Published: July 23, 2026
There is a question buried in today's Gospel that every serious disciple eventually asks, perhaps with some bewilderment: why would Jesus deliberately make his teaching harder to understand? Why speak in riddles to people who are hungry? The disciples went directly to Jesus with this concern, and his answer — though challenging — opens one of the most important doors in all of Scripture.
"Because knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven has been granted to you," Jesus tells them, "but to them it has not been granted." This can feel uncomfortable to modern ears. It sounds, at first, almost unfair — as though God arbitrarily chooses who gets to understand. But Jesus is not describing divine favoritism. He is describing the dynamics of a living, growing relationship with God, and the way in which the posture of the heart determines what can enter it.
The key is in the verse that follows. "To anyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; from anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away." This is a spiritual law as reliable as the law of gravity. When we actively receive what God offers — when we lean in, listen, make space, return again and again to prayer and Scripture — our capacity to receive grows. The heart that practices openness becomes more open. But the heart that remains indifferent, that encounters the Word and walks away unchanged, gradually grows harder and less capable of reception. It is not that God punishes such a person; it is that spiritual sensitivity, like a muscle, atrophies without use.
The parable, then, is not a wall but a door — and one that opens from the inside. Jesus teaches in parables because a parable demands engagement. It will not yield its meaning to the casual glance. It requires that the listener sit with it, turn it over, bring it back to prayer, wonder about it in the night. Those who come to the Word with genuine hunger will be drawn deeper in. Those who have already decided they know enough will find nothing to hold onto, and drift away unchanged. The parable separates not the intelligent from the unintelligent, but the hungry from the indifferent.
This is why Jesus reaches back to Isaiah, quoting the great prophet's lament over Israel: You shall indeed hear but not understand, you shall indeed look but never see. Isaiah's words were already ancient when Jesus spoke them, yet they described something Jesus recognized in his own day — and something that remains achingly recognizable in ours. People who are surrounded by truth and yet do not see it. Communities that hear the Word proclaimed week after week and emerge unchanged. Hearts that have grown, through the slow accumulation of self-sufficiency, incapable of surprise or conversion.
This connects profoundly to the First Reading today, where Jeremiah speaks for a heartbroken God to a people who have wandered far from the faithfulness of their early years. "I remember the devotion of your youth," the Lord says, "how you loved me as a bride, following me in the desert, in a land unsown." There is a tenderness in that memory — God recalling a time when the people were close to him not because life was comfortable, but precisely because it was not. The wilderness years, when Israel had nothing but God, were also the years of greatest intimacy. It is a pattern that appears again and again in Scripture and in the lives of the saints: simplicity and need can be great teachers of prayer.
But then Israel arrived in the garden land — the land of plenty — and something shifted. The psalm of gratitude became the poem of self-congratulation. The people who had followed God through a land unsown forgot the one who led them, and built for themselves cisterns to hold their own water. Jeremiah names this with devastating precision: "Two evils have my people done: they have forsaken me, the source of living waters; they have dug themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that hold no water." The image is almost comic in its futility — the tremendous effort of digging a cistern, all in order to avoid drinking from the living spring that was freely available. And yet it is also a perfect portrait of the human heart when it closes itself off from God. We exhaust ourselves constructing alternatives, and then wonder why we are so thirsty.
The Responsorial Psalm answers Jeremiah's lament like a balm: With you is the fountain of life, O Lord. The living water is still here. The spring has not dried up. The possibility of drinking deeply has not been revoked. This is the hope that underlies even the most challenging words of today's Gospel — the blessing that Jesus offers at its end is not a small thing. "Blessed are your eyes, because they see, and your ears, because they hear." He tells his disciples that many prophets and righteous people longed across the centuries to witness what they were witnessing, and did not live to see it. They — ordinary, stumbling, often confused disciples — were living the fulfillment of Israel's deepest hopes. And so are we.
For here is what is easy to miss in this passage: you are among those disciples. You, who have been baptized into the Body of Christ, who receive the Eucharist, who have been given the Scriptures and the sacraments and the community of the Church — you have been granted knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven. The question is not whether the gift has been given. It has. The question is what we do with it.
And the practical answer flows naturally from the parable itself. Bring your full attention to the Word. Come to Mass not as an observer but as a receiver. When the Gospel is proclaimed, let it land. Let yourself be surprised by it, even when — especially when — you think you already know this passage. Bring a question to your prayer. Sit with the discomfort of not fully understanding. Ask the Holy Spirit to open your eyes a little wider, your ears a little more. Do not be content with the first layer of meaning. The parables of Jesus have been feeding the saints for two thousand years, and they are not yet exhausted.
Today, the Church also honors the memory of Saint Bridget of Sweden, one of the great mystics and visionaries of the medieval world. Bridget was precisely the kind of person this Gospel describes: a woman whose heart was so thoroughly oriented toward God that she became capable of receiving extraordinary gifts of insight and prophetic vision. But her life makes clear that such receptivity was not passive — it was the fruit of decades of prayer, charity, suffering embraced in faith, and daily return to Scripture and sacrament. She did not arrive at spiritual sight all at once. She cultivated it, and was given it, one ordinary day at a time.
May we, too, have the humility to keep cultivating that openness — to come to the Word today not as experts but as the spiritually hungry, trusting that blessed are those eyes, and those ears, that keep choosing to see and to hear.
Gospel: Matthew 13:10-17 | Thursday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time