Continuously Choosing the Treasure of the Kingdom, 17th Wednesday (II), August 1, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Saint Alphonsus Liguori
August 1, 2018
Jer 15:10.16-21, Ps 59, Mt 13:44-46

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today gives us the fifth and sixth of seven Parables about the kingdom of heaven that we find in the thirteenth chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel. They’re too that really explain the essence of the Christian life and the response that is expected to the gift of God himself having come into the world.
• The first is of a poor peasant finding a buried treasure in the midst of his work in the field. There were no real banks to speak of in ancient Palestine. People would often bury things of value in secret locations in fields. There was no sense of “finders keepers, losers weepers” then; whatever was discovered in a field belonged not to the discoverer but the owner. That’s why the man needed to buy the field. It’s quite obvious that the one selling had no idea that an ancient treasure was buried on his property. He didn’t place the same value in the field as much as his peasant did and so he sold it. For the peasant, selling all he said in order to get the money to buy the field was nothing compared to what he knew he would be gaining.
• The second parable is of a wealthy merchant searching for precious pearls, going from place to place in pursuit of something truly valuable and beautiful. Finally he found the pearl of his dreams, whose worth was unsurpassable, but whose owner valued it less than the money and property he would get in exchange. And so the wealthy merchant sold all that he had before, doubtless houses, gems and other valuables, to obtain that pearl of great price.
• The spiritual lessons we’re called to draw from these parables are first, Jesus wants us to have a burning desire, an unquenchable yearning, for the treasure of the kingdom of heaven; second, he wants us to know where we need to look to find and obtain that treasure; and third, he wants us to have the willingness to sacrifice everything to obtain that treasure, for if we’re not prepared to sacrifice everything for the treasure, we’ll often not be willing to sacrifice far less than everything to obtain it either. Let’s look more deeply at each of these qualities so that we might honestly see whether we have them and, if not, to ask the Lord today for the grace to have them in abundance.
• The first quality is an insatiable desire for the treasure of the kingdom of God, which is basically an unquenchable thirst for God. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told us, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Mt 6:21). He told us in that same Sermon that many of us seek to “store up for [ourselves] treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal,” but he wanted us to “store up for [ourselves] treasures in heaven,” a treasure not measured in clothing that moths can wreck, metals that rust can corrode, or money that thieves or taxes can take. Jesus is telling us that our heart must be set on God, and not just in general, but set on him more than Tom Brady wants to win another Super Bowl, more than an ambitious politician seeks to win high office, and more than a man in love will do everything he can to win over and marry the woman he can’t stop thinking about. Do we have that hunger? Do we value God most of all in life or do we value other things more than God?
• The second is a recognition of where the treasure of the kingdom can be found. Where do we need to go to the places that will form us in the kingdom? What is the path to true union with God in the kingdom? Are we actively searching for that path or are we waiting for something to fall in our lap? The merchant in the parable knew the places he needed to go, and so he visited the shops and markets where pearls would be sold. The farmer wasn’t so much searching for a buried treasure, but what he discovered it in the middle of his workday tilling new parts of the property that had not yet been farmed for the landowner, he knew what to do. What about us? If we really wanted to grow rich in God’s kingdom, where would we go? What would we do? We know where we find God. We find him in personal prayer, we find him in the Sacraments — especially those we can, and he wants us to, receive him again and again, the sacraments whereby he forgives us and feeds us. We can find him speaking to us in Sacred Scripture. We find him radiantly shining in the lives and writings of the saints. We find him living within us in the truly Christian moral life — in the virtues of justice, prudence, temperance, courage, chastity, honesty, and compassion. We can find him in the loving service of our neighbor, since every time we care for someone who is hungry, thirsty, naked, a stranger, ill, imprisoned or otherwise in need, Jesus tells us that we, through them, are caring for him. But in order for us to find God there, we first need to grasp that each of the things I just named is a treasure, because whenever we don’t think that what we’re dealing with is a treasure, it’s going to be almost impossible for us to find God there. Do we realize, for example, that the Sacrament of Confession, is a treasure that enriches us with the precious gift of God’s mercy and makes us rich in sharing it with others? Do we grasp that the commandments and the moral law God gives us is not a moral straightjacket but a treasure, such that we really mean what we sing in the Psalms, “Lord, I love your commands!?” Do we recognize that living according to God’s commands is the real treasure, rather than living seeking the counterfeit gold of a life of flesh? Do we see that caring for a sick loved one, or helping a stranger, is a real treasure? Do we see that Eucharistic Adoration is a treasure and that we’re silly not to take advantage of it, sillier than a person with a winning MegaMillions lottery ticket would be not to cash it in? Are we truly aware that Mass is a treasure, in fact the greatest earthly treasure of all, and the wisest investment of our time we could ever make? The second virtue we need is precisely to know what the treasure is and where it can be found.
• The third virtue needed is the capacity to sacrifice to obtain that treasure. The rich pearl hunter and the poor hardworking peasant sold all they had to obtain the pearl and field, respectively. Likewise, we need to do more than hunger for the kingdom and recognize where we can find it; we also need to be willing to make the sacrifices necessary to seize it. And we need to see that when we recognize what we’re getting rather than giving up, we do so “with joy.” The apostles are the great illustrations of those who, when finding a treasure, left all they had to follow Jesus. When the Lord Jesus called Peter, Andrew, James and John from their boats right after they had captured the largest catch in their careers, the evangelists told us, they left “immediately” and followed him. Likewise, when Jesus came to find St. Matthew at his tax collecting post and said, “Follow me!,” Matthew left all the money on the table, all the ledgers, and immediately got up to follow Jesus. St. Peter would later summarize the common characteristic of the apostles when he turned to Jesus and said, “We have given up everything and followed you.” That’s in sharp contrast to the Rich Young Man who is famous for not leaving everything to follow Jesus and instead walked away from him because he was unwilling to sacrifice everything for the sake of this great pearl. This type of attitude that Jesus wants us to have toward the kingdom, sacrificing good things for the greatest thing of all, explains the greatness that happens in individual lives and happens in the Church. It explains martyrdom, because the martyrs account even their life here on earth less valuable than fidelity to God and living in his kingdom forever. It explains the lives of the saints, because they’re the ones who let go of so many great worldly expectations in order to become truly rich in God and his kingdom. It explains how to suffer and to die well. For those who really seek first God and his kingdom, then death is not dreaded but desired; even when we have to leave behind so many loved ones and good things, we recognize that all of these goods are nothing in comparison with “what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor 2:9). This type of attitude for the kingdom also describes how we ought to mourn the death of those loved ones who have died in this way: as much as miss them, we love them enough that we want them to have a greater treasure than the love and company we could give them. This capacity to sacrifice for the kingdom explains vocations to the priesthood and to religious and consecrated life, because these are people who put God above families of their own, who put his love above human loves, his will above their will, his kingdom above amassing a kingdom of their own. And these vocations normally come from families that are seeking, recognizing and sacrificing for the pearl of great price who is God by sacrificing TV for prayer, sports leagues for Mass, their own vacations to care for others. When a boy or a girl is raised in such a home, then the sacrifice of the goods of marriage, family, earthly possessions and self-determination to follow Christ all the way in poverty, chastity and obedience as a priest or religious isn’t that great a leap.
• While all of us, however, can remember special graces in which we chose to put God first — when he in conscience or in prayer realized that God was calling us to much more than we had given him before, when we discovered our vocation to be a saint or to follow him along a particular path of sanctity — God doesn’t have us abide in past choices. He constantly gives us the chance in life to choose him as our treasure, to value him more than we value the good things of life, to esteem him even more than we value our own life. And so we have to persevere in choosing the treasure of the kingdom and not give in to the temptation to trade it for something fleeting and far less valuable. This is the conflict we see in today’s first reading from the Prophet Jeremiah. As we saw last week, he had chosen to give his life to the Lord who had consecrated him from the womb as a prophet to the nations. He had chosen to put God first in his life and place his entire existence at the Lord’s service. But in today’s reading, he began to vacillate because of the opposition and sufferings that he was encountering in that work. Jeremiah complained that even though “when I found your words, I devoured them” and “they became the joy and happiness of my heart,” even though “I bore your name, O Lord, God of hosts,” even though “I did not sit partying in the circle of merry-makers” but “sat alone” because he shared God’s holy indignation at the sins of those in Judah and Jerusalem, he was experiencing not joy but anguish. He lamented that he was alive: “Woe to me, mother, that you gave me birth!” He said he was being treated worse than the usurious money-lenders who were generally considered the biggest scumbags of all: “I neither borrow nor lend, yet all curse me!” He said that he had become a “man of strife and contention to all the land” and that, rather than getting better, it seemed to be getting worse. “Why is my pain continuous, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?,” he asked. God was supposed to be a font of living water, not a broken cistern, as we examined last week, but that living water had become for Jeremiah a “treacherous brook whose waters do not abide.” The living water not only didn’t give him peace but brought danger. Rather than finding a treasure by giving himself to God, he seemed to be finding only tribulation, a tribulation that was leading him to wonder if he had been seduced, deceived, and betrayed by God. God answered him, calling him to conversion, and promising not to take his problems away but to strengthen him to confront those problems. “If you repent so that I restore you,” God said, “you shall stand in my presence.” Jeremiah had been sent to call people to the conversion required to live in God’s kingdom, but he himself now needed to convert. Rather than lifting the people up to God, God communicated, the people and their opposition were dragging him down. “If you bring or the precious without the vile, you shall be my mouthpiece,” God said, indicating that he had been mixing the message with worldly speech. “Then it shall be they who turn to you and you shall not turn to them.” With regard to the opposition, God promised, “I will make you toward this people a solid wall of brass. Though they fight against you, they shall not prevail.” He wouldn’t be frail glass to their attacks but a thick, impenetrable wall of the firmest brass. And the reason why he would be strong would be because the Lord would be with him. “For I am with you, to deliver and rescue you. I will free you from the hand of the wicked and rescue you from the grasp of the violent.” God was not promising to remove the opposition — the very verbs “deliver,” “rescue” and “liberate” point to the fact that he would have hardship — but that the Lord would be saving him by his presence in the very suffering of opposition. As we’ll continue to see over the next week, Jeremiah will continue to battle these temptations against perseverance, in which he will be faced with the choice of choosing God with the attendant sufferings that that will mean, or abandoning God for a supposedly easier life. He would be continuously faced with the choice of the Rich Young Man. But he would eventually reaffirm the choice of God and each temptation would be an occasion for him to grow in resolve.
• The lesson for us ought to be clear. We, too, need to persevere in joyfully, eagerly and wisely making the choice for the buried treasure and the pearl of great price. We also need to recognize that that kingdom is a life with God and that that joy flows from being with God. Jesus would say elsewhere, “The kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the violent are taking it by force” (Mt 11:12), an indication that seizing the buried treasure and buying the precious pearl aren’t placid transactions. Not only is there a cost in sacrificing both good and bad things for the sake of the most important of all, but God likewise will provide many opportunities for us to persevere in choosing the kingdom. When Jesus called the first apostles to follow him as the treasure and pearl, he was calling them to follow him along the way of the Cross, a way that would lead even to his own crucifixion. Even though at times they asked questions, even though at times out of fear and weakness they valued some earthly comforts and betrayed Jesus, 11 of the 12 ultimately persevered in seeking first the Kingdom, even to the point of death, and now share an eternal inheritance. Likewise the martyrs and so many saints show us that the life of the kingdom is not inconsistent with suffering. But the point is that even in suffering and in death the Lord is present to “deliver,” “rescue” and “liberate” us by his saving presence — and it’s because of those sufferings that we can appreciate ever more the value of the choice for the kingdom. Even if we should have to suffer martyrdom, it’s still worth it! Even if we should be calumniated, opposed, hated by all because of Christ, our reward will be great in the kingdom!
• Today we celebrate a saint who shows us in his life how perpetually to choose God as the pearl of great price. St. Alphonsus Maria Ligouri grew up learning how to choose Jesus in a pious home. He received a superlative education with double law degrees at the age of 16 and was a legal wunderkind. Eventually, however, he began to wander from the faith. And after losing his first case on a technicality at the age of 26, he began to look at the vanity of his life and seek something substantial and lasting. Converted and in a sense liberated, he sought the priesthood, against much opposition from his father. He eventually founded the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, which was dedicated to preaching missions, bringing people back to the faith, helping them to learn and live by the truth that sets us free (Jn 8:32). It was a work that brought great consolation in seeing people turn their lives around, receive God’s mercy for the first time in decades, reconcile familial disputes and more. He preached in simple terms so that everyone could understand and respond to their evangelical emancipation. A few centuries later, St. Alphonsus’ homilies are perhaps most famous for the graphic imagery he would use about what happens at the judgment and death and some have said that he tried to “scare the hell” out of people. But his goal was never to preach to the folks as if they were a bunch of convicts on the way to prison but as much beloved sons and daughters of God called to cease squandering their lives in self-made pigsties and make the way home, here in this world, to the celebration God has for us not with a fattened calf but a Lamb looking as if he has been slain. His many books on the Glories of Mary were meant to show how it is possible to imitate her faith so that our own souls may magnify the Lord and our spirits rejoice in indescribable happiness. St. Alphonsus gave his entire life so that no one lose the precious gift of redemption for which the Redeemer paid such a precious price, but rather use their freedom and in faith choose continually and definitively to live in the kingdom of the redeemed.Eventually when he was 49 and could no longer preach in person as much because of rheumatoid arthritis, migraines, and many other maladies, started to write books, and before he died 42 years later, had written 111, an extraordinary output that flowed from his zeal, n Christ, on the Sacraments, on Mary, and the Christian life as seen in the lives of the martyrs and more. His works preach still. He was constantly seeking to help others to choose Jesus as the pearl of great price. At the beginning of Mass we prayed that we might imitate his zeal:  “O God, who constantly raise up in your Church new examples of virtue,” — referring not to St. Alphonsus but to us and those who have come after him — “grant that we may follow so closely in the footsteps of the Bishop Saint Alphonsus in his zeal for souls as to attain the same rewards that are his in heaven.”
• St. Alphonsus was one who needed to persevere in that choice of the Lord despite so many difficulties. When he was 66 he was named Bishop of the Diocese of Sant’Agatha dei Goti, which was in desperate need of reform, which he carried out heroically. While he was fulfilling that work, other Redemptorists who were political and ambitious sought to take over the Congregation, pressuring him to sign documents that were unwise and then using them as a pretext to try to get him not only removed as superior but kicked out of the order, something that temporarily they triumphed in doing. Through it all, as painful as it was, he persevered in choosing Christ, — and his Cross — as the treasure buried in the field of the world.
• He renewed his choice for the treasure each morning at Mass, as he heard the Word of God and received the Word-made-flesh and grew in amazement at the Lord’s real presence throughout a life of adoration. He wrote in a book of devotions for the Redemptorist novices, “My Saviour in the Sacrament, O divine Lover, how lovable are the tender inventions of your love to make yourself beloved by souls! O eternal Word, you who became man, you were not content with dying for us; you gave us this Sacrament as company, nourishment and a pledge of Paradise. You appeared among us as an infant in a stable, as a poor man in a workshop, as an offender on a cross, as bread upon an altar. Tell me, must anything else be invented to make you loved?” St. Alphonsus didn’t need anything else. Neither do we.
• And so today we come to Mass to be given once more the choice for the kingdom. Like the poor peasant in the Parable, we might be surprised by the directness of the offer as we’re going about our day, or like the merchant, we might have been seeking this pearl for our whole life. But regardless, the offer of the kingdom is here. That pearl, that treasure, is Jesus himself. At every Mass the priest says, “Pray, brothers and sisters, that this sacrifice yours and mine, may be acceptable to God, the Almighty Father.” We bring to Mass our sacrifices, both what we’ve given up as well as what we are now giving of, and we unite it with Christ’s sacrifice as one holy, living and acceptable oblation to the Father, our logike latreia, the only worship that makes sense. Let’s ask God the Father for the grace, like Saint Alphonsus received,  to make Christ in the Eucharist our precious pearl, our true treasure, so that we may experience in this life and forever in heaven the joy Jesus describes of the poor peasant and rich merchant. That joy, that treasure, is ours for the taking. This is what Jesus is offering us today: the deal of an eternal lifetime. Let’s beg for the wisdom and the courage necessary to sacrifice whatever we need to do to make that tea!

The readings for today’s Mass were: