Sunday, July 12, 2026
(Matthew 13, 1-23)
The gospel of this Sunday points to two realities where today the intelligibility of faith and the future of Christianity are at stake: language and sensitivity.
We are many Christian communities that continue to ask ourselves questions about the great challenge that today’s transmission of faith represents and the need to incorporate new languages that allow us to dialogue and empathize with our contemporaries and their diverse contexts. Language is never neutral and needs to be contextualized in order to be universal.
Jesus is aware of this, which is why he speaks in parables. Jesus does not use concepts or even dogmas with which he intends to define God, but rather refers to the concrete, using a suggestive and poetic language that helps discover new meanings and depth in the most everyday reality. In doing so, he breaks the boundaries that separate the sacred from the profane, the material from the spiritual, because all reality is the realm of God’s revelation. For Jesus, God and his project is not a theory or a principle that is talked about, but an experience that he transmits in words and deeds and that constantly mobilizes him toward fraternity. His communication is incarnate and pedagogical word with a vocation for universality. For all this, the vocabulary, images, and symbols that he uses are inclusive, often taken from nature or from fundamental human experiences.
As a church we need to review and modify our languages and rethink symbols, liturgies, etc., that have ceased to convey their original meaning. Faithfulness to the gospel and to the church often passes not through maintaining but through changing. Fidelity to Jesus’ message is not identified with “it has always been this way,” but also with creativity and innovation.
The second theme to which the gospel of this Sunday points is sensitivity. Reality, before being thought about or reflected upon, is “grasped” by the senses. That is why we must educate it so that it does not become “callous,” does not harden. We need to refine sensitivity so that it “becomes accustomed” to grasping the invisible, the weak, the small, the life and gestures that do not appear in the major media, but dwell on the underside of history where life also exists, subsists, resists and points to its mystery.
The parable of the sower also reminds us this Sunday that the seeds of the word dwell in the human heart, that God resembles a sower who wants all humanity to be fertile soil and bear good fruit, but also that nothing will be possible unless we commit our freedom and our responsibility to it. The sower does her part—and us? What conditions do we need to care for to make this happen? How can we help each other so that it may be so?
Pepa Torres Pèrez