José Ricardo Bezerra and Felipe Bezerra
In the Gospel of this 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A (Mt 13:44-52), Jesus concludes the discourse of the parables of the Kingdom, in chapter 13 of Saint Matthew. After the parables of the sower, of the weeds and the wheat, of the mustard seed and the leaven, He gives us four more parables to try to say, with images from our daily life, to what the Kingdom of Heaven may be compared: to a hidden treasure, to a buyer of precious pearls, to a net cast into the sea, and to the teacher of the Law who becomes a disciple. They are short parables, almost of two verses, but when we take them up to read, meditate, and pray, they keep surprising us and revealing things new and old.
We have chosen five points for your meditation and prayer throughout this week. As always, we also leave the Gospel and the steps of the Lectio Divina at the end of this text, so that you yourself may pray with the Word. If you speak Korean, Mandarin, or Arabic, reach out to us: we will send the material directly to you, because we do not yet have these languages on the ComShalom portal, but in all the others the text is available.
Follow along also on our podcast, with subtitles in your language: https://youtu.be/7G45BRj8wO0.
1. The hidden treasure
“The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Mt 13:44).
This treasure is of such great value that it is worth selling everything, and with joy acquiring it. But there is a detail: the man finds the treasure in a field that is not yet his; that is why he needs time and a whole journey until that treasure is truly his. So it is also with the Kingdom: we find it, but it is not yet fully ours, and it is worth doing everything to obtain it.
It is striking that the treasure remains, for a time, hidden, only later to be revealed. It is not something reserved for a few, as though it were a secret knowledge (the Church has always refused this gnostic temptation): it is God’s own rhythm, who hides and reveals at the right moment. These are the things “hidden from the wise and understanding of this world and revealed to little ones” (Mt 11:25). Saint Paul is a beautiful example of this patience of God: touched by grace on the road to Damascus (cf. Acts 9:1-19), he withdrew for a time, going away into Arabia, before he actually began to preach (cf. Gal 1:15-18). It was necessary for Barnabas to find him and present him to the Apostles (cf. Acts 9:26-27; 11:25-26). There was a whole time of preparation: the treasure was not revealed at once.
And here Jesus gives us a precious key: “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Mt 6:21). How can we know what our treasure is? Notice what your mouth speaks of most, “for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (cf. Mt 12:34). If you speak much of God, it is because your heart is full of God; if you speak much of other things, it is a sign of where your heart is. Even distractions in prayer can be a good thermometer: often the heart runs, without meaning to, to where our treasure is. When this happens, instead of only condemning yourself, bring this too into prayer and say: “Lord, this is my treasure; I want it to be You. Detach me from the things that pass away and give me more of You.” As we sell everything, that is, as we let go of the old mentality, we gain a new heart, ever more full of the one true treasure, who is Jesus himself.
2. The buyer of precious pearls
“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.” (Mt 13:45-46).
If in the first parable the emphasis is on the treasure itself, here the perspective is that of the person, the disciple, each one of us, represented in this buyer. One characteristic of this person is detachment: for him, it is worth getting rid of everything, because the Kingdom is worth much more. One cannot keep one foot here and another there, wanting to have it all. It is even the opposite of the logic of the world, which teaches never to concentrate all wealth in one place, one has to diversify the investments. In the case of the Kingdom, however, there is only one venture worth all the trouble in the world, and it is eternal life. Everything else must be a means to reach there.
It is the attitude of the Apostles and of Saint Paul, who detached themselves from everything and followed Jesus; the rich young man, on the contrary, did not want to renounce his possessions and went away sad (cf. Mt 19:16-22). At bottom, it is because “you cannot serve God and mammon” (Mt 6:24): whoever adores money scatters it in many places; whoever adores the Lord knows that He is everything in that one good. As Saint Teresa of Ávila used to say, “it is right that what is worth much should cost much.” It is worth stripping oneself in order to gain what has supreme value.
3. The net cast into the sea
“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net which was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into vessels but threw away the bad” (Mt 13:47-48).
Now the perspective opens onto the Church. The net is this people of God, which gathers good fish and bad, who are together in this present time. Here a clarification is worthwhile: in the Creed we profess that “the Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.” The Church is holy because her Head is Christ and because she is animated by the Holy Spirit; at the same time, she welcomes sinners in her bosom and is always on the way toward purification (cf. CCC 825-827). We are this “holy and sinful people” (Eucharistic Prayer V), members of the mystical Body, who are on the way and who, even when falling, seek conversion.
That is why the net catches every kind of fish and, as in the parable of the weeds and the wheat, the weeds are not pulled up at once: the two are left to grow together (cf. Mt 13:24-30). The separation will come only at the end of time, when the angels will separate the evil from among the righteous (cf. Mt 13:49), as the Son of Man will separate the goats from the sheep (cf. Mt 25:31-46). It is not for us to make this separation now; it is for the Lord, and He will do it through his angels. Meanwhile, we are called to look at our own situation and to convert, learning from the patience of God, who is patient with us (cf. Gospel of the 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time).
Hence a warning: who are we to judge who is or is not a good Christian? In the Church there are good and bad, as in a gym there are those who are already healthy and those who still need to take care of themselves, but all are there struggling. Those who are aware that they need to improve cannot be cast out precisely because they want to improve; and those who do not even realize yet that they need conversion are the ones who most need to be inside. Jesus was clear: “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get” (Mt 7:1-2). If you use a very short ruler with others, be careful, because you will be measured with the same ruler.
This does not mean permitting everything, for there is fraternal correction (cf. Mt 18:15). But it has its place and its measure: we correct those who are directly at our side, over whom we have some authority or closeness, and where there is hope of success, not the whole world of the internet. And one must weigh how much the person is able to receive: first “God loves you, Jesus died for you,” and only then arrive at the moral truths. Whoever does not know himself to be loved by God will hardly understand the demands of Christian morality; that is why merely moralizing discourse often drives away more than it attracts. Once the correction is made with prudence and charity, the rest is between the person and the Lord, who judges and cares for each one.
4. “Have you understood all this?”
“Have you understood all this?” They said to him, “Yes” (Mt 13:51).
The disciples answer yes, but probably they did not yet understand everything. It is like when James and John asked to sit at the right and at the left of Jesus, and He asked them whether they could drink the cup that He was going to drink: “We are able,” they answered, without yet having full awareness of what cup that was (cf. Mt 20:20-23). Full understanding would come later, with the Holy Spirit. Jesus himself will say at the Last Supper: “I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now; when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (cf. Jn 16:12-13). As so often in our life: at the moment we do not understand, but “afterward you will understand” (Jn 13:7), Jesus said to Peter.
This word “understand” leads us to the beautiful relationship between faith and reason. Saint Augustine, commenting on Isaiah 7:9 in a version that read “if you do not believe, you will not understand,” taught: believe in order to understand. First believe, and then understand; and, at the same time, seek to understand in order to grow ever more in faith. It is faith seeking understanding (“fides quaerens intellectum”), an expression of Saint Anselm with roots in Augustine. And Saint Thomas Aquinas will say that “to believe is to think with assent”: not an assent without thought, but a thought that freely adheres to the truth.
Faith is a gratuitous gift of God, offered to all, but we need to grow in it and in understanding, because we are rational beings. Reason, however, cannot be absolutized, for there are truths that only faith gives us. Indeed, to say that “only what science proves is true” is not itself a scientifically proven statement. There are true realities that cannot be seen, measured, or weighed: love is one of them. No one can place on the table someone’s love for another person, and yet that love does not thereby cease to be real. The soul and love are not material, and it is faith, illuminating reason, that opens us to this greater horizon.
5. The teacher of the Law who became a disciple
“Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Mt 13:52).
The things new and old are a reference to the Old and the New Testament. The old things are neither abolished nor surpassed; on the contrary, they are the riches of the Old Testament: the one God, creator of all things visible and invisible, the Law, the reality of sin, and the awareness that we are sinners. To these are joined the new things of the New Testament: the Holy Spirit, the Most Holy Trinity, the Sacraments, the Church, the love of the Father who sends us Jesus, and Jesus himself. The teacher of the Law who becomes a disciple makes use of all this ancient wealth and reads it in the new light of the Gospel.
When we look at today’s parables together, we perceive that the center of them all is Jesus himself: He is the hidden treasure, He is the precious pearl, He is the one who, in his Church, casts the net and will judge at the end, and He is the Master par excellence, whom we must imitate, as Saint Paul says: “be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1).
And one does not need to be a teacher of the Law to live this. Each one of us can look at the treasure of his own heart and see how, little by little, God has been storing up in it things new and old: a prayer made many years ago, a word heard decades ago and still alive in the heart, alongside the new things He shows us each day. God never stops transforming the old things into new within us.
We close here the five points, but you who have come this far have certainly discovered still other new things with this Gospel, with which you can now pray, give thanks, and praise God. May our prayer be to ask the Lord that He himself be our treasure and that our mouth may always speak of that with which our heart is full.
Until next week!
Shalom!
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Steps of the Lectio Divina
The Lectio Divina is the prayerful reading of the Word of God. Set aside a time of silence, invoke the Holy Spirit, and go calmly through these steps, praying yourself with this Gospel.
1. Reading (Lectio). What does the text say?
Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Matthew (Mt 13:44-52)
“At that time, Jesus said to his disciples: “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net which was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into vessels but threw away the bad. So it will be at the close of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth. Have you understood all this?” They said to him, “Yes.” Then he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.””
2. Meditation (Meditatio). What does the text say to me?
What is, today, my true treasure? What my mouth speaks of most reveals where my heart is. Am I willing to “sell everything,” that is, to detach myself from what binds me, in order to gain the Kingdom, which is worth much more?
3. Prayer (Oratio). What do I say to God from the text?
Lord, we thank you because you desire to present to us the Kingdom of Heaven and yourself. In our weakness and in our so small understanding, You come to us, open your heart, and fill ours with You. Fill our heart with You, that our treasure may be you yourself, and that our mouth may overflow with that with which the heart is full. Give us, Lord, a deep love for Your Word and the grace to discover in it always things new and old. O Mary, lead each one of us by the hand and fill the treasures of our heart with the graces you received from your son Jesus. Amen.
4. Contemplation (Contemplatio). What new gaze does God give me?
Remain in silence before the Lord, who is himself the hidden treasure and the precious pearl. Let your heart simply rest and rejoice in having found the One who is worth more than everything.
5. Action (Actio). To what does the Lord call me today?
Choose a concrete gesture this week: a detachment, an act of trust in God’s patience with others and with yourself, or a greater care for the Word, keeping in your heart a sentence of this Gospel to pray throughout the week.
