This Sunday, Only Those Who Search Will Find the Prize

Jesus gives the grand finale of his parables of the Kingdom in the Gospel reading for the Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A.

He draws all the previous lessons together — and explains his reasoning for speaking in parables at all by giving concrete examples.

Here are six takeaways for this Sunday’s readings, drawn from Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

First: You won’t find the kingdom of heaven unless you actively seek it.

Jesus gives three last analogies of the kingdom of God this Sunday: A buried treasure, a pearl of great price, and a net that fills with fish when it is thrown into the sea.

The three have one thing in common: They are hidden. You can’t see the treasure in the field unless you put your hand to the plow, you don’t know the value of the great pearl until you have examined hundreds of lesser ones, and you can’t tell where the fish are lurking unless you cast your net.

So the final three parables of the Kingdom tell us something crucially important: If you want the kingdom, you have to look for it. If the Parable of the Sower said we have to be receptive and the Parable of the Wheat and Weeds said we have to be docile, the parables of hidden riches say we have to be diligent.

Second: In the Parable of the Treasure in a Field you can almost hear the clink of a plow blade on a ceramic jar.

The first kingdom analogy Jesus makes is a treasure that only a manual laborer can find. Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.”

Even in our times, buried ceramic coin containers have been found in the regions where Jesus lived and preached; presumably hidden as a homemade piggy bank. In Jesus’s story, you can imagine a farmhand coming across the treasure while plowing a field.

That gives a nice symmetry to this parable. First Jesus described the kingdom as seeds sown in good soil — now he describes finding the treasure while preparing the soil. Symbolically, that’s us, finding the kingdom of Christ by diligently going about our daily work, living our state in life with care and attention. As St. Josemaría Escrivá put it:

“It is in the simplicity of your ordinary work, in the monotonous details of each day, that you have to find the secret, which is hidden from so many, of something great and new: Love.”

Third: Finding a pearl of great price takes not an attentive farmhand but a focused expert.

Next, Jesus says, “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant searching for fine pearls. When he finds a pearl of great price, he goes and sells all that he has and buys it.”

I wouldn’t be able to distinguish between a valuable pearl and a decent fake no matter how hard I tried. But a merchant who has dedicated his life to studying the difference can see it, and so can his customers.

By analogy, while finding the truth of Jesus Christ can be as easy as happening upon it in our daily work, it can also take careful study and reading. The worker in the field was lucky; the pearl merchant was calculated and committed.

And just as he had to spend hours poring over pearls to find the right one, we have to spend time honing our intellect and improving our knowledge to understand the value of the faith. That could mean listening to solid Catholic podcasts and reading well-regarded Catholic writers, or it could mean taking a course.

But it can’t mean sitting idly by and expecting the pearl of great price to come to you on its own. As St. Padre Pio put it:

“Help yourself during this troubled period by reading holy books. This reading provides excellent food for the soul and conduces to great progress along the path of perfection. By no means is it inferior to what we obtain through prayer and holy meditation. In prayer and meditation it is ourselves who speak to the Lord, while in holy reading it is God who speaks to us.”

Fourth: Last, Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a fishing expedition.

Jesus says, “the Kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea, which collects fish of every kind. When it is full, they haul it ashore.”

The treasure was an unlooked for blessing and the pearl was a clever discovery, but the fish are the result of hard work and team effort. The message: We don’t find God alone; he finds us, through his Church. Jesus told Peter and the Apostles that he would make them “fishers of men,” and Jesus describes what that looks like here.

This is an image of the Church relentlessly seeking souls “of every kind” — “making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” The net of the Church is the network of all our various efforts to reach out to people — lay people in the world, teachers in classrooms, priests in pulpits, and bishops with an eye to all of their needs.

Together they catch us and pull us up out of the depths of our darkness into the bright light and solid ground of the shore.

Fifth: The other two readings show how blessed we truly are.

In the first reading, from the First Book of Kings, we see Solomon as, like Aladin with his lamp, he gets to have his greatest wish come true. He asks for “an understanding heart, to judge your people and to distinguish right from wrong” — and he gets it.

Now consider this: What Solomon needed a special visitation from God to receive, we get for free. It’s all there in the riches of the Catholic faith. We have what he got.

Those of us who were baptized into the Church as infants are like the guy who stumbles on a treasure in a field. We won the spiritual lottery: We were born into a Catholic family, and handed the faith on a silver platter. Our Baptism gives us the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, including wisdom, understanding and right judgement — everything Solomon asked for.

And if we make the most of our gifts, like the pearl merchant, we can unlock more and more of their potential: There on our shelf is the Catechism, filled with genius answers to life’s hardest questions. Next to it is the New Testament, which is the inspired word of our infinite God and will keep giving us more and more, endlessly, if we read it prayerfully.

But, of course, the lessons of those earlier plant parables still apply. Our growth doesn’t come from our work, but God’s. Like God coming to Solomon, or like Jesus approaching the first fishers of men, he chooses us and blesses our work. When the Catechism wants to describe this unmerited grace, in Paragraph 2012, it uses the entire contents of this Sunday’s Second Reading to do so:

“We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him . . . For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren. And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.”

Sixth: The treasure, the pearl and the fish finally explain why Jesus tells parables at all.

Three weeks ago, we heard the disciples asked Jesus, “Why do you speak to them in parables?”

Jesus replied strangely: “Because knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven has been granted to you, but to them it has not been granted … because ‘they look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand.’”

Now we know what he meant. If you aren’t paying attention, you won’t notice the treasure in the field; if you haven’t honed your skills, the pearl of great price will look like a marble; and if you don’t spend the morning on the lake, you won’t get any fish. The kingdom of heaven isn’t for any chance passersby to understand. Only the curious sense it, only the discerning value it, and only those who give everything enter it.

Amazingly, this Sunday as we gather for Mass we will see these parables played out very literally before our eyes.

We see before us a literal treasure box, the tabernacle. We lift up an actual pearl of great price, the host — Christ himself in the Blessed Sacrament. And we get dragged out of the darkness into the light on the decks of a boat in Peter’s fleet, our Catholic parish.

We have been given so much. And from those to whom much is given, much will be required.

Image: Parable of the Hidden Treasure, Rembrandt (wiki)