling to the Sacraments. And we must do all of these things with humility. The Lord gave us this image of the Church as His tree. But He showed us the humility required on his other tree: The Cross.
“Humility is the mother of salvation.” - St. Bernard of Clairvaux
Fr. Christopher Meyer is the parochial vicar at St. Faustina Catholic Church in Fulshear, TX. Ordained to the priesthood in June of 2022, he is still amazed every day to wake up as a priest. Fr. Christopher loves hanging out with friends, the Rosary, sports, and reading.