Homily for Sunday, 30 July 2017

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: 1 Kings 3:5, 7-12; Psalm 119:57, 72, 76-77, 127-128, 129-130; Romans 8:28-30; Matthew 13:44-52

This homily was given at St. Clare and St. Alphonsus Churches, Edmonton, AB, Canada

If we were able to ask God for anything; if God were to say to us what he once said to Solomon and that we hear today, “Ask what I should give you,” for what would we ask God?

I am teaching this summer here in Edmonton at St. Joseph’s College of the University of Alberta. I know some teachers (and I have said this myself) who refer to the kind of question I have just asked as the famous, or perhaps infamous, “teacher’s leading question.” We know already, from our first reading today, that what Solomon asks for, wisdom to govern the people of Israel, pleases God. Solomon could have asked God for anything: “Long life or riches, or for the life of [his] enemies,” and God would gladly have granted it to him. Instead Solomon asks this of God: “Give your servant… an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil; for who can govern this, your great people”? To return to the classroom analogy, Solomon is like the eager and brilliant student, always the first to raise a hand, who gives us the best answer— although here there is no wrong answer to God’s initial invitation— “Ask what I should give you.”

To God’s invitation, there is a good answer, a better answer, and a best answer, and Solomon gives the best answer: “Give your servant… an understanding mind… able to discern between good and evil.” All we might need to do now, if God were to ask us to ask him for anything we wished, is to answer, “What Solomon said.” This is what makes God’s invitation to Solomon and to us to ask for anything a kind of “leading question”; the kind of question a teacher would ask students in a classroom, the correct answers to which the teacher already has in mind.

Solomon’s answer; his petition to God to give him wisdom and the ability “to discern between good and evil” is the best answer. Would it not be wonderful if more, if not all, the people who govern us; who hold public office or are otherwise in positions of power were to make Solomon’s prayerful wish more profoundly their own? This, though, does not mean that how we would answer God if God offered to give us anything we wished would not be a good answer or at least a good try. God invites us here, as he once invited Solomon, to be honest with ourselves, not only to give the answer we think would most please God (although pleasing God is important), but to answer from our hearts: What would we most desire if God were to invite us to ask for anything we desired?

What is wrong with asking, as perhaps God might have expected Solomon to ask, “for… long life or riches”? Nothing is wrong, essentially, with asking for these things. Might we also ask for peace in our world, our communities, and our families? Might we ask for God’s mercy toward the sick, the suffering, and those who have died? Might we ask for God to guide and protect our Church? If we were to ask, since it was apparently one of the options possible for Solomon, for the lives “of [our] enemies,” we might need to talk. We and God might need to talk…

Humour aside, these are only a few of the items on our “wish list” we might have if God were to offer to give us anything we desired. And every time we are at Mass, we offer God our wish list. We call this wish list, our list of petitions to God, the Prayer of the Faithful. “Lord, hear our prayer”… There is nothing wrong with this; in fact, to pray this way is to be encouraged and an important part of our Mass.

In our Prayer of the Faithful, in the dialogue we hear today between God and Solomon, in God’s pleasure at Solomon’s wish for wisdom and discernment, and in our daily prayers and petitions, we have a sense of what St. Paul says in his letter to the Romans: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God.” In other words, we cannot go wrong if all our deepest desires stem from love for God and love for one another. And so go ahead; raise your hand up in class when the teacher asks one of those leading questions. Answer God’s invitation: Pray without worrying about whether you are asking for the right things. Be bold, yet be honest: What do you desire most? If you love God and neighbour, or at least are trying your best to love, there is no unworthy desire. There is no wrong answer. There is no bad prayer. After all, God did say to Solomon, “Ask what I should give you.” Here, God says the same to us.

Some of us may know the heartwarming childhood story one of the Church’s great saints, Thérèse of Lisieux, tells about herself in her autobiography, her Story of a Soul. One day, her sister Léonie (who eventually entered the Sisters of the Visitation; all the other sisters of the family became Carmelites in Lisieux) was giving away her toys that she had outgrown and no longer played with. Each of the sisters chose their favourite item from the giveaway basket. And then along came Thérèse, who announced “I want everything,” and then, as she says in The Story of a Soul, made off “without further ado” with the entire basket!

“Ask what I should give you”… “I want everything”! Later, St. Thérèse would refine her desire for “everything” into a desire to be everything for the love of God and of God’s people; of us. This once impish, sassy child would come to understand that “love included all vocations, that love was everything, that it embraced all times and all places; in a word, that [love] is eternal,” and that “in the heart of the Church,” she was to be “love.”

“All things work together for good for those who love God.” In Thérèse of Lisieux and King Solomon we have two prime examples of people who loved and desired God above all else. In loving and desiring God, they were able to proclaim boldly and honestly, “I desire wisdom and discernment”; “I want everything… In the heart of the Church, I shall be love.” In the same way God invites us to desire all that stems from love of God and shows itself in works of love toward one another. And God promises us that, for those who love; for those who desire love above all, “all things work together for good.”

Those who desire love will enter “the Kingdom of Heaven” of which Jesus speaks in the parables of our Gospel reading today. Those who desire love will find “the treasure hidden in a field” or the “pearl of great value” and will give anything up for it. Those who desire love will be found among the righteous; “the good” who will be saved, because “the Kingdom of Heaven” is where our desire for love will meet Love itself, God, who has created us to love as he loves us.

Heaven is the place for the bold and the honest; those unafraid to put up our hands first; unafraid of not having worked out the best answer yet when God asks us that leading question: What do you most desire? “Ask what I should give you.”

Lord God, we desire wisdom. We desire the grace to discern good from evil and to do good. We desire the entire basket of toys; “everything” that works “together for [our] good.” We desire the “treasure hidden in a field”; the “pearl of great value.” We desire to be saved. We desire eternal life with you in “the Kingdom of Heaven.” We desire love, O God. Show us to love. Show us, “in the heart of the Church,” in the heart of our world that thirsts for your love, to be love, for it is in being love that, embracing “all times and all places,” we have and are everything we most deeply desire.