The Parable of the Sower

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan Church on Sunday 12th July 2026, the 6th after Trinity

Sowing the Seed

Today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel (13:1-9, 18-23) is commonly called the Parable of the Sower.

A parable is a story describing a scene from everyday life, which conveys a deeper meaning. I think Jesus taught so often in parables because they conjure up memorable images. They lead those who hear them to reflect on their meanings, and to discover the truth in them for themselves. No lesson is better learned than one you tease out for yourself! Parables are a bit like slow-release fertilizer, gradually yielding up their truth to people who ponder them.

The parable of the sower comes in Mark’s and Luke’s Gospels as well as Matthew’s, and in startlingly similar words. Scholars believe the vivid image was remembered and recorded, and an edited version was used by the Gospel writers when they composed their texts years later. All three Gospels also contain the same authoritative explanation by Jesus of what the story means.

So let us in our imaginations picture the scene, let us reflect on the parable’s meaning, and let us tease out its relevance for us now, 2000 years later.

Let us begin by entering into the parable in our mind’s eye.

So many people wanted to listen to Jesus that he used a boat to address the crowd on the beach. The beach was on a lake, the Sea of Galilee. I’ve never been there, but I see it as rather like Lough Derg. It’s about 40% larger in area, and wider but not so long. Imagine the people crowded on the beach at Dromineer, and Jesus a few yards off shore in a lake boat talking to them.

Did Jesus see a man sowing in a nearby field? Perhaps this prompted the parable, and everyone could literally see what he was talking about. In my minds eye it could be my neighbour Padraig Slattery's field.

The sower isn’t using a seed-drill; he is broadcasting the seed by hand, just as our ancestors would have done only 150 years or so ago. The seed is in a bag or a basket, and he walks steadily up and down the field, taking a handful of seed and throwing it out as evenly as he can. Even at a distance it is quite clear to everyone what he is doing: they have seen it hundreds of times before, and many have done it themselves.

Imagine a big field divided like allotments into strips, each one belonging to one family, with paths between them, beaten down hard by the passage of many feet. The crowd can see the birds following the sower swooping down to gobble up the seed that inevitably falls on the path, for all the sower’s skill.

Everyone would understand that different parts of the field are of different quality.

Some parts are stony: don’t imagine small pebbles, imagine great sheets of rock just under the surface, with just a few inches of soil on top, like parts of the Burren, for instance. The soil above the rock warms early, and the seeds germinate quickly, but without a depth of soil the young seedlings will soon run out of nutrients and water and shrivel up in the sun.

Some parts of the field are infested with perennial weeds: imagine scutch grass and creeping thistle, which will quickly outgrow the delicate crop, choking it.

But other parts of the field are good land, with a deep, clean soil. Here the crop will have nutrients and water enough. It will flourish and produce a harvest of thirty, or sixty, or a hundred times the grain sown on it.

Jesus said many other things to the crowd that day in parables, we’re told. We don’t know what they were, but I think we can take it that Jesus was ‘proclaiming the good news of the kingdom’ as Matthew tells us elsewhere (Mat 9:35).

‘Let anyone with ears listen!’ Jesus finishes.

Jesus himself explains the parable in terms of the word of the kingdom he preaches.

When his disciples ask him why he teaches in parables, Jesus interprets the parable for them, no doubt to reassure them that they do indeed understand what he is getting at:

The seed sown on the path is the word heard, but not understood, which the evil one snatches away, before it ever has the chance to sprout.

The seed sown on rocky ground is the word received with joy, but by a person without roots, without character, whose initial enthusiasm cannot withstand trouble or persecution.

The seed sown among thorns is the word heard by those who are so trapped by worldly cares and the lure of wealth that they cannot act upon it.

And the seed sown on good soil is the word heard by those who understand it, and act upon it. Only such people will yield a harvest of good.

Like those who crowded to the lakeshore 2000 years ago, we are the soil in which Jesus sows the seed.

On a personal level, the message of his parable remains what it was then: we need to cultivate our character so that as good soil we yield a rich harvest. Each one of us must strive to develop the character traits of attention, persistence, and detachment. Attention, so that we do not miss God’s call when it comes. Persistence, so that we can withstand trouble or persecution when we answer God’s call. And detachment, so that we are not distracted from acting on God’s call by the cares of the world and the pursuit of wealth.

 But we cannot do so by our own will - we need the help of the Holy Spirit at work within us. 

For Jesus, the sower is one who proclaims ‘the word of the kingdom’.

That is himself of course. But it is also his closest disciples, the twelve apostles, whom he sent out saying ‘Proclaim the good news, “The kingdom of heaven has come near”’ (Mat 10:5-7). No doubt the twelve took comfort from the parable that even when their teaching seemed to show poor results, enough people would accept it to make it all worthwhile.

Before his ascension Jesus commissioned the apostles to go out and make disciples of all nations. Their commission was handed on to others in the developing Church, which in all its varied traditions still proclaims Jesus’s good news of the kingdom today. In Paul’s memorable words Christians are all part of Christ’s body the Church. Today the Church is the sower. 

Is there then a message for the Church in this parable? I believe there is.

The Church’s sowing of the seed may not seem to be producing a good harvest these days. The fact is that here in Ireland, and in Europe generally, taking a broad view across all traditions, more and more people are losing contact with Christ’s Church. We see falling Church attendance, fewer baptisms, and insufficient ordinations to maintain the stock of full time clergy. We need to understand why and do something about it, and for that we need the Holy Spirit to guide us.

But we should not despair. Jesus himself was completely realistic about the prospects for his teaching, and so should we be as his Church. As Jesus realised, no matter how good a job we do as sowers, the sad fact is that many people will not become his disciples, and will not be led to the kingdom of heaven by his or the Church’s teaching. Yet those who do, make up for those that don’t by the rich harvest of good fruit they yield – as Jesus put it, 30, 60 or 100 fold.

So to sum up, we can learn these things today from the parable of the sower:

As Christians we need to cultivate the soil of our own characters, to develop the Christian virtues of attention, persistence, and detachment from the world, so that we may yield a plentiful harvest of good grain.

And we should not despair at the state of Christ’s Church today. Rather we should rejoice in the rich harvest of Christian souls the Lord already has. And we must pray for the Holy Spirit of God to guide his Church, and each one of us, to be better sowers of the word in future, so that the Lord’s harvest may be even greater.

Breaking the cycle of loss, anger, and violence

 

Man attacked by babies, bronze by Gustav Vigeland,
in the Vigeland Sculpture Park, Oslo, showing
a father struggling with the responsibilities of parenthood.

Reflection at Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Friday 26th June 2026

How (can) we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?

So says the author of Psalm 137, a portion of which we have just heard. It is a great cry of lament, of painful loss.

The background is this. The Babylonian empire had attacked and defeated the Israelites. Many, if not most of them, had been taken captive back to Babylon, with its great rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. They had been forced to leave their homes, their businesses, the Temple in Zion where they sang praises to God. Everything dear to them had been ripped from them, and they were hundreds of miles from home, a subject people.

The Israelites loved music. A central part of their identity was to sing prayers and songs of praise to God in their Temple. Now they did not feel they had anything to sing about. Their captors mocked them, asking them to ‘sing the songs of Zion’ for their tormentor’s pleasure. No wonder they hung up their harps on the riverside willows.

Their first response was to remember all they had lost, to hold on to the memories. They vowed never to forget Jerusalem. We all respond to loss in this way, don’t we? We human beings cling to memories and keepsakes to remind us of joys we used to have, but have no longer.

We have all experienced loss in our lives of one kind or another. Speaking personally, I suffered a painful divorce, the loss of my home, and the close presence of the family I loved. I was angry, frustrated, and besieged by dark thoughts. I sank into depression. But thank God, I came out the other side, and I still have a close loving relationship with my children.

We can relate to the distress and bitter anger felt both by Israelis mourning the victims of Hamas, and by Palestinians, whose loved ones, homes and businesses the Israeli army has destroyed. Loss breeds anger, and anger breeds violence. It is the way we human beings are made. All too easily we can slip into a vicious cycle of anger and violence.

The compilers of the lectionary chose to omit the last 3 verses of Psalm 137. No doubt they felt they were unsuitable to hear in church. But I shall read them to you:

Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem's fall, how they said, "Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!" O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!

What a terrible scream of rage! What should we make of the Psalmist’s desire for revenge? What should we make of his wish to see his enemies’ children brutally murdered?

We must not avoid confronting our fallen human nature. We must look it directly in the face. We can recognise the Psalmist’s rage in our own response to loss. It is not wrong to vent our feelings in prayer before our God, who knows our most intimate thoughts. But if we give in to our human desire for revenge, we feed a cycle of escalating violence, which damages ourselves as much as it damages our enemy.

Jesus shows us a better way, a way to break the cycle of anger and violence. ‘Love your enemies’, he tells us. ‘Do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you’ (Matthew 6:27-28). God our Father is loving and merciful, so we must be too. Faced with loss, we must pray that the Holy Spirit may teach us to respond with the love and mercy of God our Father, that his Son models for us.

To finish, let us recall what became of the exiled Israelites. Some few years after Psalm 137 was written, the Babylonian Empire was destroyed by the Persians, who allowed the Israelites to return home. They did so peaceably. They never did smash any babies against rocks. It seems they vented their anger in their prayers, not their deeds, a far healthier response to their loss.

 

Praise God from whom all blessings flow - Part 2

 A reflection in the June 2026 issue of Grapevine, the parish magazine of the Nenagh Union of Parishes

The Doxology, a much loved hymn of praise, was written in 1674 by Thomas Ken, Bishop of  Bath & Wells

Praise God from whom all blessings flow!

Last month, I began to tell the story of creation in a new way, based on the findings of modern science. It does not conflict in any essential way with the old story we read in Exodus, in which we learn that God sees all he has made to be very good, and that we human beings are made in his image.

The God-given laws of nature are fine tuned to make possible the galaxies, stars and planets we observe. Through the continuing process of evolution, the same laws of nature have led to the bewildering diversity of life on our planet Earth, and quite possibly elsewhere in the universe. Evolution is the way our God continually creates diversity.

Evolution is not just a blind force of competition, in which the strong survive and the weak die – ‘nature red in tooth and claw’. More important is the natural selection of cooperative behaviour. Looking back over the history of life on Earth, we see our Creator at work building relationships between his creatures, and communities in which all may flourish. It would be a blasphemy not to cherish these relational communities.

Evolution favours cooperation between diverse creatures, building ecosystems: relationships and communities in which they flourish mutually. Consider, for example, the beautiful three-cornered dance between insects which pollinate plants in return for nectar and pollen, plants which produce fruit and seeds to feed animals, and animals which disperse seeds to make new plants.

Evolution also favours altruistic behaviour in social species. Sterile worker bees and ants tend and protect the eggs and larvae of their fertile sister the queen. Most birds and mammals will defend their babies even at the cost of their own lives.

Praise him all creatures here below!

So what about human beings like you and me? At our best we extend the altruism we see in other social species to our pets, to strangers, and to the rest of creation. This is the basis of the human emotion we call love. It is an echo of the self-giving love of God we discern in Jesus Christ. We are made in God’s image.

God has forged us through evolution from clever apes. Of all God’s creatures here on earth, we are the only ones who can imagine a future, make plans to achieve it, and act to do so. But for all our cleverness, our human plans do not always work out. Our future is always uncertain. We do well to remember that we are not masters of the universe: God is, and his laws don’t change.

Just as God has made us clever, so God has made us in his image to be moral beings, to be souls. Souls with the capacity we call conscience to distinguish right from wrong, truth from lies, love from hate - and to prefer good to evil, as he does. It is through our conscience that God’s Holy Spirit inspires us to make the right choices, so reaping a harvest of good which nourishes our souls.

We are not masters of our own souls, any more than we are masters of the universe. Our souls are as God made them, with free will, vulnerable to temptation. It is hard to be good. All too often we fail. We name that sin. And when we fail and sin, the evil we do poisons our soul.

But like a loving father, God does not wish the consequences of our sins to poison our souls, to consign us to eternal death, cut off forever from his loving kindness. He has given us the example of the life and ministry, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ to show us how to escape that fate. If we repent of our sins, God will forgive them. And as St John tells us, Jesus prays to his loving Father for us, asking him to give us eternal life in him, ‘And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent' (John 17:3).

Eternal life is not the same as everlasting life. Our lives are finite. They are like threads winding through the four dimension of space and time, interacting with the threads of other creatures. They begin at our conception and end at our death, after which all that makes us human is dispersed. But our God is outside the confines of space-time. He loves us unconditionally. He rejoices at the love we show for each other and for his other creatures summed over the whole of our life-thread, while he weeps over our failures to love as he does. Our resurrection to eternal life is not physical. It is to abide in the timeless presence of our loving God, who knows and loves us completely, from our first beginning to our very end.

Praise him above the angelic host!

So what of the future? We human beings are the product of an unfinished process. God continues to create the universe he loves, and our species, through evolution.

The French palaeontologist and Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin suggested that the biosphere of which we are part is evolving to become a noösphere. This consists of human minds and souls interacting with each other and with the rest of creation, moving toward a final point of unification with God. He named this the Omega point. He speculated that it resembles the Christian Logos, namely Christ, who draws all things into himself, who in the words of the Nicene Creed, is ‘God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, through him all things were made’.

If Teilhard de Chardin is right, then perhaps we imperfect human beings will evolve over countless eons towards the Omega point of unity with God. Perhaps our descendants in the far distant future will become the angelic host, perfected saints!

Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost!

The glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ

 Reflection at Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 9th June 2026

1898 negative of the image on the Shroud of Turin, by Secundo Pia

It is unlikely that St Paul ever saw Jesus in the flesh, face to face.

But he tells the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 4:5-10), ‘It is the God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’.

In Acts we read that Paul, then called Saul, had a blinding vision of light on the road to Damascus. He heard a voice saying, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting” (Acts 9:4-5). This encounter with the risen Christ changed everything for him. He became the Apostle Paul. He worked unstintingly to bring others to the knowledge of Christ. For Paul, I am sure, to see the face of Jesus is to feel the presence of the risen Christ in the most intimate way.

Like Paul, we have not seen the face of Jesus in the flesh. But we too meet the risen Christ in scripture, and in the sacraments. We have come to understand that ‘God… has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’. And we have heard Jesus declare ‘Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age’ (Matthew 28:20).

Paul is clear that he is the slave of those he writes to, for Jesus’s sake. It is his ‘knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ which drives him to work for others, to be a slave for Jesus’s sake. And the same must be true for us.

But we are frail human beings. In Paul’s words, we are clay jars. The power to work for others is not our own. It ‘belongs to God and does not come from us’.

Paul goes on to acknowledge the trials the Corinthians are experiencing, and encourages them, saying, ‘We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed’. He tells them it is because he and they are ‘always carrying in the body the death of Jesus …that the life of Jesus’ may be revealed to others through them.

Like Paul and the Corinthians, we must feel in our innermost being, in our guts, the self-sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Then we can see ‘the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’. Then we need not fear anything, not affliction, not perplexity, not persecution, nor being struck down. Then we can live up to our calling, which is to show God’s love to others in the way we live our lives.

Love your enemies

 A reflection a morning worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 12th May 2026

Donald Trump deleted this image after many criticised him for posting it.
He may see himself as a Messiah, but he is the opposite.

‘Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who abuse you.’ How easy it is for us to say these words, but how hard it is for us to abide by them!

The reading we’ve just heard (Luke 6:27-38), is part of the ‘Sermon on the Plain’. It comes just after the Beatitudes which we said at the start of our service. In the reading, Jesus commands his disciples – then and now – both you and me - to respond to hatred with love, something which runs contrary to our natural human instincts.

Yet there is great psychological wisdom here. The key is the ethical principle of nonviolence. If we respond to hatred and violence with our own hatred and violence, we escalate conflict. We damage both our enemy and ourselves. Our mental health suffers.

There is nothing specifically Christian in this. Jains in India consider the highest ethical value of all to be nonviolence towards all living beings, in action, word and thought. Gandhi, a Hindu, drew on the long history of nonviolence in Indian religious thought in his successful campaign to force the British out of India.

But there is something much deeper in this for us as Christians. We believe that all human beings are created in the image of our loving God. Our God loves our enemies, just as much as he loves us. To hate our enemy is to reject God’s love for us. To take the speck of sawdust out of our enemy’s eye, we must first take the log out of our own eye.

What are the practical implications of this? Consider the President of the United States, Donald Trump. His cruel domestic policies are tearing families apart in his own country. His policy of using tariffs to bend other countries to do his bidding threatens livelihoods around the world. His boosting of fossil fuels puts at risk Earth’s natural systems upon which all life depends. And his reckless use of military force has brought only death and destruction. I can only see Trump as my enemy, and the enemy of all that is good in the world.

How should I as a Christian respond to Trump? Pope Leo IV shows us the way, I think. He has not bowed to Trump’s bullying. He has called him out, saying, ‘Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them. And Sarah Mullaly, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has expressed solidarity with Pope Leo, calling Christians to work and pray for peace, and to urge political leaders to pursue every possible peaceful and just means of resolving conflict.

In a spirit of nonviolence, I can speak truth to Trump and his supporters – by doing so I show my love for him. I can support those who reject Trump’s evil regime, even if it costs me – by doing so I do good to him. I can ask God to bless Trump by awakening his conscience to do good, not evil – by doing so I bless him. And I can pray that God will soften Trump’s hard heart - by doing so I pray for his immortal soul, that he may not be cut off from God’s love forever.

Only the people of the United States can remove Trump and his hate filled MAGA gang, of course. Mid-term elections are due in the autumn, and Americans increasingly reject him, according to opinion polls. We may hope that his capacity to do harm may soon be limited.

God’s love will surely defeat Trump’s hate in the end.

Anticipating Ascension and Pentecost

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan church on Sunday 10th May 2026, the 6th Sunday of Easter

Jesus' Farewell Discourse, Duccio di Buoninsegna (1255–1319)

On this 6^th and last Sunday of Easter, we continue to celebrate the central event of our faith, the resurrection of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

But today’s reading from John’s Gospel (John 14:15-21) leads us to look forward, to peek over the horizon so to speak, toward the great events of the Ascension next Thursday, and Pentecost in 2 weeks’ time, when we celebrate the coming of the Spirit which Jesus promised us.

The reading is just a small part of Jesus’s farewell discourse to his disciples. John sets the scene as after the last supper. Jesus has washed his disciples’ feet to teach them his example of service. He knows how things will play out. Judas Iscariot has already left to betray him to the authorities, who will arrest and execute him. Time is short for Jesus to prepare his followers for what must come, so his words are dense with meaning. Let me reflect on what they mean to me.

‘I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you’, says Jesus.

Even as Jesus endures Judas’s betrayal and waits to be taken to his death, he puts aside his own distress to comfort his disciples. He loves them. He will not desert them. And he promises he will continue to be present for them, whatever befalls.

 ‘In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me’, he says. The Gospels tell us the risen Christ appeared to the disciples between the Resurrection and his Ascension, when he returned to his Father - they experienced his presence physically. But I do not think this is what Jesus means here. Jesus is looking beyond the day of Ascension, through the millennia to our own time and into the distant future. Throughout the ages Christians continue to experience Jesus’s reassuring presence, as friend, brother, and redeemer. As Matthew (28:20) tells us, Jesus said, ‘Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age’. Jesus continues to be alive for us.

‘Because I live, you also will live’, says Jesus. We live – we can be fully human as God wants us to be – because we know, as Jesus tells us, ‘I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you’.

‘I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you for ever.

Jesus promises his disciples they will receive the gift of another Advocate - ‘the Spirit of truth’, the Holy Spirit - to teach and support them as a mentor. As we read in Acts, they did indeed receive the Spirit, on the day of Pentecost. The Spirit led them to go out boldly, declaring their belief in Christ, to make disciples of others. The disciples they made in turn received the Spirit and did the same, and so on - down through the years, the centuries, the millennia. Christians continue to be inspired by the Spirit to this day. The result is the Church we know, in all the glorious variety of our traditions. The Spirit will be with us for ever, Jesus promises, helping us to discern the truth.

Notice, Jesus asks the Father to send the Spirit. He does not ask him to send scripture – not the Gospels, nor the letters of Paul, nor any other scripture. The primary gift Jesus asks for us from the Father is the Spirit, the Spirit of truth. Scripture is secondary – while we believe it is divinely inspired, we must also believe that we need the Spirit of truth to help us interpret it and discern the truth.

The disciples recognised the Spirit when they felt it working in them and saw its effects in others. So can we. ‘You know (the Spirit)’, says Jesus, ‘because he abides with you, and he will be in you’.

‘If you love me’, says Jesus, ‘you will keep my commandments’.

We need to take these words very seriously, I think. Jesus loves his disciples, but not in any soppy, sentimental way. His love demands obedience from his disciples. Just as loving parents demand obedience of small children, so that they do not run in front of cars, or burn or electrocute themselves.

‘Those who love me will be loved by my Father’, continues Jesus, ‘and I will love and reveal myself to them’. We cannot expect to feel the loving presence of Jesus, nor the love of God the Father, unless we are obedient.

But just what are these commandments of Jesus? We surely need the continuing help of the Advocate, the Spirit of truth, to enlighten us. But scripture is pretty clear on the bones of it, I think.

·         Matthew (22:36-40) tells us that when Jesus is asked what the greatest commandment is, he answers, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’”

·         And John (13:34) tells us that Jesus says shortly before today’s reading, ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another’.

If we follow these 3 commandments, I don’t think we can go too far wrong. But we need the help of the Spirit to do so. And when we fail, as we surely will from time to time, we need to seek the forgiveness that God freely offers to those who are truly penitent.

I hope you will take 3 things away from my words today:

1^st, as we celebrate Ascension Day next Thursday, let us give thanks for the continuing reassuring presence of Jesus, our friend, our brother, and our redeemer.

2^nd, as we look forward to Pentecost in 2 weeks time, let us give thanks that the Spirit, which the Father gave us at Jesus’s request, will continue to lead us to discern his truth.

And 3^rd, let us pray that the Spirit may guide us to keep Jesus’s commandments: to love God, to love our neighbours as ourselves, and to love one another as he loves us, so that we may know the loving presence of Jesus and the love of his Father.

I finish with the Collect of the Word set for today:

O God,
you have prepared for those who love you,
joys beyond our understanding:
pour into our hearts such love for you,
that, loving you above all else,
we may obtain your promises
that exceed all we can desire:
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you
and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen

 

Praise God from whom all blessings flow! Part 1

 A reflection in the May 2026 issue of Grapevine, the parishmagazine of the Nenagh Union of Parishes

The Doxology, a much loved hymn of praise,
was written in 1674 by Thomas Ken,
Bishop of Bath & Wells

Praise God from whom all blessings flow!

I am starting to write this on Earth Day, 22^nd April, marked around the world as an annual opportunity to celebrate our wonderful, living planet. On this warm, sunny spring day, flowers are blooming, birds are singing, trees are leafing, and bees are buzzing. How can we not express our joy through praise to the Creator?

Genesis chapter 1 tells us how God made Earth and the heavens, and living creatures, including people like you and me. It is a myth, but like the best myths, within it we find important nuggets of timeless truth. Two are central to our faith, I think. First, God sees all he has made to be very good. And second, we human beings are made in the image of God our Creator.

Today, modern science compels us to tell the story of creation in a new way, perhaps even more glorious in its breadth and depth. The story is still being written, and there is much we do not understand yet. But it does not, I believe, conflict in any essential way with these timeless truths. Here is a precis of the story.

The Universe came into being from nothing around 13,000 million years ago in a hot burst of energy. After inflating rapidly, it started to cool, and the simplest elements, hydrogen and helium, began to clump together into the first galaxies and stars. The stars shone brightly through thermonuclear reactions, making ever heavier elements. They lived and died, and many exploded as super-novae, spewing heavy elements into clouds of cosmic dust. From this dust new generations of stars were born, and are still being born, many with planetary systems. About 4,000 million years ago our Earth formed, a small planet circling the star we call the Sun, on the outer edge of the Milky Way, one of innumerable galaxies in the observable universe.

If fundamental physical constants were not much the same as they are, none of this would have happened – there would be no galaxies, no stars, no planets, and no Earth on which biochemical processes could generate living beings. What an extraordinary fact. The God-given laws of nature have been fine-tuned to make our living world possible!

Praise him all creatures here below!

Life began to appear on Earth thousands of millions of years ago. At first simple single-celled organisms, like bacteria, using DNA as an instruction template, evolved to feed, grow, and reproduce. They competed against each other. They ate each other. But some evolved to cooperate, to form relationships with other cells where both benefited. Some even became engulfed in the cells of others. This is the origin of cellular structures called organelles, such as mitochondria, which power respiration, and chloroplasts, which make sugars from light, water and CO2. Both were once free-living single cells, and still retain their own DNA.

Complex, multi-cellular organisms, plants, fungi and animals, evolved as cells divided and differentiated into specialised organs. Bacteria and viruses evolved to live inside these creatures, forming communities such as our gut microbiome, so important to health. Later, fungi began to cooperate with higher plants to form the mycorrhizal root systems, which are essential for most plants to grow well.

The Creator fine-tuned the laws of nature to make the process of evolution possible. Evolution is the way he has made the bewildering diversity of life on Earth today, all descended from a single common ancestor. He will continue to use evolution into the distant future to create new worlds and communities we cannot even imagine.

Until recently, people have thought of evolution as driven by competition to eat and reproduce – ‘nature red in tooth and claw’. But more important than competition is cooperation, the selection of cooperative behaviour. By cooperating in different ways, different creatures flourish better together than they can apart. Looking back over the history of life on Earth, I see our Creator at work building relationships between his creatures, and communities in which all may flourish. It would be a blasphemy not to cherish these relational communities.

Next month I shall examine what God has created human beings like you and me to be. We are souls, with the capacity we call conscience to tell right from wrong, distinguish truth from lies, and prefer good to evil. And I shall peer into the distant future to speculate what we may become.

Joc Sanders, 24^th April 2026