Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 30, 2023 – 1 Kings 3:5, 7-12; Romans 8:28-30; Matthew 13:44-46

Jesus begins by saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like…” The kingdom of heaven is like… And then He tells us two brief stories about searching and strife. The person finds the treasure, digs it up - probably illegally, on somebody else’s property - hides it, goes and buys the property. The other one is searching, always, for valuable pearls. Maybe next week he’ll find a more valuable one than the one he found in the parable, and then what? He’s already sold everything.

Our understanding of heaven is that, at the very least, heaven is where all strife and searching ends. We are at peace. We have all that we need because we have God. And so, how could the kingdom of heaven be a place of searching, strife, and even duplicity? That’s because Matthew changed a key word. He changed something else to heaven.

If you look, in the Gospels of Mark and Luke, at the same parables of the kingdom, you find that, in the English translation, it says, “Jesus said, ‘The reign of God is like…’” The reign of God is like... Two changes. From reign to kingdom. From God to Heaven.

Let’s talk about the second one first. Why would Matthew change God to heaven? Because St. Matthew was a Jewish Christian writing for Jewish Christians. And, in the Jewish faith, it is abhorrent, except on the most solemn occasions, to speak the name of God, Yahweh. And so, he could not say, “The kingdom of Yahweh.” He used a circumlocution. He replaced it with heaven. St. Mark and St. Luke, born pagans and converted to Christianity, had no such scruple about the use of the word God. So, when they recorded Jesus words, they wrote, “The reign of God.” 

The second interesting thing is the switch from reign to kingdom. Kingdom suggests a place and permanence. Reign is an activity that somebody does. A subtle change has taken place in Matthew’s gospel between God’s activity in the world and God’s place in the world.

And that’s because parables are a form of Jewish storytelling. And, in Jewish storytelling, there is always exaggeration. That was their style. It was both their humor and their way of making a point. And so, Jesus doesn’t mean, literally, that if you find a treasure in a field, you should bury it and sell everything you got. Not literally.  It’s figurative. It’s imaginative. Which leads us to ask ourselves, “What about us and this story?”

I’m going to suggest something to you that has nothing to do directly with religion, and certainly nothing to do directly with morality. During the week I want you to give some consideration to five things.

The first one is family. Who is your family? It’s usually not just those few people who live under your roof. It’s also the other people who are beloved to you and who love you in return. They could just be friends. They could be other relatives, coworkers. There’s an inner core of people on whom you count day after day and whom you love dearly. Family.

Faith. I don’t mean faith in the sense of a series of propositions about God that you have to believe in. I am talking about faith as relationship with the mysterious other. Beyond understanding. Everybody has that relationship. Sometimes it mirrors exactly what the catechism said when you were a little girl or boy. Sometimes not. But you have a relationship with this mysterious other. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here this morning. 

Home. Home is not just the building you live in. The building you live in is where home happens. It’s where your stuff is. The stuff you’ve accumulated, the stuff that you treasure. It’s where the most intimate and precious things happen. It’s your refuge against both the physical weather outside and the emotional storms within. It’s interesting that, when people go to the hospital, not only the patient, but also the doctors and staff, are always saying the same thing, “I want to go home.” “Let’s get you home.” It’s a symbol for safety.

Profession. Either you have one now, or you had one, or you’re going to have one. But it’s what we do with most of our time. What our constructive activity is, whether or not we get paid for it. It’s what we do with our time that seems meaningful to us.

And finally, Reputation. Twice, in Shakespeare’s plays, he does this little dance around the word reputation. In Othello, Cassio, the hero, gets roaring drunk and shames himself in front of the commander, and demoted in rank. And when he sobers up, he says, “My reputation. I have lost my reputation. I have lost that immortal part of myself.” And, in Shakespeare’s famous description of the ages of man, he talks about the time in life when we chase after that bauble, reputation. What is your reputation? How much do you value it? You have what you think is your reputation and, of course, nowadays you have a different reputation online. You have no knowledge about people saying stuff about you online. But what is your reputation? And how much do you value it?

Those five things. Family. Faith. Home. Profession. Reputation. What I’d like you to do sometime this week is to spend a little bit of time putting those in the order of importance for you. It’s not going to be easy. You’re going to keep crossing them out and doing them again. And, after you see the list the way you like it, recognize that it tells you something about your relationship with yourself, your relationship with other people, and your relationship with God.