Carmelite Homily for Thursday of 3rd Week of Ordinary Time, January 26 2024 – Lectionary 321
In today’s Gospel we have these parables that I call “Gradualism.” That grain growing slowly, and no one knows how it happens, and harvest comes, and no one knows. It is all gradual. And these are all parables of the spiritual life. Saint Teresa of Avila says “Never cease to believe that even in this life God grants the hundredfold.” But we want the hundredfold now. But I think it is a gradualism, of maturing, and growing, and being inspired, and being ever more wise, ever more loving, ever more like Jesus. That is the call of today’s Gospel of these parables. Yes, the hundredfold, but it is a hundredfold slowly, not a hundredfold in a snap.
