Seventeeth Sunday of Year (A)

(1 Kings 3:5, 7-12; Romans 8:28-30; Matthew 13:44-52)

Our readings this week, my dear People of God, give us great reason for gratitude, great cause for hope and joy.  Just think of those words of St. Paul:

Those God foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, so that He might be the firstborn among many brothers; and those He predestined He also called; and those He called He also justified; and those He justified He also glorified. (NAB)

God foreknew each one of you baptized Catholics here present and has predestined you to be formed in the likeness of His Son.  How do we know that?  Because God the Father called you to faith in Jesus, and -- through the waters of baptism -- to become a member of His Body the Church, where you were endowed by the Gift of God’s Spirit and once washed clean of all your sins.

Now, those are verifiable facts of your lives, and objective proof -- for faith -- that God the Father has called you and predestined you in Jesus.

You are also being glorified; for that outpouring of the Spirit of Christ into your soul was the beginning of a life-long process whereby the Spirit of Jesus seeks to lead you ever further along the way of Jesus until ultimately you are endowed with a God-given share in the glory of Jesus before the Father.  For example, every time you receive Jesus in Holy Communion and open yourself up to Him in loving prayer, commitment and obedience, that glory, which shines with resplendent brilliance on the face of Christ, is reflected onto you, and gradually remains shining more and more brightly on you for the Father.  You and I -- each one of us known and loved by God the Father before time in Jesus -- are thus destined, through time, for eternal glory if, by the Spirit, we persevere faithfully and humbly in Jesus and His Church!

What degree of glory will be ours?  That we do not know and it is probably the wrong sort of question to ask, because the glory of Jesus -- the glory we hope to be allowed to share -- is not an objective, measurable, quantity of which we can be vainly proud, but a quality, a change of heart and mind, a totally selfless and self-sacrificing love, in Jesus, for the Father.

We do know that Mary – given to us as our Mother by Jesus from the Cross on Calvary – was a simple girl from Nazareth, and is now Queen of Heaven and of all the angels, principalities, and powers; and we believe that, because we love Jesus and hope for, look forward to, His heavenly promises, our glorification as her children has begun.  And our faith is confirmed by the fact that, although subject to temptation here on earth, we do not allow ourselves to be ruled by the earthly lusts of our flesh, nor to be dominated by that earthly pride which would drive us to seek earthly success, power, and prestige above all else.  As yet, we cannot see the fullness of our on-going glorification, but St. John assures us that, when Christ is revealed in all His glory at the end of time, we too -- members of His Body being led by His Spirit -- shall be like Him and able to share in His glory:

Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. (I John 3:2)

What we have to do therefore is to remain faithful to Jesus in the response we make to our experience of life; for, as St. Paul reassured us in our second reading:

We know that all things work for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.

That means, that in all the events of our life, no matter how uninspiring or perhaps unwanted, however puzzling or even painful they may be, God our Father is at work: seeking to form us, by His Spirit, in and through those very experiences, into the likeness of His Son so that we might ultimately be able to share His glory.

Surely, therefore, dear friends in Christ, we can both gratefully appreciate and joyfully respond to Jesus’ parables in today’s Gospel reading:

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and hid; and for joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.   Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it.

There, Jesus puts before us two individuals: one, an ordinary man and a chance-finder, the other, a business man and a professional-searcher; two very different people yet with the same characteristic attitude; for, when they find or track down something of supreme value they are both able to appreciate it enough to want to make it their own at whatever cost, both of them willing and glad to give all they have in order to acquire such a treasure, such a pearl!

Now, all of us here are in a similar position, for Jesus is the treasure, the pearl beyond compare, and the Father Himself evokes our appreciation of Him:

No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day.  No one can come to Me unless it has been granted to him by My Father.  (John 6:44s.)

Why has the Father drawn us to Jesus?

God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.   (John 3:16)

Yes, Jesus is indeed the treasure, the pearl of great price, and each of us knows where He is to be Personally found and revealed in all His glory: in the Scriptures and Sacraments of Mother Church; and in our sincere experience of, and faithful response to, Life as God offers it to us.

Only the Spirit of Jesus, given in fullness to Mother Church, can reveal to us, in and through her teaching, the fullness of Jesus' saving truth contained in the Scriptures; only the Spirit of Jesus can share the life of Jesus with us through the Sacraments given us in Mother Church as sources of divine life and conduits of saving grace.  One can indeed find treasures of wisdom and pearls of beauty in the various religions and traditions wherein men and women have sought and served God throughout human history.  However, the one supreme treasure, the one pearl precious beyond all compare, is Jesus -- God's supreme revelation and gift of His very Self – and He is to be found uniquely and supremely in the Christian Scriptures and Catholic Sacraments of Mother Church, unfailingly sustained and infallibly guided, by the very Spirit of Jesus.

Our final consideration today -- our response to life – brings Prayer to our attention.

You know about that treasure in the field of the Church, that pearl of great price in the Eucharist, but what efforts are you willing to make to ensure that the treasure available to you, the pearl being offered you, will indeed be yours for all eternity?

Have you noticed that once again we have put the wrong sort of question: speaking about getting instead of giving?   Life’s greatest question, surely, must be: how can we give our whole selves – mind, heart, soul, and being – to Jesus, God’s priceless pearl, given for us in a love transcending time?

Pope St. Gregory the Great tells a story which goes something like this: imagine someone going on, let us say, a journey on the Orient Express, travelling in luxury towards some wonderful destination, let us imagine, Venice.  It is a long journey; deliberately so, because the trip is meant to embrace many places of great interest along the way: places of beauty such as mountain villages and places of curious attraction, such as ancient bazaars.  Let us further imagine that the train stops at some of these places and, on one particular day, allows passengers to alight in order to visit a most famous bazaar during a two-hour stop by the Express.  One of the passengers goes from stall to stall, into one bar or boutique after another; he haggles here and there for bargains to take back, and in this delightful process forgets all about the ultimate destination for which he had set out on this long, expensive, journey!  He forgets about Venice, the uniquely situated and wonderfully adorned city of history, culture and beauty, he forgets all about the friends awaiting him there, and misses, indeed forgets all about, the train.  What a fool! 

People of God, so many Christians are like that, allowing themselves to be distracted from seeking the Lord by the pleasures and cares of life.  Others there are, once faithful servants, perhaps true lovers of the Lord, who -- over time – have allowed themselves to gradually lose their early fervour and love for Jesus.  We saw this in the life of King Solomon, as we heard in the first reading:

In Gibeon the LORD appeared to Solomon in a dream at night. God said, “Ask something of me and I will give it to you.”  Solomon answered: “O LORD, my God, you have made me, your servant, king to succeed my father David; but I am a mere youth, not knowing at all how to act….  Give your servant, therefore, an understanding heart to judge your people and to distinguish right from wrong.   For who is able to govern this vast people of yours?”   The LORD was pleased that Solomon made this request.  So God said to him: “Because you have asked for this—not for a long life for yourself, nor for riches, nor for the life of your enemies, but for understanding so that you may know what is right— I do as you requested. I give you a heart so wise and understanding that there has never been anyone like you up to now, and after you there will come no one to equal you.  In addition, I give you what you have not asked for, such riches and glory that among kings there is not your like.  If you live in my presence as your father David lived, sincerely and uprightly, doing just as I have commanded you, I will establish your throne… over Israel forever.

However, King Solomon did not persevere in loving and following the Lord; he allowed himself to be distracted by his worldly renown and successes – that is by his self-love – and by the many fleshly loves of his life:

When Solomon was old his wives had turned his heart to strange gods, and his heart was not entirely with the LORD, his God, as the heart of his father David had been.  Adoring Astarte, and Milcom; building a high place to Chemosh, and to Molech, the idol of the Ammonites, on the hill opposite Jerusalem, he did likewise for all his foreign wives who burned incense and sacrificed to their gods.   The LORD, therefore, became angry with Solomon, because his heart was turned away from the LORD, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice.

People of God, the Father may not have appeared to us but He has called and still does call us to Jesus; and the Holy Spirit – the Promise of the Father -- has been given to Mother Church and to us, to guide and support us in our search for Jesus, in our endeavours to centre our life on Him.  Let us not be distracted, led astray, by earthly pleasures; let us not be deceived by the temporal security promised by money or perhaps by sought-after popularity; let us not be put off by the troubles and difficulties which are an unavoidable part of our calling as disciples of Jesus, our Lord and Master.  We are on a journey and we must press on to the end, because that is the hall-mark of the true Catholic and Christian.  And this is where Prayer demands our attention and commitment,  for prayer is co-extensive with life itself for a Christian whose search for Jesus, whose endeavour to find, love, and respond to Jesus, in all life’s encounters and activities, is often called his, or her, spiritual life, his or her prayer life.  Prayer cannot be limited to longer or shorter periods on one’s knees before the Blessed Sacrament or in private …. Rather, it is like a mountain range hidden under the great ocean of life which appears as, culminates in, an island …. That beautiful island of prayer is only real and substantial insofar as it is the culmination of an apparently hidden but extensively solid foundation and support.  Prayer is indeed, as the old catechism beautifully put it, ‘a raising of the mind and heart to God’; but it is more than that, it is a sharing of one’s life with Jesus, by the Spirit, before and for the Father.

You have been told, O man, what is good, and what the LORD requires of  you: only to do right and to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God.  (Micah 6:8 NAB)

Prayer is the engine, set and maintained in motion by the power of the Spirit, carrying us along Jesus’ way to our heavenly home, without which we quickly become like those merely nominal Catholics mentioned in our third parable today, who find themselves caught like bad fish, idly and perhaps unwillingly, in the Church’s net and thrown away.  Let us rather follow the advice of the Psalmist:

Let the heart of those who seek the Lord be glad.  Seek the Lord and His strength, seek His face continually, remember His wonders which He has done.  Glory in His holy name.  (105:3-5)

      

Sixteenth Sunday Year (A)

(Wisdom 12:13, 16-19; Romans 8:26-27; Matthew 13:24-43)

Today, my dear brothers and sisters in Christ, in the parable of the tares, the darnel, or, as we would call them, the weeds, sown in a field of good corn, we have Jesus’ answer to those who complain about, or accuse, Mother Church in order to justify their own lack of faith.  Their complaint, their accusation, frequently ends like this:  “You don't need to go to Church in order to live a good life”, and they reach that face-saving conclusion as the necessary consequence of charges you will all have heard at some time or other: “I’ve seen so-and-so doing this; the priest was very rude and unkind to me; when you meet them outside Church they are no different from anyone else; I don’t want any part with them, they are a lot of hypocrites".  All of which finally leads up to that memorable phrase: "I may not go to Church but I live as good a life as most of them, and a better one than some of them who pretend to be so good and holy!”

Strangely enough, the devout Pharisees of Jesus’ time were somewhat akin to many of our faithless Catholics today in the sense that they liked to imagine the Assembly of faithful, or the Church, as an exclusive community into which only those truly holy are to be admitted.  But what is such true holiness?  Can it be surely recognized, measured, or guaranteed to endure?

One great grief the Pharisees held against Jesus was that He did not accept their oral traditions as true criteria for holiness; indeed, He demanded from His disciples a holiness greater than that of the Pharisees.  Moreover, He did not despise, refuse contact with, sinners: at times He was to be found eating and drinking with them; indeed, He welcomed some of them as His disciples, and  even chose one to become an Apostle.

Minutely observing Jesus’ behaviour, the Scribes and Pharisees found themselves with thoughts like to those of Simon, their fellow Pharisee who, once having invited Jesus to a meal in his home, found himself mentally criticising his Guest’s attitude of patient indulgence towards a reputedly sinful woman present in the company:

This man, if He were a prophet, would know who and what manner of woman this is who is touching Him, for she is a sinner. (Luke 7:39)

Even John the Baptist -- sent to prepare the way for Jesus – might seem to have an attitude very similar to that of Simon and the Pharisees, after all, didn't he once say of Jesus:

I indeed baptize you with water; but One mightier than I is coming, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to loose. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.  His winnowing fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clean out His threshing floor, and gather the wheat into His barn; but the chaff He will burn with unquenchable fire? (Luke 3:16-17)

However, whereas the Pharisees considered themselves, to be sufficiently learned  and holy, authorized and prepared, to separate the good from the bad here and now, ultimately, John was shown to be faithful and true, for Jesus, the Messiah, will gather the wheat into his barn and burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire; but He will do that in His Father’s own good time, the time set by His Father for judgement day, and until then, all who are called, both good or not so good, devout or neglectful, sincere or insincere, will remain together in the field of Jesus’ planting, which is His Church.  Of course, we are not considering here those who openly and seriously contemn the teaching of Mother Church or those who knowingly try to lead astray her faithful by their own bad example, for St. Paul clearly instructed his converts to get rid of such people.  Here we are thinking of those who -- like weeds – surreptitiously hide themselves among the corn; those who outwardly seem to be part of the living, growing, fruit-promising, crop, but inwardly are not.  Bearing that in mind, let us listen again to Jesus’ answer to His own ancient adversaries and to His Church’s modern critics:

The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat and went his way …

That pseudo-wheat mentioned in Jesus’ parable was notorious and considered a great nuisance.  It resembled wheat in appearance but had no marketable value, nor was it of any use for eating.  The rabbis described it as “prostituted wheat”.  Sowing such stuff in someone’s field was regarded as a crime, and the Romans had a law against such actions, which said that “If you have sown tares into another’s field so that you might damage its productivity, not only can the master (of that field) act with force or covertly, but … also he can sue for damages.”   Jesus was clearly telling a serious parable about events that were part and parcel of the lives of those listening to Him.

Notice, first of all, that this parable shows us that Jesus knows full that there are weeds as well as wheat to be found in mother Church.  Indeed, in His parable, the problem is so urgent that He has the master’s workers say: “Should we root out these weeds at once?”  The master, however, knows more about the agricultural issues involved, for the roots of the tares are intermingled with those of the wheat: pull one up and you draw both. Therefore he decides to delay the removal of the weeds: while the crop is growing both weeds and wheat are to remain together; however, when the time is full, the tares are to be uprooted and bound into bundles for burning – for, though useless as food, they can serve as fuel for the fire -- whereas the wheat is then to be carefully harvested and gathered into the barn.

What, therefore, is the teaching of Jesus for us today, People of God? 

To answer that question we must look carefully at today’s readings since they might seem at first sight to be concerned with mutual relations between individuals in the Church and teaching a ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil’ sort of attitude, whereby no impressions are to be acknowledged nor thoughts formed which might seem to distinguish between right and wrong teaching, reverent and irreverent worship, publicly good Catholic behaviour and that which harms the Catholic name.  Indeed, the Gospel can be easily misinterpreted so as to imply that since it is only for the Lord to judge, therefore, until that time, all are to live and worship together in mutual acceptance, appreciation, and affirmation …. a nice family where no one rocks the boat by disapproving of what others might do or say, and where no one can rightly call for positive standards higher than those popularly acceptable.  Such an attitude has, of course, already penetrated and permeated far too many parishes and churches with the result that the dignity of divine worship and the healthy integrity of catholic teaching and moral standards are fearfully disregarded in the name of fraternal charity.

However, that is certainly not the concern of today’s Gospel reading which is totally centred on the kingdom of heaven in its earthly constitution and development.   Although there are, indeed, individual members in that kingdom, both good and bad, it is, nevertheless, the good of the kingdom itself which is the supreme consideration, and this is, currently, a most unwelcome emphasis.  In our modern society any idea that the corporate whole, the social body, may have even more important rights than those of individuals is anathema.  For us, however, the true good of  Mother Church, is supreme, she is our joy and must be our  confidence, something we both live and would die for, since she is, already here on earth, the beginning of what will ultimately become the kingdom of heaven, the glorious paternal home of all God’s children.

People of God, we should not to allow ourselves to be unduly scandalized, and most certainly never put off Mother Church because of individuals be they every so highly placed, be they ever so many, be they ever so arrogant or disdainful.  Nor should we ever become despondent for her no matter how powerful or popular her enemies may become; because in every parable of today’s Gospel reading the wheat is finally and successfully gathered in, the minute mustard seed becomes a tree giving shelter and refuge to the birds of the air, and the yeast ultimately permeates and leavens the whole measure.

The corn sown by Jesus can grow only in the field which He, the Master, has chosen; any seed that falls by the wayside, among thorns or on the stony path, surely perishes in one way or another.  The seed of Jesus’ planting is His Word proclaimed authoritatively by the Apostles chosen by Jesus and subsequently sent out by Him to bring His Good News to the whole world.  Such seed can only grow in the field of Jesus' Church where it can be fully nourished by life-giving showers of His Most Holy Spirit; and in that field there will always be good workers to be found -- called and appointed by the Master to look after the seed He has sown --  through whom, His Spirit, will always provide His People with the grace and guidance necessary for their supernatural fulfilment.  

However, there is an aspect of life in the Church for the Kingdom that is not always appreciated by Church members, but which is perfectly obvious to any farmer watching his crop grow; namely, the fact that, just as weeds hinder the growth, vitality, and the quality of a crop, so also those of sinful life in the Church harm all who are in the Church.  This is what we must bear in mind today when we see Mother Church disfigured in so many ways, short of vocations, and bereft of children.  The disfigurement we may be tempted to complain about is brought upon her in no small measure by her children’s sins: indeed, by the wrong we ourselves do and the good we fail to promote or protect.  Rather than allowing ourselves to give way to so-called righteous indignation about this or that aspect of the Church, we should pity her, love her all the more, because she is suffering for our sins.  I doubt that there has been anything done and perpetrated by others throughout the history of Mother Church which does not find some trace or echo in our own personal weakness and fallibility, or that there is any tide of popular contagion that has not been encouraged or furthered by our own sins of omission or positive faults.

Sometimes in films and fiction, and even in the liberal talk of those wanting to show themselves in a popular light, we are presented with the picture of a jolly sinner, a loveable rogue, an attractive scoundrel.  In actual fact, though, such sinners, rogues, and scoundrels, are the wolves in sheep's clothing of which the Gospel speaks; and the Gospel assures us that they come only to kill and destroy, for there is nothing lovable in known sin and indulged weakness.

People of God, we should always have loving concern for, and trustful commitment to, Mother Church, and therefore we must always confidently hope and trust in Jesus, as we were encouraged in the first reading:

^Your might is the source of justice; Your mastery over all things makes You lenient to all; (and) You show Your might when the perfection of Your power is disbelieved.   But though You are master of might, You judge with clemency, and with much lenience You govern us; for power, whenever You will, attends You.

And it is to His Spirit that we should always turn in our every need, for the Holy Spirit has been given both to perfect Mother Church and to form each and every one of us, uniquely, in Jesus, for the Father, as our second reading told us:

The Spirit too comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit itself intercedes with inexpressible groanings.  ^ And the One who searches hearts knows what is the intention of the Spirit, because He intercedes for the holy ones according to God’s will.