There
are good things in the world. And that’s
worth celebrating. Sometimes we work to
seek those out. I think of the joy
musicians feel when, after hours upon hours of laborious practice, they
participate in presenting something truly beautiful and receive the heartfelt
gratitude and appreciation of a crowd.
The joy of being a cultivator of beauty is something worth seeking
out. Sometimes we just stumble on a good
thing. Maybe we’re in an accident or in
trouble and a friend or even a stranger reaches out a hand and we encounter
true goodness, unsought, unexpected, maybe even initially unwelcome, but eventually
deeply appreciated.
There is
good in the world and maybe it might be worth each of us making our own litany
of how we have truly encountered goodness in the world, be it in the beauty of
nature, or the wonder of friendship or the brilliance of human ingenuity. There are good things in the world, and that’s
what both of our parables affirm. This
is our third and final week now reading from Jesus’ discourse of parables of
the kingdom, the third of the five major speeches in Matthew’s gospel. And these parables are meant to be read
together. Last week, we read the verses
that immediately precede these parables, and Jesus explained something about
how he was using language symbolically. “The
field,” he tells us, “is the world.”
There is treasure in the field for the man to find. There is goodness in the world. God has planted goodness in the world for us. And some will find that by seeking, like the
pearl merchant, while others stumble upon it by what seems like chance, like
our lucky treasure-finder.
We’ve
all encountered goodness in the world, however hidden it might be in a morass
of weeds, of sin, suffering, need, want and decay. But, have we found something so good it’s
worth selling all we have to possess it?
If we haven’t found something that good yet, we need to dare to hope
that there is better out there yet. This
is a radical claim that these parables make.
And it hits people with lots of possessions as radical in one way, and
it hits those who find it hard to find even a glimmer of goodness as radical in
another. God has planted goodness in the
world. It is there, we can find it, or
sometimes it will find us, and it’s worth more than whatever we currently have.
And when
we find that ultimate goodness in the world, we need to follow in the footsteps
of these two parable characters and act, decisively. Both of them have an encounter with the good,
both of them undergo a complete reversal, ridding themselves of all they
currently possess, and both make a decisive action to buy, to cling to the
goodness they’ve found.
And
the only thing that could be that good is love, is the closeness to Christ that
we find in hearing God’s call of how we’re meant to love and living that out,
living out the joy and the self-sacrifice that true love entails in our weedy
world, that Christ lived supremely for us, that he calls us to continue,
whether married, single, priest, vowed religious, parent or not, whether the
corporal works of mercy are how we earn our daily bread or not. There’s a unique call for each of us to
participate in that love with which Christ loved us, to continue his mission as
God’s people in the world God created, because of, not despite, the sin and
suffering in which it travails. What
wouldn’t we be prepared to rid ourselves of to be the people of love God calls
us to be? We may long to be
whole-hearted in our response, but, as our Holy Cross constitutions put it, we
still find it within ourselves to hold back.
The
goodness that God has put into the world does make demands on us; a response is
called out of us. And this parables
discourse has given us several demands, as to how we’re to receive the gifts we’ve
been given. But we can’t encounter
goodness first as demand. We must
encounter goodness first as goodness.
Pope Francis writes that every passage of scripture must be encountered
first as gift and only later, if we ever get there, as burden. The singular goodness God has planted in this
world, the kingdom, love… this is to be marveled over, to be sought out,
allowed to surprise us, to delight us. And only when we let ourselves be fully taken
over by that awe, will we be strengthened enough to say, with St. Ignatius of Loyola, whose feast day we’ll celebrate on Thursday (and here I borrow a
paraphrase from composer Dan Schutte):
Take my heart, O Lord, take my hopes and dreams.
Take my mind with all its plans and schemes.
Take my
thoughts, O Lord, and my memory.
Take my tears, my joys, my liberty.
I surrender, Lord, all I have and hold.
I return to you your gifts untold.
Give me nothing more than your love and grace.
These alone, O God, are enough for me.
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