Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: Preaching, Homiletics & Scripture

  • The Twenty-first Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Twenty-first Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    One of my jobs before I went to seminary was in the sales department of a computer supply company.  In that job, they taught us that one of the first good rules of sales was never to ask a question to which you didn’t already know the answer.  I think teachers get taught a version of that principle as well.  I can’t help but think that Jesus’ question to the disciples in today’s Gospel falls under that heading.  Because Jesus obviously knew who he was.  But, as often happens in our interactions with Jesus, there’s something more going on.  And to figure out what that something more is, all you have to do is go back to the Gospels the last couple of weeks and see in them that Jesus is looking for people’s faith.  He was looking for faith from Peter when he called him to walk on the water.  He was impressed by the faith of the Canaanite woman last week as she persisted in her request that Jesus heal her daughter.  And now he queries the disciples’ faith – and ours too – as he asks us the million dollar question: “Who do you say that I am?”

    He actually starts with kind of a soft-ball question. “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they recount all the obvious and probably much-discussed options of the time.  If there were bloggers and podcasters and talk radio people and cable news in that first century, they too might have said “John the Baptist” or “Elijah” or “Jeremiah” or “one of the prophets.”  So this is an easy question for the disciples to answer.  But when he gets to the lightning round question, “But who do you say that I am?” there’s a lot more silence.  And, as often happens with the disciples, it’s the impetuous Peter who blurts out the right answer, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

    But here’s the thing: that answer is going to require much of Saint Peter.  You see, his answer not just a liturgical formula or a scriptural title or even a profession of faith in the formal sense.  Jesus is looking for something that goes quite a bit deeper, something that comes from the heart, something integrated into Peter’s life.  He is looking for faith, not just spoken, but faith lived, and that’s why Peter’s answer is actually pretty dangerous.  If he is really convinced that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God” then that conviction has to show itself in the way Peter lives.  He can’t just believe that and keep it under his hat.  If Jesus really is the One who is coming into the world, the Promised One of all generations, the salvation of the world, then Peter has to proclaim it from the rooftops.  And, as we know, that proclamation isn’t going to be very welcome.

    So I’m very sorry to tell you all this, but we have all gathered here on a very dangerous Sunday.  We too, you know, are being asked today, “But who do you say that I am?”  And Jesus isn’t asking us just to recite the Creed, the Profession of Faith.  That’s too easy; we do it all the time.  Jesus doesn’t want to know what you learned at Bible Study or what you read on Facebook.  He isn’t going for what’s in our heads.  Jesus is calling all of us today to dig deep, to really say what it is that we believe about him by the way that we act and the things that we do and the life that we live.  It’s a dangerous question for us, too, because what we believe about Jesus has to show forth in action and not just word.  Our life has to be a testament to our faith in God.  And if we cannot answer that question out of our faith today, if we are not prepared to live the consequences of our belief, then what are we doing here?

    Because if we really believe that Jesus is who he says he is, then we cannot just sit on the news.  Like Peter, we are going to have to proclaim it in word and deed.  In our homes, in our workplaces, in our schools, in our communities – we must be certain that everyone knows that we are Christians and that we are ready to live our faith.  That doesn’t mean that we need to interject a faith lesson into every conversation or bludgeon people with the Gospel.  But it does mean that we have to live that Gospel.  In St. Francis’s words, “Proclaim the Gospel at all times.  If necessary, use words.”  People absolutely need to be able to tell by noticing the way we live our lives that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.  If they can’t, then our faith is as tepid as the Pharisees’ and that’s certainly not praiseworthy!  Frankly, that too has consequences.

    Every part of our Liturgy has consequences for us believers.  “The Body of Christ.”  When we hear that proclamation and respond with our “Amen,” we are saying “yes, that’s what I believe.”  And if we believe that, if we are then filled with the Body of Christ by receiving Holy Communion, then we have made a statement that has consequences.  If we truly become what we receive, then how does that change the way that we work, the way that we interact with others?  “Go in peace, glorifying the Lord by your life.”  “Thanks be to God.”  If we accept that command, then what?  What does it mean to glorify the Lord with our life?  Does it mean that we just do some kind of ministry here at Mass?  Not even close.  The first word in the command is “Go” and that means we have to glorify the Lord in our daily lives, in our business negotiations, in our community meetings, in our interactions with peers or the way that we mentor those who work for us.

    So if we really believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, then our lives just became a whole lot more complicated.  We may have to give up some of our habits and vices, we may have to make a concerted effort to be more aware of Christ in our daily lives, we may have to learn to treat other people as the Body of Christ.  We may have to do all this preaching in a hostile environment, because sometimes people don’t want to hear the Good News, or even be in the presence of it.  I think that’s more true today than ever.  The Gospel is met with hostility just because Christians preach it.  Therein lies the danger, because if we really believe, then we have to preach anyway.  Peter did, and it eventually led him to the cross.  What will it require of us?

    So I don’t know just how dangerous this will be for me or for you. I’m not even sure how we will all answer the question right now. But one thing is for sure, all of us sitting here today have the same one-question test that Peter and the disciples had. Who do you say that the Son of Man is? Be sure to take that to your prayer this week.

  • Friday of the Twentieth Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Twentieth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today we have a Pharisee who is a scholar of the law engaging Jesus in conversation.  Obviously, this scholar wasn’t really interested in Jesus’ point of view; he didn’t expect to learn anything from Jesus.  Instead he was looking for Jesus to say something incongruent with their way of thinking so that they could brand him as a heretic and get rid of him. 

    But Jesus knows that.  So what he gives this scholar, and all those who were listening in, was a very fair summary of the law and the prophets: love God and neighbor.  And he does it in a way that is familiar to them.  He quotes one of their most famous rules of life: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.”  Every Jew memorized that as the greatest and first commandment, so his addition of loving neighbor wasn’t going that far beyond what they had been taught.  And now they have nothing to say to him.

    But what is important here is that these words are for us.  All of our life needs to be centered around love.  If love is what summed up the law and the prophets, it is certainly what sums up the Gospel.  We too are called to love God who loved us first and loves us best.  We too are called to put that love into action by loving others, every person we come in contact with.  Some are easy to love, others not so much.  But we are called to love them anyway.

    How will we love others today?

  • The Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary

    The Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary

    On this, the octave day of the Assumption of Mary, we celebrate another great Marian event, the memorial of the Queenship of Mary. Today we celebrate the fifth glorious mystery of the rosary: Mary is crowned Queen of heaven and earth. The Queenship of Mary has been celebrated ever since Venerable Pope Pius XII instituted this celebration in 1954. But the feast itself is rooted in Sacred Scripture. In the Old Testament, the mothers of the king had great influence in court. Certainly this would be the case between Mary and Jesus; we know that Mary’s intercession is a powerful force for our good. The Queenship of Mary, though, is most properly understood as a sharing in the Kingship of Christ the King. St. Paul speaks of the crown that awaited him after a long life, filled with fighting the good fight. And we know that that same crown – the crown that comes from Christ himself – awaits all who believe in Jesus and live lives of faith.


    The origin of Mary’s crown, I think, can be seen at the very end of today’s Gospel reading. Having heard the overwhelming news from the angel Gabriel, Mary responds in faith: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” Her faith, a faith that responded to the Lord’s call even though the details were not clear, is the kind of faith we’re all called to model. This kind of faith responds to God’s movement with absolute trust in his providence. Mary models that kind of response for us, and perhaps her reward, too, is a model of what we can hope to receive. Just as she responded in faith and was rewarded with a crown of glory, so we too can hope to have the same crown if we live the kind of faith she did.

    And that’s the goal of our spiritual lives, brothers and sisters. We are to discern God’s call and respond with faith that leaves the details to God alone. Mary is always the model for us. She paves the way to living the Gospel as we are all called to do. But Mary is also the intercessor for us. She knew the difficulties and the sorrows that taking up the cross of the Gospel means for us, so we can depend on her intercession to help us through it. So on this feast day of her crowning, may we all look at our own calls in this life, and respond with her fiat: “Let it be done for me according to your word.”

  • The Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today’s readings are challenging ones for us.  They’re certainly a little difficult to understand, especially the Gospel story.  But I think it’s the Gospel story that presents the key to our understanding today by revealing the Canaanite woman’s faith.  This is what I think Jesus wants us to reflect on in today’s Liturgy of the Word.

    As we have been reading from Matthew’s Gospel this year, we have seen various levels of faith: “lacking faith” as seen in the Jewish community, most particularly in the Pharisees and Sadducees, “little faith” as seen in the disciples, and particularly in the Twelve, and “great faith” as seen in surprising places, like in the Canaanite woman today. We’re all on different places in our faith life, and I think today’s Scriptures give us time for a quick summer check-up to see where we are in that spectrum.

    Throughout our Gospel readings this past year, Jesus has run up against the religious leaders and even some of the Jewish people, those he was sent to save first, and found them frustratingly lacking in faith.  They have heard him preach and seen his mighty deeds just like everyone else, but could not reconcile it with what they believed, so they refused to believe in him.  They thought his words were scandalous and his wondrous deeds were black magic.  It’s not so much that they didn’t recognize the miracles, they just refused to believe he was doing it by the same faith they thought they had.

    We have also seen Peter’s faith on display.  He is kind of the spokesman for the rest of the disciples, often putting into words what they may have been too timid to express.  In last weekend’s Gospel, Peter was able to walk on the water when he had his eyes fixed on Jesus, but began to sink when he looked at the storm-tossed waves. Jesus pulled him out of the waves, saying “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?”  The disciples are those men of little faith, who were with him all the time, but often missing the point.  And Jesus sometimes seems to be frustrated with their little faith and slow understanding.

    In today’s Gospel, though, we have “great faith,” and from a surprising source.  The woman is a Canaanite, a member of the race of people who lived in the Promised Land until God gave it over to the Jews.  She is an outsider, who risked her life to cross into enemy territory.  But she knows enough to give her daughter’s situation to Jesus.  And she is persistent enough to keep asking even though she is initially rebuffed.  The disciples find her so irritating, they want Jesus to send her away.  But he recognizes in her what he has been thirsting to find all along: great faith.  And with that great faith, she was able to return to her daughter, freed from the demon, healed from the inside out.

    So we have been able to see in Matthew’s Gospel over these past months, the range of faith.  From the lack of faith of the Jews and religious leaders of the time, to the little, almost fledgling faith of the disciples, to the surprisingly great faith of the Canaanite woman.  This begs the question in us, I think, of where we are in the journey of faith.  Have we yet to begin, or worse, have we chosen not to begin?  Do we hope our mere physical presence at Mass will be good enough?  Do we hear the word of God but refuse to let it sink in, to travel from our brain into our hearts?  Have we heard the Gospel but been very lax about living it?  Do we come to Mass only to leave this holy place and become a very different person in the parking lot, or in our homes, businesses and schools in the week ahead?  Do we find ourselves as lacking in faith as the Pharisees and Sadducees?

    Or are we tentative in our faith?  Are we among those who want to believe, but are afraid to take a leap of faith, afraid to walk on that choppy water?  Are we discouraged by what seems to be a lack of response to our prayers?  Are we angry with God because of something that happened – or didn’t happen – in the past?  Do we think it’s okay to miss Mass because we have other things to do?  Have we not gone to confession in a long time because we think our sins are too big, or because we think we don’t really sin that much?  Are we hesitant to pray about something because we think it’s too big for God to handle, or too little to bother him about?  Have we been looking for excuses to avoid something we know is God’s call in our life?  Have we been of “little faith?”

    Maybe we have found ourselves in one or the other of those places in the faith journey at different points in our lives.  I know I have.  But maybe too – I hope – we have found ourselves on more solid, faithful ground.  Maybe we have taken a leap of faith and found ourselves blessed beyond our wildest imaginings.  Maybe we have answered God’s call and found grace to do the things we never thought we could.  Maybe we have given a problem or situation over to God and found out that in God’s time, healing came in unexpected ways.  Maybe we have been surprised by our faith from time to time and heard God say, “Great is your faith!”

    Like I said, I think many of us are in all these places at different times of our lives.  And that’s okay as long as we make a little progress all the time, as long as we eventually find our faith taking us places we never thought we would go.  The life of faith is full of surprises, most of them good, some of them challenging or possibly even disheartening.  But when we approach it all in faith, all of it will work out for good in God’s own time.  When we give our lives to God, when we take the leap we know God is calling us to take, when we get out of our boat, we might just find ourselves walking on water, or feeding thousands, blessing others and sometimes saying just the thing someone else needs to hear.  All of this is God working through us, of course, all of it is because we have trusted God in some significant way.  In those moments, may we hear what Jesus said to the Canaanite woman: “Great is your faith!”

  • Mass of the Holy Spirit

    Mass of the Holy Spirit

    This homily was for the Mass of the Holy Spirit, celebrated at the beginning of the new school year.

    Readings: Isaiah 42:1-3; 1 Corinthians 12:4-13; Matthew 5:1-12a

    I’m grateful that we can come together as a community to celebrate Mass on this second day of the school year.  It’s good that we begin our year with Mass, and that we begin by asking for the help of the Holy Spirit.  That’s why we are celebrating a Mass of the Holy Spirit today.  A Mass of the Holy Spirit is a traditional way to begin a school year.

    So I once heard a story about a priest who was walking through the jungle.  At one point, he comes face to face with a very hungry lion.  The priest, of course, is very frightened and he makes the sign of the cross and prays, “Lord, if you can hear me, please fill this lion’s heart with the Holy Spirit.  The lion stops right in his tracks and a bright light begins to shine all around him.  The priest is relieved until he sees the lion fold his paws, bow his head, and say, “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts…”

    But of course, that’s not what the Holy Spirit is really like.  We know that the Holy Spirit is God: the third person of the Holy Trinity.  The Holy Spirit is the One who fills us with grace and helps us to do the really hard things in life, helps us to do the things that are really worth doing, those things that are part of who we are, those things that are our life’s vocation.

    I really don’t think we spend enough time praying to the Holy Spirit.  And that’s too bad, because we have to do really hard things in life, and we aren’t ever expected to do them all by ourselves.  In fact, if we do them by ourselves, we will very rarely be successful.  God the Father calls us to an amazing life, and wants us to shine and do great things, but when we insist on doing them ourselves, it can be very disappointing. 

    Just think about the Blessed Virgin Mary.  She was called to do maybe the hardest thing anyone has ever been called to do: to be the Mother of God.  Raising Jesus was probably very hard.  There was a lot of danger, and lots of people didn’t agree with the way Jesus was practicing the faith.  We know that she eventually had to watch her Son die on that cross.  How could she do all that and still have faith?  Well, she did it by relying on the gifts of the Holy Spirit.  The Gospels tell us that she was filled with the Holy Spirit, and that’s how she conceived our Lord.  And she relied on the Holy Spirit to help her do her part in God’s plan.

    The Blessed Virgin is amazing.  Her faith is incredible.  But we are called to have that same faith, too, and we can get it the same way she did, by letting the Holy Spirit come into our lives and bring great things to birth in us.  We aren’t called to give birth to our Savior, but we are called to give birth to great ideas, to important technology that will save lives, to social programs that help those most in need.  And all of that starts now, with you learning in our school and especially by inviting the Holy Spirit into your life.

    That Holy Spirit will make demands of us, just like he made demands of Mary and even Saint Joseph who was the father of Jesus.  But he will never demand anything of us that we cannot do with the help of his grace.  Just as Mary was full of grace, which helped her to be the Mother of God, so that same Holy Spirit can give us grace to make the world a better place.

    Our second reading today tells us about the gifts of the Holy Spirit.  We all aren’t filled with all of the gifts, and we all don’t have the same gifts.  But the Holy Spirit gives us all different gifts that serve the world and make it better.  It’s important to remember that those gifts aren’t for us alone: we are given gifts to share with others and help others and to continue to let God create great things in our world.

    So, this school year, we should rely on the Holy Spirit.  We shouldn’t expect him to give us answers to the test we didn’t study for.  We shouldn’t expect him to finish the homework we never started.  But we can expect him to help us to understand new things that seem hard.  We should expect him to make new ideas spark creativity in our souls.  We should expect him to inspire us to be there for our friends and classmates so that we can do our part in making our school a grace-filled place.

    All we have to do is to let the Spirit into our lives so we can be filled with his gifts.  Then our reward will be great in heaven!

  • The Feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord

    The Feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord

    Today’s readings

    When I was in Israel a few years ago, we were able to visit Mount Tabor, the traditional site of the Transfiguration of the Lord, the feast we celebrate today.  We went up several mountains on that pilgrimage, and the thing about being on top of a mountain is that it’s like you can see everything.  And I think that is an important point about this feast, because, in the Transfiguration, the disciples started to see who Jesus really was.  The Transfiguration is the fourth Luminous mystery of the Holy Rosary, the mysteries on which we usually meditate on Thursdays.

    Sometimes I think that, because of the limitedness of our minds, we accept a rather small and rather bland view of Jesus.  I think that was true for the disciples too, although they had a good excuse: they didn’t have two thousand years of Church history to guide them!  It’s understandable that they were definitely familiar with the human side of Jesus: over the time they had spent with him thus far, they had become close to him and saw him as a friend, a companion on the journey, and a great teacher, even a miracle worker.  They experienced him in his humanity every day.  But they were always having trouble with his divinity; they often missed his connection with the Father.

    Today’s feast changes all of that for them, and for us as well.  If there was any doubt about who Jesus was, it had to be gone now.  That voice from the cloud is absolutely specific: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.”  Jesus is the Son of God and his divinity must be embraced and proclaimed.  It’s nice, even comfortable, for us to have a picture of Jesus that is absolutely human, but we must always keep in mind the Transfigured Christ, dazzling white, radiating glory, the lamp shining in a dark place.  He is the “one like a Son of man” of whom the prophet Daniel speaks in our first reading today, and to him belongs dominion, glory, and kingship.  If Jesus were only human, we would have no Savior, we would be dead in our sins, and we would have no chance of being caught up in the divine life ourselves, that life for which we were created and intended from the very beginning.

    The Transfiguration is also a sign for the disciples of what would happen in the Paschal Mystery.  The incredible event of Jesus’ Transfiguration foreshadows the glory of the Resurrection.  It’s a peek at what Jesus would look like after he rose from the dead.  You may remember that the first witnesses of the Resurrection had a hard time recognizing Jesus.  That may be because he was transfigured by the Resurrection, and so today’s event is perhaps a foreshadowing of what that would be like. Yes, Jesus would have to suffer and die, but his Resurrection and Ascension would be glorious, and would open the possibility of glory to all of us as well.

    As we meditate today on the glory of the Transfiguration, we find a sign of what waits for us who believe.  The glory that we see in Jesus today is the glory that waits for all of us.  We have hope of the Resurrection, we have hope of an eternal home in heaven.  The Transfiguration shows us that this hope is ours, if we but listen to the one who is God’s beloved Son.  Sure, we come to that as those who don’t deserve that kind of glory.  We are in need of our own kinds of transfigurations.  We are in need of our sins being transfigured into faithfulness, of our failures being transfigured into joys, of our death being transfigured into everlasting life.  All of those transfigurations are accomplished in us when we but listen to God’s beloved Son.

    On the way to the mountain, the disciples came to know Jesus in his humanity, and on the way down, they came to know Jesus in his divinity.  Knowledge of both is absolutely necessary because Jesus is fully human and fully divine.  That trip down from the mountain took him to Calvary, but ultimately to the Resurrection, the glory of all glories.  Christ is both human and divine, without any kind of division or separation.  Peter, James, and John got a clear picture of that as Jesus was transfigured on the high mountain.  We too must be ready to see both natures of our Jesus, so that we ourselves can transfigure our world with justice, compassion and mercy, in the divine image of our beautiful Savior.  No matter what challenges may confront us or what obstacles may appear along the way, we must be encouraged to press on with the words of the Psalmist: “The Lord is king, the Most High over all the earth.”

  • Saint John Vianney, Priest

    Saint John Vianney, Priest

    Saint John Vianney’s seminary education got off to a rather rocky start. In fact, his poor previous education nearly kept him out of the seminary. Then he had trouble understanding lectures in Latin. He was only able to overcome this with some private tutoring and amazing dedication to his calling to become a priest. He was eventually ordained, and in sainthood, he is the patron saint of parish priests.

    Saint John Vianney is the image of the good shepherd who guarded the flock zealously. He considered it his mission to heal the broken and drive out the demons of sin. He was known to spend 11 or 12 hours in the confessional every day in the winter, 16 hours in the summer! He said that he drew his strength for this ministry from the Eucharist.

    In fact, he tried to bring everyone together for the public worship that was the Eucharist. About public and private prayer, he said: “Private prayer is like straw scattered here and there: If you set it on fire it makes a lot of little flames. But gather these straws into a bundle and light them, and you get a mighty fire, rising like a column into the sky; public prayer is like that.” 

    As we are gathered here for our public prayer today, we pray for that mighty fire to well up in all of us so that our dark world can be set ablaze with the fire of God’s love. 

  • Thursday of the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    The Israelites wandering in the desert would seem to have had the spiritual life easy. How could they possibly miss God’s presence? There was a cloud to lead them to the Lord by day, and fire by night. But just like the stuff that ended up in the net in today’s Gospel, some people got it and some people didn’t.

    The same is true for us. How hard can it be for us to see the Lord’s presence in our own lives?  Even now, some people get it and some people don’t.  And more than that, even the faithful among us sometimes get it and sometimes don’t.  I often think it would be good to have something as hard to miss as a column of cloud or fire to keep me on the straight and narrow.  Well, in a way – a much better way, actually –  we do: we have the Church, the Sacraments, and the Word of God, prayer that beckons us by day and by night. But even that doesn’t always light the way for us.  There are so many distractions.

    The issue is urgent.  The Kingdom of heaven, Jesus tells us today, will be like the fishmongers sorting out the fish from the seaborne refuse.  We don’t want to get thrown out with all that vile stuff.  So, may God lead us all to be among those who get it, those who follow the way marked out for us. After all, we have something way better than clouds by day and fire by night, don’t we?

  • Saint Ignatius of Loyola

    Saint Ignatius of Loyola

    Saint Ignatius was all set to accomplish great things in the military when his leg was badly injured by a canon ball. As he was convalescing, he asked for romantic novels to read. But nothing like that was available, so he had to settle for books on the life of Christ and the lives of the saints.  Coincidence?  I think not!  Reading the books they gave him, he noticed that those books made him feel differently than the romance novels he was used to. He noted that the pleasure those books provided was fleeting, but that the joy he felt in reading the spiritual books stayed with him, and so he pursued the Christian life and began a process of conversion, thanks be to God!

    During this time of conversion, he began to write things down, and these writings served for a later work, his greatest work, the Spiritual Exercises. These Exercises became the basis for the Society of Jesus, which he formed with six others to live a life of poverty and chastity and apostolic work for the pope. This Society, which we now know as the Jesuit order, was accepted by Pope Paul III and Ignatius was elected its first general. Ignatius’s motto was Ad majorem Dei gloria: All for the glory of God. His Spiritual Exercises have become a spiritual classic and have provided the basis rule for other religious orders over time.

    Ignatius’s major contribution to the spiritual life is probably his principles of discernment, which help people of faith to know God’s will in their lives. In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus speaks of the Kingdom of God as compared to a mustard seed, or a measure of yeast. You probably remember those readings, because we had them two Sundays ago. We are called to discern the presence of the Kingdom of God from among the ordinary stuff of our lives. May God grant us, through the intercession of Saint Ignatius, the discernment to do just that.

  • The Seventeenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Seventeenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Think about it.  God comes to you in a dream and says that you can have anything you want—just one thing, though.  It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.  What would you ask for?  What is that one thing you’d give anything to have?

    God already knew what Solomon was going to ask for; he already knew that what Solomon wanted was something that would be good for Solomon to have.  Solomon asks for a wise and understanding heart so that he could more readily lead the people God had called him to lead.  And so God grants his servant’s request: he gives him a heart so wise and understanding that there was never anyone as wise as Solomon, before or since.

    Solomon’s answer to God’s question told us what was of most importance to Solomon. In today’s Gospel, we are asked to answer that same question. Jesus speaks, as he has been for a few Sundays now, of what the kingdom of heaven is like. A couple of weeks ago, the kingdom was like seed that was scattered and sown. Some fell on rocks, some among weeds, but some on the good soil that yielded more than anyone had a right to hope for. The kingdom of God is something like that: the more we nurture and cultivate our life with God, the more we benefit ourselves and others. Last Sunday, the kingdom was again like seed, which was carefully planted, but was interrupted by someone planting weeds in among the wheat. The landowner had the harvesters sort it all out at harvest time, giving the wheat a chance to thrive. The kingdom of God is something like that: the good and the bad will all be sorted out in due time, time which allows the good to change.

    In today’s Gospel reading, the kingdom is like buried treasure or the pearl of great price.  The treasure is so great that when it is found, the treasure-hunter sells everything he has to buy the field.  The pearl is so wonderful that the merchant gives everything he has to buy it.  Can you imagine their joy?  What they have found is so wonderful that they give up everything to possess it.  Well, Jesus says, the kingdom of heaven is like that.

    But not just like that, right?  Because we know that worldly goods can never hold a candle to the riches of the Kingdom of heaven.  The success in our careers is nice, the nice things we have in our homes give us some pleasure, our accomplishments may even give us some pride.  We live in a very well-to-do country, and we possess technology that our forebears probably would never have imagined.  But all of these pale in the face of the joy of the Kingdom.

    And so we have the invitation today.  We don’t have to look, really, because we have found the great treasure, the pearl of great price.  We have come here today to worship and to receive the Lord in the Eucharist, really present: Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity.  There is nothing better on the face of the whole earth.  We know where to find that which is ultimately valuable.  But the fact is that we can come and go from this holy place today and still not have what’s truly worthwhile.  Because in order to receive it, we have to give up everything.  We have to sell everything and buy the field in order to have that pearl of great price.

    That might mean walking away from a business deal that is profitable but has consequences for the poor or the environment.  Or perhaps it means giving up a relationship that is destructive.  We may have to give up a leisure pursuit that is enjoyable but separates us from family and friends.  We have to make choices, changes and decisions that amount to selling everything in order to make room for something that is of ultimate importance: that pearl of great price which is the greatest treasure of all: theKingdom of heaven.

    Today’s Liturgy of the Word leaves us with some very important questions.  What is the pearl of great price for us?  What is the thing for which we would give up everything else?  How important is it for us to enter the Kingdom of heaven?  What is it that we must give up in order to get there?  Our prayer today is that we would be strengthened by the Word of God and nourished by the Eucharist so that we would have the courage to sell everything for the Kingdom of heaven, that pearl of ultimately great price.