27 January 2021

Wednesday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time (St. Angela Merici, Virgin)

In today’s Gospel (Mark 4:1-20), Jesus offers to his listeners the great Parable of the Sower, in which the Lord explains the different ways we can respond to the seed of his Word placed in our hearts. For those of us who live in the world, it is not an easy task to avoid the weeds of worldly anxiety or the craving for material comforts. In addition, Satan is always lurking and ready to snatch up the word sown in us before it can take root, and tribulations and persecution are often a fact of life. In order to be the “rich soil” that hears and accepts God’s word and bears great fruit, we need to cultivate a spirit of openness through prayer and works of charity. 

Saint Angela Merici, whose memorial we celebrate today, was one of those plots  of “rich soil” within the garden of the Church who bore abundant fruit. In her openness to the Lord, she founded an institute of teaching women which has many thousands of spiritual daughters and continues to bear fruit even to this day. Today, let us ask the Father for the spirit of openness to his Word which Angela showed and which will allow us to yield, through his grace, “thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.”