Becoming Good Soil - Homily for the Parable of the Sower (2025)

+ What is the state of our heart? In today’s Gospel our Savior presents the parable of the Sower in order to get us to ponder this question. What is the state of our heart? Are we able to bear spiritual fruit? This is the most important question of our life, and we need to be constantly reminded to keep it front and center.

In the parable of the Sower, Christ shows us the various ways we can respond to God’s Word, the various states of soul. Unfortunately, most of them are negative. 

We have seed sown along the wayside, in rocky places, amidst thorns. We see hardheartedness, refusal to accept God’s word. Not just in atheists and those who live ungodly lives, but also when we trample on our conscience, when we refuse to listen to our spiritual father. No fruits can come from this.

We have hard-heartedness and we also have faintheartedness. When trials come along, we refuse to fight or if we fight and lose, we give up. No fruits can come from this.

And finally, we have distraction through cares, riches and pleasures of this life. To clarify, this is not just the obvious negative distractions in chasing after wealth, entertainment, and so forth. Because Christ first mentions cares as just as dangerous. Cares are all the things that distract us from Christ, even things that seem good to us. Most of us are fine having cares, most of us are used to listening to the devil whisper to us that right now things are too busy, too stressful, too difficult to pray as we would like. To take the spiritual life as seriously as we would like to. Just wait until this passes. But eventually “this” becomes our entire life as we will soon see.

So how to we become good soil? How do we break up our hardened hearts and remove the rocks and the thorns? How do we produce spiritual fruit?  Through humility. I remember whenever this parable came up at my old parish, my priest would remind us that the Latin word for humility comes from the root word “humus”, which means dirt. We have to see ourselves as dirt, as nothing. The saints were humble, they didn’t see themselves as holy. They didn’t think they figured things out to the point where they could rely on themselves. They were always willing to seek counsel from others. They always struggled to make a good beginning.

I’d like to share a story about a negligent monk. Father Arsenios was born in 1907 in Greece to a poor but pious family. He had a great love for the Theotokos and actually snuck into Mount Athos at the age of 16 and joined Simonopetra. He had much zeal, but Mount Athos was a tumultuous place then. Controversies and scandals were ripping through the communities and the monks of Simonopetra removed their Abbot along with some of his spiritual children including Father Arsenios.

From there he went around to other monasteries. His zeal for the spiritual life faded as he focused more and more on making ends meet and on his daily chores. His handicraft proved to be a distraction, as he got better and better at what he did. Eventually, he was allowed to return to Simonopetra. But he fluctuated between trying to focus on his tasks and daily cares to idleness in free time. The weeds began to grow up in the soil of his heart as he started growing a garden and raising chickens, which is fine in and of itself. But he made so much money from this work he bought gold fillings for this teeth when they rotted. He ceased praying the Akathist every day. For years, he stopped going to confession and communion. He abandoned the monastic diet and began hunting birds for food.

To reiterate, Father Arsenios was a very pious child and had great love for the Panagia. He came with burning zeal as a teenager, similar to St. Porphyrios. He was not some renegade hiding out in a monastery, he was not some career monk that fed off of vainglory for being an excellent singer or iconographer. But his monastic life was chaotic, to say the least, because the world was in chaos at that time. And in such unfavorable circumstances, he allowed the weeds to begin to grow in his heart. The soil became hardened where he just didn’t even bother to follow some of the basic monastic precepts anymore.

One day, after falling asleep from his meal of cooked bird and a glass of wine, he woke up to a horrifying vision of a demon sitting on his chest. The demon refused to leave, despite Fr. Arsenios calling out to Christ. He managed to make the sign of the cross and the demon fled. Fr. Arsenios happened to be friends with Fr. Athanasios, the brother of St. Joseph the Hesychast. He asked him what to do. He told him to find a spiritual father, repent, confess, fulfill whatever epitimia he might be given and prepare himself to receive communion. And so Fr. Arsenios started again at the beginning. He went to Elder Haralambos, another disciple of St. Joseph (who had already reposed at the time) and confessed to him. Under his careful guidance, his zeal was renewed. He followed the prayer rule set by him and began anew.

What’s even more impressive is that Fr. Arsenios had been on the Holy Mountain decades longer than Elder Haralambos, and yet he willingly humbled himself and sought out his counsel. He could have dismissed Fr. Athanasios’ suggestion when he found out it was someone younger than himself who hadn’t been a monk nearly as long as he had. He could have excused himself with the notion that, “Well, the monks of the last times won’t amount to much anyway, so what can I do?” No, he was a true monk and he knew he had to start over, he had to begin again, at the beginning.

Elder Aimilianos of blessed memory soon took over the monastery and revitalized monastic life there. Fr. Arsenios had become a real monk at this point. He became a hermit and came to the monastery for Sundays and holidays. He was always joyful, full of brotherly love, gratitude, and humility. He showed forth true spiritual fruit.

Eventually his eyesight began to bother him, so he was blessed to go to the mainland to see an optometrist. He was given the diagnosis of cataracts and was told to wait a bit before they would operate on it. So when he came back some time later, the optometrist was horrified to realize he was mistaken. He did not have cataracts, he had glaucoma. And because they had him wait so long, the glaucoma was now irreversible. Fr. Arsenios would soon be blind.

On relating this to Elder Aimilianos, the Elder was sorrowful that he didn’t think to have him get a second opinion at the onset. However, Fr. Arsenios graciously accepted the providence of God. “If it would have been to the advantage of my soul, God would have enlightened you to do it. He enlightened you as He did, this is what happened, so this is what God wants from me. May His name be glorified!” (p. 119, Athonite Fathers of the 20th Century).

What to an outsider seems like complete passivity—the acceptance of “bad luck” as God’s will, is not passive at all. It takes much spiritual courage, it takes real spiritual struggle to arrive at such a state. St. John Chyrsostom says that to be at peace in the midst of affliction and to send up thanksgiving to God is a bloodless martyrdom that all of us can accomplish. And that this virtue yields more spiritual fruit for us than if we were to give all our money away to the poor. Acceptance of sufferings is why Job shone more brilliantly on the dung heap than when he showed hospitality while he still had his wealth. We see in this one moment of Father Arsenios’ life that his heart finally became rich and good soil for the word of God.

It’s hard to find lives of holy people who really messed up for a long time. It’s hard to find lives of people who had good intentions but went astray before finally repenting. It’s hard because it’s so easy to be lukewarm. It’s so easy to be comfortable with our sins. It’s so easy to resist starting over. But it’s possible! It’s possible to make a good beginning. It’s possible to choose humility now, even if we kept saying “no” over and over again up until this point. It’s possible to start over. God gives us opportunities every day to humble ourselves, all we have to do is ask Him to open our eyes to see it and open our hearts to do it. If we do this, if all we can do is learn to be grateful in our humiliations, in our afflictions, God will pull up the weeds from our hearts. God will remove the rocks and break up the hardened ground of our hearts. And He will plant His seeds in us again. He will do this, because as the Savior tells us, “Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit” (John 15:8). Amen.