The virtue and grace of perseverance: sermon on Sexagesima Sunday

By a Dominican Friar   |   19 February 2025

“That on the good ground are they who, in a good and perfect heart, hearing the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit in patience.”

This parable of the sower explains something that might otherwise puzzle us, or even cause us dismay. I mean the question of why Christianity has not made more difference to the world. Who, after all, is the “sower who went out to sow”? It is Christ, who came forth from the Father and went out into this world by His Incarnation. And what is the seed that He sows, but His own words? Each of our Lord’s words is a seed with  power to bring forth a great harvest. And these words were not only spoken by Him while on earth, but they have also been spoken and sung and preached down the centuries by His ministers. We might expect that by now the whole world would be like one great field full of golden wheat, with saints everywhere we look.

Yet we see that it is not so. In every age, saints are the exception, not the rule. And Jesus shows us why this is. In part, the cause is diabolical: the devil distracts people, both Christians and non-believers, from paying attention to the truths of the faith. He pecks the word out of their ears, like a ugly bird pecking seed off a path. But the cause is also partly human, and I think it can be summarised in one phrase as “lack of perseverance”. People start off well enough, but they do not persevere. So, let’s think about what perseverance is, and how we are to obtain it.

It’s a part of our human state that we don’t obtain perfection in any area of life all at once. For the angels, things are different. God created the angels in such a way that from the beginning, they had the fullness of their natural powers. They already knew all there is to know about physics, mathematics, biology, astronomy, and all natural things. But not so with us. Just as our bodies grow for many years from being tiny embryos until they reach their proper size, so also our minds. We don’t obtain perfection in any art or science, at playing a musical instrument, or speaking a foreign language, all at once, but only after a long time. And so, we shouldn’t be surprised that the same is true about our spiritual life. Here also, to become perfect, we must persevere.

Take St Paul as an example. Did anyone ever go through so much as he? We hear about some of his adventures in the epistle. “Thrice I suffered shipwreck; a night and a day I was in the depth of the sea.” He didn’t know it, but he would be shipwrecked at least once more before the end of his life. “Of the Jews five times did I receive forty stripes save one.” That means that they scourged him five times, with thirty-nine strokes of the lash each time. And St Paul was not a superman: these things hurt him. What if he had said, after he’d been scourged for the fourth time, “That’s enough now, O Lord; I can’t be expected to bear any more”, and then gone back home to Tarsus? Perhaps the gospel would never have reached us, if he had done so. Perhaps he himself would not have been saved.

Perseverance in a sense is the only virtue, in that it is the test of all the virtues. If we give up before the end, none of our good deeds will profit us; we shan’t reach our heavenly home. It doesn’t matter why a person gives up following Christ, whether it’s because of persecutions, as with the crop that had no roots, or because of the pleasures or cares of life, as with that which grew up among thorns; the result will be the same. But if we have perseverance, it doesn’t matter what failures we may experience in life or even in a sense what sins we may commit; we are guaranteed of success.

But finally, notice that perseverance itself is a grace. The spiritual writers tell us that it is a grace that we cannot merit, but that it is one we can obtain by prayer. We’re praying for the grace to persevere every time we say the Our Father. When we reach the words “Lead us not into temptation”, we mean “Do not allow us to grow discouraged, do not let us turn back half-way on the road to heaven.” Christ came from there to sow His seed in our hearts. So, let us be the good soil, that “brings forth fruit in patience”.