17th Sunday Year A

See Commentary on Matthew 13: 44-52 in Matthew 13:44-53

Homily 1 - 2008

We talk (or at least we used to!) of the wisdom of Solomon.  What’s wisdom?  Some of you older ones will remember the list of the seven gifts of the Spirit (that we were expected to learn off by heart for Confirmation).  The first four were: wisdom, understanding, counsel and knowledge.  Knowledge is a bit like information, and deals with facts; understanding is the capacity to put facts together and to see the broader picture; counsel is the practical sense of how to act appropriately in line with the facts and their meaning.  So wisdom is connected to understanding, counsel and knowledge but distinct from them.

So what is it?  The First Reading today had Solomon ask for a heart to understand: It is a heart function, a gut function.  Beyond facts and meaning, prior to decision and action, wisdom has more to do with the capacity to weigh up, to evaluate.  (The Latin word for it is close to to get the taste of).  How do we acquire wisdom? Where do we get it from?  Wisdom is nourished by experience, searching and reflection.

In the gospel today, Jesus commended the disciple who like a householder brings out from his storeroom things both new and old.  Wise disciples have new things to bring out: they are open to experience, to be challenged, to grow, to move on, and to change. Yet they are not so foolish as to think they need personally to “re-invent the wheel”.  They are open to draw on the accumulated wisdom of the past, the old, to help make sense of the new.  They bring out from their storeroom things both new and old.  Like Mary, of whom Luke’s Gospel wrote: As for Mary, she treasured these things (experience) and pondered them in her heart... against the background of the Scriptural treasures of her people.

The disciple-householder Jesus spoke of may even have been something of a self-portrait.  Jesus followed a never-ending process of seeking and changing perspective - moving on from his initial sense of mission,  through the experience of the people’s and leaders’ incomprehension and unresponsiveness, wondering what was going on and what to do next, drawing thoughtfully on the insights and the imagery of his tradition, especially of Isaiah and of Daniel,  but taking them further and adapting them to his actual situation.

What is the content of wisdom?  What is the basic instinct of the wise person?  I think that Paul got close to it in today’s first Reading.  He seems to have seen the starting point of wisdom as the sense that God can be trusted, that God’s love can be trusted, and that, provided we are open to receive that love, all will be well.  He wrote: By turning everything to their good, God co-operates with all those who love him.  Paul was convinced that, in his love, God has called us, indeed, chosen us, forgiven and justified us, that we might come to share in the same life that energises Christ, as he put it, to be true images of his Son.

And interestingly, Paul adds that God has shared his glory with us – already, though not yet perfectly.  It can be a “now” experience, even if elusively so.  As we read this morning: (God) called those he intended  (to be true images of his Son): those he called he justified, and with those he justified he shared his glory.  We don’t know this so much with our heads (or if we do it’s not enough) but with our heart, in our gut.  It is a sort of intuitive experience: we sense it, we taste it.  More than that, we appreciate it, we treasure it,  we stand in wonder at it.  It may take a lifetime for hearts to sit comfortable with it, but, when we grasp it, we are on the way to wisdom.

The wonderful Mother Julian of Norwich wrote, way back in the late 1300s: All will be well; all will be well; all manner of thing will be well.  Whatever is going on in our world, we don’t need to feel that we have to control everything.  We  don’t need to diverge from the path spelt out for us by Christ, or to do things the world’s way, the way of so-called common-sense and often sterile realism.  We become free truly to trust God.  To know that in our hearts is true wisdom.  It is the pearl of great price.  It is worth not less than everything.

Homily 2 – 2011 

I have been thinking about the pearl of great price.  What is it?  For me, today’s Second Reading helps to give it shape.  I’ll read a bit of it again: God cooperates with all those that he has called according to his purpose.  They are the ones he chose specially long ago and intended to become true images of his Son (so that his Son might be the eldest of many brothers).  He called those he intended for this: those he called he justified, and with those he justified he shared his glory.  Paul talks about God’s original purpose - God’s purpose in creating us.  He says that God intended us to become true images of his Son.  But image does not capture the full idea.  He sees us as the younger brothers and sisters of Jesus.  [Paul called Jesus the eldest of many brothers (& sisters)].  So the image, the likeness, is a sort of family likeness.  There is a sharing of life, a sort of sharing of spiritual genes.  Whose genes?  If Jesus is God’s Son par excellence, if we’re his brothers and sisters, then our genes are [sort of] God’s genes.  We are not just creatures of God - we are part of the family, brothers and sisters of Jesus, sons and daughters of God.

Paul says that God calls us.  That suggests to me the invitation to personal one-to-one relationship - the way that persons relate to each other.  Paul then says that God justifies us.  It is clear from elsewhere in Paul’s Epistles that God’s justifying us is God’s forgiving us - God’s judgment, God’s declaration, that we are loved, irrespective of our behaviour, of our puny human goodness or badness.  To the extent that we let God love us, that we freely choose to accept God’s love, then God leads us to share not just the same humanity as Jesus but somehow his divinity.  We share in the risen state of Jesus.

That was God’s intention from the moment of the Big Bang, from the first moment of creation.  Right from the beginning of the whole evolutionary process, God put into that mixture of matter and energy that God first created - the potential, indeed the straining (across all those billions of years) towards not just becoming alive, mobile, organic, sensate and intelligent but coming to be resurrected in the risen Jesus.  However, that last step, that coming to share in the life of the risen Christ, requires human cooperation.  God calls, and we need, freely, to answer the call.

Let’s pin it down a bit more - this sharing of the life of the risen Christ, this sharing the very life of God.  The Scriptures tell us that God is love; God’s life is loving.  That means that the created universe has been predestined from the moment of the Big Bang, to evolve towards human persons - free human persons, who choose to receive God’s love and to be empowered themselves to love.  The vast universe, all those vast galaxies, have been predestined towards love: created, called, justified, glorified - evolving towards persons who love.

To recognise this is to discover the pearl of great price, the treasure hidden in the field.  It is the one thing that ultimately matters.  The fellow who discovered the hidden treasure had a stroke of luck.  He wasn’t even looking for it.  Discovering the pearl probably involved a bit of luck, too, but was more the result of a long and determined search.  Recognising that God loves us; recognising that love is our destiny, our calling, is not quite luck, but it is sheer gift, sheer grace.  Sometimes that gift seems to come out of the blue.  Sometimes it is the fruit of a long and determined search.  The wonderful thing is that it is there - there, needing only to be recognised.

Homily 3 - 2014

Those of you over forty and still happily married… You have been able to experience something that in its own way seems to relativise everything else, whether nice house, decent car, respected job, smart looks or even health. Their importance to you simply grows less and less the firmer your relationship grows. Those of you single like me – whether never married, widowed, separated… A life of service of others can have a similar effect, giving a sense of meaning, purpose and personal worth that make everything else lose their grip on you - they might be helpful, perhaps, but not necessary. The consistent practice of meditative/contemplative prayer, whatever form it takes, can have a comparable effect. 

I think that that is what Jesus was driving at in his examples of the unearthed treasure, the pearl of great value and the net full of fish – things that to their finders were of such value that other things paled into insignificance: … they sold everything they owned; they threw away the useless fish.

Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is somehow like that – not business as usual, not life like it was before or simply like everyone else’s, but an experience or insight that seems to tip us on our heads and shows everything in a different perspective.

Let us unpack that further.  What is common in all three experiences I mentioned is that they are all instances of loving. More than that, they are experiences of loving forged at personal cost and requiring constant letting go of self-interest, a love that necessarily and increasingly becomes forgiving and unconditional. It is a love that gradually replaces as first response the otherwise instinctive or at least habituated automatic judging or summing up of another. It is not easy. It does not just happen but requires repeated determination and effort. It can be felt as a painful dying to self yet at the same time be mysteriously experienced as deeply fulfilling and satisfying.

I believe that there is a further dimension to it. Somehow it is beautifully connected with a gaze of mercy. As we increasingly learn to observe our inner life, we notice our spontaneous, usually unconscious, habitual, even addictive responses to others and to life in general. We recognise them as our inappropriate way of handling our personal inner wounds and our fears of some mysterious, formless, inner emptiness that we carry from infancy and childhood.  As we slowly learn to accept ourselves gently and respectfully, we find ourselves able to do the same to others. We learn in time to recognise the other’s cry of anger as a cry of pain, not unlike our own.

Wonderfully, I think that the natural process of growing older sets us up for this merciful gazing. We fail more often than we succeed – but that does not faze us unduly, though we may quietly weep. Our increasing insights into the kingdom-experience carry us on. I believe that that is what Jesus meant when he called us all to repent [that dreadful mistranslation!] and believe the Good News. He draws us into his own experience of love.

So now, through Christ, and, as the Gospel of John would have it, with him, and, indeed, in him, through the unifying action of the Spirit, we are drawn to share in the loving living of God – now, as we celebrate this Eucharist.

Homily 4 - 2020 

A friend of mine, a keen fisherman, older than I am, comes from time to time to tell me that he has heard that the fish are biting in a local lake or creek. He assures me that, as soon as the weather picks up, he will be down there and catch a fish for me. His eyes are alight with joy just with the thought of it, and his joy is contagious. His enthusiasm puts me in mind of the two people mentioned in today’s parables — the man who found the treasure and the one who came across the precious pearl. They, too, came alive with joy. Jesus commented that the experience of God’s Kingdom can generate a response like that. Do you know what he was talking about? Do you sometimes feel like that?

A couple of weeks before my sister died, her doctors told her that her situation was terminal. I asked her if she was frightened of dying. She looked at me, somewhat puzzled, and gently corrected me: “Frightened of falling into the arms of God!” she whispered. Since she died, I delight that she felt so comfortable surrendering all she had and was and, even a little impatiently, looking forward to dropping into the arms of the God she loved. I am disappointed that I did not ask her to tell me what her experience of God had been.

I wonder if Jesus at times is saddened that so many of us Catholics have not yet discovered the beauty of a personal relationship with him, that not enough of us have felt, at least from time to time, the indescribable joy of real closeness to him and to God, his Father. Our Church can appear so dull, so stern, so stiff, so serious. No wonder so few seem attracted, and so many are just hanging on by the skin of their teeth .

“So happy … he buys the field … he buys the pearl”.

Homily 5 - 2023

The more I have reflected on each of today’s brief parables, the more they have set me thinking.

In the light of the first one, I have been asking myself if there is something about God’s Kingdom that has me enthusiastically smiling to myself, so much so that it has led me to view my life differently and even to radically readjust my former priorities. What do I really agree with in the teaching and life of Jesus? What is it about that I might call “the Jesus project” that really makes profound sense to me?

I don’t know if you ever ask yourself questions like this? And, if you have, how you answer them. Perhaps today’s short parables might set you thinking once more, asking yourself if there is something perhaps that you are missing out on.

I don’t know if our world has changed all that much recently, but I have been struck by the general mood of discontent that seems so prevalent. There seems to be so much mutual hostility, criticism, even personal depression — wars and persecutions, on the one hand, increasing mental illness; and all sorts of “aggro” apparently expressing itself on social media.

Against a background like this, I hear with a new clarity the consistently repeated call of Jesus deliberately to discover the wonderful simple human dignity of ourselves, and equally of everyone else. I hear his invitation to us all to see and to treat each other as brothers and sisters. Of course, such appreciation will never simply just happen. It calls for radical and continuing conversion, and flourishes with mutual encouragement and support.

Would it not be wonderful if everyone would just change! Indeed, it would be. But everyone else does not need to change. It is enough for me to start to become like the person in today’s first parable, who discovered the secret that released the freedom to let go of the former familiarities, “went away happy”, and found the price of change to be more than “well worth it”.

In the story as Jesus told it, the lucky person’s motivation was sheer pragmatism. Is sheer pragmatism enough to motivate and sustain life-style change? Perhaps so. Or perhaps it could be called simple common sense.

The second parable may throw further light on the challenge. There, the merchant’s purchase of the “pearl of great value” could have been downright pragmatism. He may simply have recognised it as an opportunity to sell the pearl again later for an even greater price. Or perhaps the point of the parable was that the sheer beauty of the pearl was such that the sense of continuing wonder and appreciation that it generated was more than worth the expense.

This helps me to draw the conclusion that any practical appreciation of the “Jesus project” [and of the Kingdom of heaven in general] is stimulated enormously by discovering and developing a genuine relationship with and personal friendship and love for Jesus. That is the crucial difference between the practically useful “treasure hidden in a field” and the aesthetically up-lifting and spiritually sustaining “pearl of great price”.

Personally, my sense is that the undoubtedly discouraging effect of the present secular culture is so powerful that without such a personal friendship with Jesus and love for him people simply lose trust in him, or never really get round to developing much trust in the first place. Sadly, we are beginning to see the effects already.

True love and friendship do not just happen. They need to to be worked on.

The experience is wonderfully stimulating and worth all the effort it entails.