Imagine two tiny tomato seeds talking to each other. They try to imagine what they will be like when they grow up. Will they be just a bigger seed two or three times their present size? They can’t even imagine that they will grow into a vine that produces maybe a hundred huge tomatoes, each one containing innumerable seeds that look just like them. Oh, the miracle of nature!
Now imagine two tiny Christians talking to each other. What will they look like when they grow up. What will the tiny seed of the Holy Spirit planted inside them at Baptism produce in their lives? If a small tomato seed can grow into a huge plant producing a multitude of tomatoes, what can the seed of the Holy Spirit do within the life of a Christian?
St. John reflected on this (1 John 3:1-3).
“See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are…Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”
What does our future look like? What will happen as the Holy Spirit “seed” grows up? The best John can say is that it has not yet been revealed. The only thing he knows is that we shall be like God and have the capacity to see Him as he is. What a future God has in store for us!
And so how important it is that we do all we can to nurture the life of the Holy Spirit in our few short years of “incubation” on this planet.
“Everyone who has this hope based on him makes himself pure, as he is pure.”
Sadly, not every baptized person grows to maturity in the Holy Spirit, just as not every tomato seed grows into a fruit-producing tomato plant. Many times, Jesus warned his disciples of the danger of getting off the true path. John tells us to do our best in keeping a pure heart, one free from sin.
Jesus exhorted his disciples to seek God’s plan for their lives and not be led astray by the world’s plan (Matthew 5:1-12).
“Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted…Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for holiness, for they shall be satisfied.”
The world seeks to fill itself with pleasure; the disciples of Jesus are to go beyond this and allow God to fill them with the “Kingdom.” The world rejoices in the trivial, the disciples of Jesus seek a deeper joy. Finally, as the world seeks to satisfy its hunger with food and drink, those who follow Jesus are driven by a deeper desire—they want to be holy, like Jesus is.
So our goal, then, is to become holy as our heavenly Father is holy.
Today we celebrate All Saints’ Day. This is the day when we are reminded of what the future of a Christian is supposed to look like. We think about the millions of people who said a heroic “yes” to Jesus’ invitation to follow him, and now see God face to face. Through great trial and suffering, they stood their ground, determined to be all that God planned for them to be.
This great “cloud of witnesses” reminds us that if they could do it, so can we. Today, they cheer us on.
