Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Blessed Stanley Rother
July 28, 2021
Ex 34:29-35, Ps 99, 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 we have two short parables that summarize the essence of the Christian life, pointing, however, to a reality that too few actually realize and live. They indicate the fundamental Christian choice and the joy with which we’re supposed to make and renew it. The parables are simple enough to understand. The first is of a poor peasant who happens to find a buried treasure in the midst of his work in someone else’s 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 had 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 actively 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.
- We see a few fundamental lessons about the kingdom of God in these parables.
- The first is that the Kingdom is a treasure greater than any other. 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 an aging professional athlete wants to win a championship, 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. Is our heart set that way? Do we really treasure God?
- The second lesson is that to obtain the treasure isn’t cheap. We have to give up things, and not just things that we don’t want or value, but things that are precious. In the parables, each sells all he has, all his valuables. Jesus says that to enter his kingdom, we must deny ourselves, pick up our Cross, lose our life, sell what we have and give to the poor, love our enemies, give our cloak and not just our tunic, and even be willing to leave father and mother, children and lands, for his sake and the sake of the Gospel. The price is steep! But it’s nothing compared to what we’re getting.
- That leads to the third lesson. Despite the cost, it’s still the greatest bargain of our life. It’s like trading in a small house in a crowded, unsafe neighborhood for a Mansion at the bay, giving up a steady Chevy in order to get a new Mercedes. That’s what leads the farmer and the merchant to sell all that they had, because the joy they obtained from their new acquisition far outweighed the sadness of what they were losing. What they were getting was far greater than what they were giving up. This is the joy we see, for example, in the apostles 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.” Unlike the Rich Young Man who kept grasping his mammon and departed from Jesus said, the Apostles seized the kingdom with joy. That’s the decision made by the saints.
- We have three illustrations of this truth today. The first is Moses. When he met the Lord at the burning bush, Moses left everything behind to do what the Lord was asking. And he continuously chose the Lord. He chose him in trust, regularly going to Pharaoh as the Lord commanded, despite his reluctance. He chose him in prayer, as we saw yesterday in the Meeting Tent and today in 40 days of prayer on Mount Sinai that would make his face glow. He chose him in his commandments, living according to what God asked, and announcing it to the Israelites, despite their grumbling and stiff necks. He was willing to let go of everything else to please the Lord, in accordance with his recognition of just who the Lord is and how blessed he was to be in relationship with him.
- The second illustration is in the priesthood and in religious life. By the objective choices of our life, we show that we choose the poor Christ over all the money in the world, the obedient Christ over all the autonomy the world promises, the chaste, celibate Christ even over the goods of marriage and family. And when we do so with joy, there is no more compelling witness to the kingdom in our age, enslaved as it is by materialism, individualism and hedonism. This is a choice that is supposed to be not just in the past, but renewed each day. Christ comes to us each day and each day we are giving the privilege to make him our treasure, to seize him with joy. In the midst of a culture that tries to live everything as “both/and” because it’s afraid of sacrifice, in which we want God and mammon too, we want happiness and sin too, we priests and religious have a particular apostolic task to show that sometimes it’s “either/or,” and that the choice for Christ is the best and happiest one we can make.
- The third illustration we find in the American hero of the faith we celebrate today for the fourth time. Blessed Stanley Rother, from Okarche, Oklahoma, who was martyred 40 years ago today, chose the Lord as his precious pearl and buried treasure. And he regularly had to choose to sacrifice to follow him. Following his vocation to the priesthood was a Cross for him because he could never really master Latin, essential for seminarians in the 1950s and early 60s. Much like St. John Vianney who was three times booted from the seminary because he couldn’t master the language, Rother was similarly dismissed from Assumption Seminary in San Antonio when it became clear that his Latin wasn’t really going to improve. But a priest mentor and his bishop intervened, knowing his goodness and generosity, and arranged for him to finish at Mt. St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Little did his professors in San Antonio foresee that as a missionary Father Rother would not only, through hard work and grace, master Spanish but also translate the Bible into the Mayan dialect Tz’utujil, learn how to share the faith with them in those languages and become, when necessary, a language instructor! He was a simple hard-working farmer, from a salt of the earth family in Oklahoma, who knew quite a bit about carpentry, tractors, seeds and soil, wheat and weeds, all of which he put at the Lord’s service and at the service of his people in Guatemala, repairing the plumbing, building and grounds of the Church and rectory, erecting a school, a small hospital, and a radio station, training the locals in better farming techniques, through digging a well, installing its pump, and irrigating the fields, driving bulldozers, stopping only for Mass, prayer and teaching catechists. Around 1980, extremist elements in the Guatemalan army during Guatemala’s 36-year-long civil war started to use force and intimidation against some of the indigenous people and those who defended their rights. His catechists and parishioners began to disappear and were later found dead, their bodies tortured. They destroyed the radio station he founded to teach the locals math and languages and killed its director. In January 1981, once his name was put on a death list because of his opposition to the presence of the military in the region, he was pressured by friends, family and his bishop to leave for a time lest he become the next victim. He returned to Oklahoma, but his attention and heart were with the people whom he had served for 13 years who desperately needed a shepherd, surrounded by so many fierce wolves. As he repeated in various letters, a shepherd cannot run when his people need him. After three months, at the age of 46, he asked the permission of his bishop to return, and despite his family’s and others’ remonstrations, he did. Three months later, masked gunmen broke into his rectory at midnight, and, after he resisted their attempts to kidnap him, they shot him twice in the head. He was one of ten priests murdered in Guatemala that year. But we know that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church, a seed that grows even in the midst of weeds. His love for God and his people, his faith, was contagious, and a source of faith and charity for others. Today we ask God through Blessed Stanley’s intercession, to help us perseveringly seize the treasure of the Kingdom and, like Blessed Stanley, give our lives to pass that treasure on.
- Every Mass gives us another chance to choose the treasure of the kingdom. Like the poor peasant, we might be surprised by the discovery as we’re going about our day, or like the merchant, we might have been seeking this pearl for our whole life. 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. St. John Vianney, the patron saints of priests, catechized his people about the power of the Eucharist to make us great saints, to help us seize the kingdom, if we but choose to center our whole life on Jesus, the King himself, in the Eucharist. He said, “Next to this sacrament, we are like someone who dies of thirst next to a river, just needing to bend the head down to drink; or like a poor man next to a treasure chest, when all that is needed is to stretch out the hand” and grab the gold coins. The Eucharist is that treasure that quenches our thirst, that makes us truly rich, because Christ himself is that pearl of great price. Let’s ask God the Father for the grace to make Christ his Son 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, like Blessed Stanley Rother, to sacrifice whatever we need to do to make that deal.
The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 EX 34:29-35
As Moses came down from Mount Sinai
with the two tablets of the commandments in his hands,
he did not know that the skin of his face had become radiant
while he conversed with the LORD.
When Aaron, then, and the other children of Israel saw Moses
and noticed how radiant the skin of his face had become,
they were afraid to come near him.
Only after Moses called to them did Aaron
and all the rulers of the community come back to him.
Moses then spoke to them.
Later on, all the children of Israel came up to him,
and he enjoined on them all that the LORD
had told him on Mount Sinai.
When he finished speaking with them,
he put a veil over his face.
Whenever Moses entered the presence of the LORD to converse with him,
he removed the veil until he came out again.
On coming out, he would tell the children of Israel
all that had been commanded.
Then the children of Israel would see
that the skin of Moses’ face was radiant;
so he would again put the veil over his face
until he went in to converse with the LORD.
Responsorial Psalm PS 99:5, 6, 7, 9
R. (see 9c) Holy is the Lord our God.
Extol the LORD, our God,
and worship at his footstool;
holy is he!
R. Holy is the Lord our God.
Moses and Aaron were among his priests,
and Samuel, among those who called upon his name;
they called upon the LORD, and he answered them.
R. Holy is the Lord our God.
From the pillar of cloud he spoke to them;
they heard his decrees and the law he gave them.
R. Holy is the Lord our God.
Extol the LORD, our God,
and worship at his holy mountain;
for holy is the LORD, our God.
R. Holy is the Lord our God.
Alleluia JN 15:15B
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
I call you my friends, says the Lord,
for I have made known to you all that the Father has told me.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel MT 13:44-46
Jesus said to his disciples:
“The Kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field,
which a person finds and hides again,
and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
Again, the Kingdom of heaven is like a merchant
searching for fine pearls.
When he finds a pearl of great price,
he goes and sells all that he has and buys it.”
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