Homily for Sunday, 30 July 2023– Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

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

If you were able to ask for and receive anything you wanted, what would you ask for? Have we ever thought this about our prayer: What do we most frequently ask of God in prayer?

This is what happens to King Solomon in today’s reading from 1 Kings. God invites Solomon “in a dream” to ask him for anything he desires: “Ask what I should give you,” God says to Solomon. Imagine if God offered any ruler, public leader, or politician today to give that person anything they desired. What would that leader ask of God?

Here Solomon recognizes the significance of the choice before him. It is far from the first or only time in the Bible when God communicates with somebody important in a dream—think of the two Josephs, one in the Old and one in the New Testament; Jacob’s Ladder vision and the dreams Daniel interprets in the Old Testament. And this is far from the first or only time in the Bible when somebody significant is overwhelmed, like “a little child” before this kind of encounter with God. I think of Jeremiah, who is “only a boy” when God calls him to be a prophet.

These two frequent biblical motifs occur together at the beginning of Solomon’s reign in 1 Kings: First, God speaks to Solomon in a dream. And, second, Solomon, “only a little child” who does “not know how to go out or come in” (a Hebrew expression for complete ignorance), is overwhelmed that God should invite him, “Ask what I should give you.”

What is not so frequent is God inviting somebody, even somebody important, to ask for anything that person desires. More often God tells us what it is acceptable or not to pray for. I think of Jesus’ introduction to the Our Father with, “This is how you are to pray.” Jesus says to his disciples in the Gospels, “Ask, and it will be given to you.” Yet not even Jesus’ prayers are always accepted. In the depths of his passion, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prays, “If it be your will, let this cup pass from me.” Yet Jesus will suffer and die on the cross for us anyway.

All this shows how important and well-regarded Solomon is in God’s eyes. Solomon is already wise before he asks God for wisdom, “an understanding mind to govern [God’s] people” Israel. It is as if God has given Solomon his greatest desire, wisdom, before he asks for it. God anticipates Solomon’s desire for understanding, wisdom for good governance, and all Solomon has to do to please God is to meet God halfway, in one sense, on this: Ask God not for “long life or riches,” but the wisdom for which God knows ahead of time Solomon will ask.

Long before the “kingdom of heaven” was ever a reality or even a concept in Scripture, as it is in Jesus’ parables we hear from the Gospel of Matthew today, the kings of ancient Israel knew that God was the true ruler of Israel. Kings like Solomon and his predecessor David knew that they were stand-ins for God, anointed by God to rule according to God’s will for the good of the people of Israel on earth.

Of course, Israel’s kings were sometimes far from perfect in ruling according to God’s will for Israel. Solomon seems to have learned from some of David’s mistakes when God invites him to ask of God anything he wishes. Solomon acknowledges that Israel is “a great people, so numerous that they cannot be numbered or counted.” One of King David’s greatest sins was to have the people of Israel counted in a census. (Censuses are common in many if not most countries and not at all sinful; we should understand David’s action, and Solomon’s reference to it today in 1 Kings, as an attempt to usurp God. Remember that God had promised Abraham that his descendants could not be numbered, so to try to number them would be both futile and sinful in the biblical imagination). Solomon wisely avoids a repeat of this sin of his father.

Solomon desires above all “an understanding mind” to rule Israel. His desire for “an understanding mind” at God’s invitation is really a desire for what he needs to rule, to inherit, to share in the reign of God, the reign or the kingdom that originates in heaven. This is why this is so significant that Solomon should ask for “an understanding mind”—for wisdom toward good governance—over “a long life or riches” or the lives of his enemies. Those other things for which Solomon could have asked God would not have been bad (the lives of his enemies maybe excepted); God would not have been displeased had Solomon asked for them. But Solomon would have been just an ordinary king: He might have been rich, or he might have lived a long life (which he did anyway; he matched the forty-year reign of his father David, the symbolic length of reign of a good king in Israel), but for what?

Solomon desires the kingdom of heaven. And to reign with God, he needs “an understanding and discerning mind.” He needs wisdom, first and foremost.

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus encourages us at length to desire God’s kingdom of heaven above all else, much as King Solomon did. Other Gospels and writings in our Bible highlight the kingdom of God (or kingdom of heaven), and include Jesus teaching about the kingdom of God in parables or metaphors: “The kingdom of God is like”… But in Matthew’s Gospel, in Jesus’ teachings, there is an especially intense focus on “the kingdom of heaven” and what it is like, to encourage us to want it above all else.

Today is the third Sunday in a row at Mass in which we have heard from the same part of Matthew’s Gospel—Matthew, chapter 13—which is a long string of Jesus’ parables about the kingdom of heaven. Over these last three Sundays (in case anybody is counting) we have heard seven of Jesus’ parables about the kingdom of heaven from Matthew’s Gospel: The sower, the weeds among the wheat, the mustard seed, the yeast or leaven and, in just today’s Gospel reading, the “treasure hidden in a field,” the “pearl of great value,” and the net with many fish.

I think Jesus wants us to go to heaven, really badly! The question for us is: How intensely do we want to go to heaven, to inherit the kingdom of heaven God promises us in and through Jesus Christ? Do we want heaven, the kingdom of heaven, as much as God wants to offer it to us? A few minutes ago, I asked: If we were able to ask for and receive anything we wanted, what would we ask for? Maybe my questions should have been: Who here wants to go to heaven? And what are we willing to give to inherit a share in God’s reign, the kingdom of heaven?

I will presume wildly that all of us want to go to heaven. After all, we pray for heaven during every Mass and many times outside of Mass, when we pray the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come.” So I will presume that God’s promise of heaven appeals to us.

And God’s promise of the kingdom of heaven to us is a free gift. It was a free gift to King Solomon: God invited him to ask for whatever he wanted: “Ask what I should give you.” God is inviting us to do the same as Solomon, as Jesus’ first disciples: “Ask what I should give you.”

Yet what are we willing to give for a share in the kingdom of heaven, a share in God’s reign over the universe everything in it? If we are shown a field with a treasure buried in it, will we sell all we have and buy that field? If “a merchant of fine pearls” shows us the pearl of greatest value, will we sell all we have and buy that pearl? Will we go fishing in the sea in which Jesus is telling us that the fish are of excellent quality, with only a few exceptions? That is, will we go out into our world, to our neighbours, to our workplaces, to our places of leisure, to our streets and attract still other people to the reign of heaven Jesus promises us by our joy and acts of kindness? (Because, let us face it, at the best of times fishing is unpredictable and even a little frustrating. So is evangelization, proclaiming and living God’s word, God’s invitation to us toward heaven, in a way that attracts still more disciples). Will we resist the temptation to be gatekeepers of who is worthy or not of heaven? Will we allow God and God’s angels, as our Gospel says today, to do the sorting of the good fish from the bad—and simply concentrate on and enjoy the fishing?

Sisters and brothers, we are here in the great divine showroom of the kingdom of heaven. Over here we have a field with a priceless treasure on sale for a real bargain, considering its worth. Over there we have somebody selling a pearl of unmatched value from an amazing pearl collection. And a little further over there we have somebody selling a once-in-a-lifetime fishing trip, all expenses included. In fact, God is offering us the entire showroom and everything in it: The field with its treasure, the pearl of great value, the great catch of fish. No riches we have now compare with the value of all that, of the kingdom of heaven. So let us make the big purchase. Any “understanding and discerning” mind would.

Homily for Sunday, 16 July 2023– Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Readings of the day: Isaiah 55:10-11; Psalm 65:10, 11, 12-13, 14 (R: Luke 8:8); Romans 8:18-23; Matthew 13:1-23

I have been discovering a wonderful new podcast on Sunday homilies through the website of America Magazine over the last few weeks. The podcast is called “Preach.” This week on “Preach,” the featured homilist (who is a different person each week) is Fr. Bryan Massingale, a Black priest, theologian, and professor of social ethics at Fordham University.

Fr. Massingale begins his homily on “Preach” this week by asking how many of us have heard a preacher—a homilist, a retreat preacher—ask, about the Gospel reading we have just heard, something like: What kind of soil are you?

I will presume that we all know, and could practically recite without a text, Jesus’ parable of the sower in Matthew’s Gospel today. It is one of Jesus’ most memorable parables. The parable features four types of soil. Few of us, maybe even if, as Matthew’s Gospel says, we are lured away from our faith by “worldly anxiety and… riches” would readily admit to being the thorny soil. Few of us would admit to being the rocky soil, people of a joyless faith that does not allow the seed of the kingdom of heaven to take root. A few more of us might be willing to admit to being like the path: Those who hear “the word of the kingdom” but occasionally (or frequently) have difficulty “understanding it.” It would be very honest of us to admit when we are like the little wisp of soil that gets spread over a pathway, in which the seed of the kingdom cannot take root and sprout. Few of us (including myself) are Bible scholars; sometimes what exactly the Bible is saying—or what Jesus is saying—can be difficult for us to understand.

So it is fair, I think, that more of us could admit to being like the soil on a pathway than rocky or thorny soil. After all, the first Christians, before they first called themselves Christians at Antioch according to the Acts of the Apostles, were simply called “the Way.” They were “the Way,” the path. Maybe we are on to something if we consider that, even most of the time, we are the soil on the path, far from the most effective soil for sprouting and growing the fruits of the reign of heaven from seed.

I think that, only if we are really too proud and self-centered in our faith, will we most readily claim to be the good, rich soil that is most effective for growing the kingdom of heaven on earth. Often the greatest saints have also been the greatest at identifying their own deficiencies, even their own sins. So may we not delude ourselves into thinking that we are, even most of the time, like the rich soil that is most effective at sprouting and growing the kingdom of heaven among us.

What kind of soil are you; what kind of soil are we? Or, as Fr. Bryan Massingale might ask, does it matter what kind of soil we are? If we take the frequent approach to interpreting the parable of the sower, which is to assess how good we are (or not) at nourishing the seed that is God’s grace, God’s gifts to us that lead to salvation, we might become easily discouraged. If we are honest with ourselves—I know if I am honest with myself—we can point to many times in our lives when we have been anything but good soil to nourish the seed of grace God has sown in our lives and in our world. And if we are not so honest with ourselves, the only thing we nourish by the “quality of soil” approach to placing ourselves within Jesus’ parable of the sower is our own pride.

So please allow me to say that the “quality of soil” approach to interpreting the parable of the sower will never work well for us. We need to find another approach to interpreting this parable. The focus of Jesus’ parable of the sower is not us, or how good we are at nourishing the seed the sower, God, sows. No, the focus of the parable of the sower is—by the very name of the parable—the sower.

What is the most prominent quality of the sower in Jesus’ parable? The sower in this parable is ridiculous and reckless. This sower is messy. This sower scatters seed seemingly without care as to where it lands: On good soil, on the path, on rocky ground, or among thorns.

But for all this sower’s deficiencies—the sower is reckless, messy, careless as to where he sows seed—he seems awfully confident in the yield of his harvest; that even the small amount of seed that will land “on rich soil” will yield “fruit, a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.” With exceeding confidence in his abilities as a sower, Jesus says to the crowds who hear his parable, “Whoever has ears ought to hear.”

I am surprised that, if we read on past the end of today’s reading in Matthew’s Gospel, the Gospel does not say that the crowds laughed heartily at Jesus’ ridiculous parable of the sower. No sower in his right mind would sow seed so indiscriminately, knowing that so little seed would fall on soil capable of nourishing it and allowing it to take root—No sower, that is, except God!

The focus of the parable of the sower is not us, or how “good” our soil is, which can vary from one moment to the next; the focus of the parable of the sower is and must be God, the sower of the seeds of grace, love, mercy, kindness, ultimately salvation. Jesus’ parable of the sower is and should be tremendously encouraging to us: God knows that the quality of our soil, so to speak, is variable. And only rarely will the seed of God’s saving grace land on the ideal soil. But enough of it will so that the world will be saved. Enough seed will land on good soil so that it will more than make up for our bad days, the times when we become discouraged by our own failings or the failings of others, the times when we sin, the times when we do the very best we can in the moment and, as Fr. Massingale says, through no fault of our own our best is simply not good enough. Yet enough seed will land on good soil as to increase the yield of good “a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.” Jesus’ message and its promise to us are remarkable!

I want to go back in our Christian history from our time, the time of excellent preachers like Fr. Bryan Massingale, oh, about seven hundred years to the time of St. Thomas Aquinas. In a part of his Summa Theologiae, the mother-of-all-theology-texts-of-all-time, St. Thomas imagines and addresses objections related to the Incarnation, God’s becoming human in the person of Jesus Christ. The first objection St. Thomas lists in this section of the Summa Theologiae is that “the Son of God ought not to have assumed human nature with defects of body,” like vulnerability to sickness (Did Jesus ever catch even a minor cold?), unsavory bodily functions, ultimately subjection to death.

St. Thomas Aquinas treats this objection graciously, but counters it by responding that the Incarnation, how it took place and the “defects of body” that Jesus assumed through it, are the will of God for our salvation. A shorthand for this argument of St. Thomas Aquinas is that God’s will for our salvation accounts for our deficiencies, our “defects,” even our sin. That is just the way God willed to save the world, to sow the seed of the reign of God in our world, in and through God’s Son, fully divine but also fully and perfectly human. And who are we to question how God willed to save the world through his Son? How are we to question how God sows the seed of God’s kingdom of heaven in our world, our experiences, our relationships, our successes and our failures?

God has a long history of sowing the seed of his grace through what he has created. We could say that God’s history of sowing this seed goes back to before the first moments of creation themselves. God’s way of sowing seed seems reckless, messy, careless as to where the seed lands. But God is confident in its yield, that enough will land on good, faithful soil as to produce “a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.”

The prophet Isaiah today speaks of this same confidence of God that God’s grace, God’s word “shall not return to [God] void, but shall do [God’s] will, achieving the end for which [God] sent it.” And the same confidence in the saving yield of God’s grace permeates St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, from which we hear today. St. Paul does not deny that we can experience times when we do everything we can with the utmost faith, goodness, and kindness, and it simply is not good enough. St. Paul admits that “all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now.” Anybody here who has ever experienced a long, difficult childbirth knows what St. Paul is speaking of better than I do and probably even better than St. Paul himself did. We labor, and sometimes we are successful; other times we feel like our labour in God’s name has been a failure. Still other times we are guilty of sin outright: St. Paul speaks in Romans of creation’s “slavery to corruption.”

But with God as the sower of seeds of grace, none of this matters. God has promised a great yield, “a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold” or, as St. Paul says to the Romans, “the redemption of our bodies.” God will not be denied; we will be redeemed. We will be saved, sometimes with our (successful) cooperation by being the “good soil” for the seed of God’s grace, other times in spite of not being the ideal soil. Yet God continues to go out to sow, in God’s own reckless, messy way that is the only way in which we will be saved.