NewCreation

Homily for Sunday 17 in Ordinary Time Year A

The Kingdom of Heaven Hello, my sisters and brothers, and welcome to this homily for the 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time. This is the week when we finish Matthew's account of the parables — the various parables which Jesus taught. It's rather fun really; there are some very entertaining and interesting things in them. So Jesus said to the crowds: "The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field." Okay, the first thing of course is that the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. So someone has hidden it — a little hint there that there's something slightly more mysterious going on — which someone finds and then hides again. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Well, as you can imagine, actually the ancient world, and particularly the Jewish ancient world, had a lot of laws around the subject of treasure trove — in other words, finding treasure hidden in fields. There were very specific circumstances in which, if you found it, it belongs to the owner, depending on whether you were a day laborer, whether you had found it while in the course of doing what you were hired to do, and so on and so forth. There were a whole variety of laws according to which the finder might have been acting dishonestly. But in fact we can assume he wasn't, because one of the interesting things about Jewish law was that if the current owner doesn't know that he has treasure in his field, then that's the same as him not owning it. What that then means is that if someone finds it, they should then not lift it. It's strange that the lifting was the bringing of something out into the open, and from the moment it was lifted, it then might become the object of legal concern — concern as to whether it was really the owner's, whether the person had dug it up in the course of doing something he was hired to do, et cetera, et cetera, endless legal problems. So we must assume that it was hidden in the field and that the owner of the field didn't know about it. And very, very carefully, the person who finds it does exactly what a good Jewish contemporary of Jesus would have done when finding such a treasure, which is not to lift it out. You hide it over, of course, to make sure that no one else saw it, but also you've glimpsed it. If you lift it out, then there's a whole new legal ball game and you have to start discussing it with other people. But by hiding it over, you know it's there. You know something about the field the owner doesn't know. It's not his. And in your joy you go and sell all that you have and you buy that field. In other words, the treasure is something which you know about, that's there, which is not visible to anybody else, is not known about — something that has been hidden — and it's worth your while to give everything in order to explore what you know and has not yet been revealed. Remember, in this first parable, the kingdom of heaven is shown to be like the hidden treasure, the treasure hidden in the field. In other words, someone hiding something somewhere unknown is what sets off the process by which you can discover and then get yourself into a position of giving yourself completely away to the digging it up and finding out what it's about. In the second parable, which at first sight seems very like the first, it says again the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls. On finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it. That in one sense sounds a bit like the person with the treasure in the field who goes and sells all that he has and buys it, except that here the kingdom of heaven is not related to the treasure — it's related to the merchant. The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant. This merchant is in search of fine pearls. Now here's the really interesting thing: if you're a merchant in search of fine pearls, you're used to having a fair amount of stock. You exchange, you buy, you sell — that's your activity, that's how you keep going. And of course you've got an eye out for the good purchase whether or not people appreciate it, but you keep your stock going because that's how you keep going as a merchant. But here is this merchant in search of fine pearls: on finding one pearl of great value, he goes and sells all that he has and buys it. Well, please notice that if you're a merchant and you go and sell everything that you have and buy something, you cease to be a merchant. You're not able to take part in any more give And take — you've got this thing, and here's the bizarre thing: it's got you. If you've sold everything you had in order to get this, this is not your property; you are its property. That's the bizarre feature. You cease to be able to be a merchant. With the merchant you're comparatively unsentimental about what you've got — you buy, you trade, that's the whole thing. The moment you get rid of absolutely everything in exchange for this, you can't power-trade anymore. It's got you. You become, if you like, the setting which shows it off. And that's the really interesting thing about this: that here, rather than us being, if you like, the people who are taken inside a process of working out ourselves what the kingdom of heaven is, here we're shown that the kingdom of heaven is looking for us. And this is the remarkable thing. In this, the kingdom of heaven finds a pearl, gives everything he has away completely for the sake of the pearl, and then actually becomes identified with the pearl. He can't get rid of it without getting rid of it himself — it's everything he's got. There's this complete identification with the pearl, the suggestion being that that's what the kingdom of heaven looked like: God completely identifying with us and giving us a value that we had no idea that we had. The value is discovering ourselves in the regard of this merchant who gave everything up in order to become completely associated with us, such that he actually ceased to be a merchant, ceased to be able to be a bargain-hunter looking for better things. He's found us, and that's it — that's who he is to be hereafter. So being on the inside of the process here is discovering what it is to be a pearl who has been found, rather than discovering the process of being the finder of the pearl. Then we have: "the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea," and in the translation we have it says "and caught fish of every kind." It's actually not what it says in Greek at all. In the Gospel it says, "Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net" — a dragnet, so not a gill net, a dragnet, that's the kind of thing you draw and drag along the bottom of the sea — "that was thrown into the sea and caught," or gathered together, "every kind." So it says — the word "fish" does not appear in the Greek. "When it was full, they drew to shore, sat down, and put the good into baskets, but threw out the bad." Well, here's the interesting thing, because of — the word "fish" — we're very inclined to miss, I think, what's going on here, which is that if you put a dragnet in, it brings things of every kind. If you were a fisherman in Galilee, or in Israel at the time, in Palestine at the time, you would be very aware that there are many sorts of things that you can bring out of the waters, especially with the dragnet, some of which are inert, inanimate objects. But there would be, of the living things that you might find there, three quite distinct sorts. Things that were edible, things that were inedible, and things that were, although edible in principle, impure — for instance, any shrimps, lobsters, crabs that you might come across, crustaceans: these are all impure. They're alive, they're edible, but they're impure. Other kinds of things that were inedible might be dangerous, poisonous, or whatever. And there are others that are good to eat, and not only good to eat and pure. But this dragnet, mysteriously, is quite unbothered by all that. This dragnet goes along the bottom, brings up everything, it gathers things of every sort. And when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down — so there's the nice notion of this slow process — and put the good into baskets, but threw out the bad. And it's quite interesting that the words here for "good" and "bad" are the same words which Jesus uses earlier in Matthew's Gospel to refer to a tree which produces good fruit and the tree which produces bad fruit. Those are the terms that are being used. In other words, it's something to do with a form of growth into goodness, and a form of failure to grow, into badness. And then we get: at the end of the age, the angels will come and do all the separating. In other words, as we heard in the parable of the wheat and the darnel last week, here we have the notion that the separation is only to be done by angels, and at the end of the age. We are not to be involved in that. We are part of the everything that is being gathered together, without the usual forms of discrimination. That's the surprising thing. You know, where's the category of impure fish, impure crustaceans? It's not here. Everything is being carried in. And then the badness will be nothing to do with their previous status, but with whether or not they turn out to have been bad. The process is all the gathering in of everything, and the refusing to discriminate before time. Then Jesus turns to them: "Have you understood all this?" They answered, "Yes." And he said, "Therefore…" "Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old." Well, the phrase "who has been trained for the kingdom" literally means "who is being discipled to the kingdom." It's a passive, and it suggests that it's the kingdom that is doing the dragging into the process of learning to make proper discernments as we go through whatever situation we find ourselves. This process of being dragged into the middle of things — the scribe who is being trained to the kingdom is one who finds himself in the middle of these processes: the process of finding something hidden, covering it over with joy; the process of discovering yourself valued above everything by one who has given everything up in order to become identified with you; the process of being brought in along with everything else without discrimination, long before there's any kind of separation. Finding ourselves on the inside of that is what we hope and we pray learns us to be capable of bringing out of our treasure house things old and things new. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Thank you.