Are we impatient towards God?

THE ONLY ANSWER TO OUR IMPATIENCE

Mk. 4:26-34

We live in what I would call an impatient age.  We must have everything now, instantly.  This is why plastic credit cards are so popular.  We don't have to carry cash, just produce our card and the object is ours.

Fast food restaurants are everywhere and all they do is to feed this impatience.  It takes patience and time to prepare good nourishing food.

Again, we see this impatience in young people’s relationships.  They don’t give themselves the time to get to know each other and to woo each other.  Some, even on their first date, have to jump into bed with each other, with the disastrous effect of hurting each other, finding out the hard way that they are not compatible, or they marry too soon.  This results in many children being born out of wedlock, and so divorce is widespread.   There is much our age can learn from today’s Gospel which addresses this very problem of impatience.

Jesus tells a simple little story about a farmer who planted a crop, waited patiently for it to bear fruit and then gathered in the harvest.  Jesus introduced the story by saying, “This is what the Kingdom of God is like.”  In other words, God is like the farmer who starts something and waits patiently for it to come to fruition.

Let us examine this story in more detail.  The farmer, before sowing, prepared the ground.  Then he planted the seed.  If watered by the rain and warmed by the sun, he is confident that it would produce a harvest. 

The same principle holds true for you and me.  We want results. We want to believe that the world of tomorrow will be a better place than the world of today.  That kind of faith requires us to work on the problems of today.  Faith in the future involves action.

The next step is to be patient.  A farmer does not plant a crop one week and expect to harvest it the next.  He must allow time for growth, as Jesus said, “First the shoot, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.”  Anyone who is not prepared to wait for that gradual development is not cut out to be a farmer!

But, of course, Jesus was not talking about farming but about the Kingdom of God.  He was talking about life.  The greatest difficulty that some of us have with faith in the future is our impatience.  We want to believe in the Kingdom of God but we want it to happen now.

This is not a new problem.  Isaiah tells about some people in his day who said of God, “Let Him make haste and speed His work so that we may see it.”  How typical that is of you and me.  We measure life in short units of hours, days, weeks, months and years.  We expect God to operate in the same way.  When that doesn’t happen, we are ready to cast aside our highest hopes because they are not fulfilled when we want.  We must remember that in the Lord’s eyes, one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day.  If we believe in a better world, we must forget about clocks and calendars, and gear our thinking to centuries.  Faith in the future involves patience.

Finally, we must believe that faith in the future demands a large amount of divine backing.  It has been estimated that the production of a wheat harvest depends five percent on the efforts of the farmer and ninety five percent on the forces of nature.  I don’t know how that calculation was made, but I do know that no farmer would ever bother to plant a seed unless he was aware of the rain and the sun, to support his efforts.  That is what Jesus is saying in today's story.  “A man throws seed on the land … the seed is sprouting and growing; how - he does not know.”  The only thing that the farmer knows is that his efforts are supported by powers greater than his own.

To conclude, that is how it is with people who truly have faith in the future.  Their faith involves action.  Their faith involves patience.  They do not expect immediate fulfilment of their highest hopes.  But most of all, their faith involves a sense of divine backing.  They believe in the future because they believe in God.

Lord Jesus, the most popular saying of our Capuchin brother Saint Padre Pio is “Pray, hope and don’t worry.”  Those words are very appropriate for today’s homily.  We all need to pray to the Holy Spirit to help us in any project, that He would give us the strength to pursue it, the patience needed to see it through, and not to worry.  There is a tendency for many of us to worry unnecessarily, and not put our trust in our Heavenly Father.  So, whatever we do, let us pray, hope and not worry.

My website is at: https://fatherfrancismaple.co.uk