Matthew 13:44-52

 SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME – YEAR A

Commentary of Fr. Fernando Armellini

Greetings to all. 

Nothing was as highly esteemed as wisdom among the peoples of the Ancient Middle East. A man could be rich; he could also be a king, powerful and, therefore, he could be feared; but, if he was not a wise person, he did not deserve any esteem. Wisdom was not understood as erudition but as the aptitude of the one who knows how to make the right decisions and how to distinguish very well between what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil. This is important because life depends on it. 

In the Old Testament, we find many texts that praise wisdom. The Book of Job says that it is better to discover wisdom than precious stones: "It is not equal to the gold of Ophir, to precious onyx or sapphires" (Job 28:16). In the Bible, the land of Teman was famous, for there dwelt the possessors of wisdom—Eliphaz, one of the three friends who comfort Job and converses with him about the great enigma of grief that comes from Teman. And the elders naturally possess it through the experience they accumulated over the years. 

The Qohelet, who had opened in Jerusalem a school to teach the young how to live, affirms: ‘My heart has seen much; that is, I have accumulated much experience, so trust in what I teach you; I am a wise person.’ And the book of Ben Sirach says, ‘What is fitting for the elders, to know how to give advice.’ They are the ones who train the new generations. 

The book of Sirach recommends: ‘Do not neglect the advice of the elders, for they too have learned from their fathers; and from them, you will learn to discern between what is right and what is wrong.’ 

At this point, we wonder: Will the wisdom transmitted by the tradition of the elders be enough to prevent mistakes in life? Can we trust what people consider 'wisdom'? Which one will be the right among the many life choices presented to us? 

Today, Jesus, with two parables, wants to propose to us the inestimable value of his wisdom. Let us listen to the first one: 

“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.” 

In Jesus' time, there were many stories about hidden treasures that someone had been lucky enough to find, and these stories came from actual finds that some lucky person had made. The reason is that, in Israel, there were always wars. Foreign tribes and peoples invaded its territory; it was always a land of passage. And, when there were these wars, for many people, the only way to save their lives was to flee. Before fleeing, they hid what they couldn't take with them. Some people would even bury real treasures in their fields, hoping to recover them later when the danger had passed. 

Archaeologists found at Megiddo, a very important city mentioned several times in the Bible, a palace now called the "Palace of the Ivories." A real treasure of ivories from Egypt, Syria, and Anatolia hidden under the floor. The marauders did not manage to discover it because they were well hidden. It was archaeologists who made the find. That palace, which dates from 1500-1200 B.C., was inhabited by a prince who escaped and, before fleeing, hid this treasure. 

Also, Josephus Flavius records that in 66 A.D., before the war that led to the destruction of Jerusalem, someone sensed that things were going badly and escaped. But before escaping, Josephus Flavius says that he hid his treasures. However, the real owners never returned. The field remained uncultivated for many years and was finally occupied by other owners who knew nothing about the treasures the ancestors had hidden. One day, the new owner's day laborer, or a passer-by, noticed a significant peculiar flash; he was intelligent and sensed a treasure there. 

Let us grasp the message of the parable Jesus wants to give. He has heard many of these stories of hidden treasures being recovered, and he applies these stories to his treasures. The treasure he offers is the proposal of the new man, of the blessed man; the treasure of which Jesus speaks is his Gospel. 

Now, let us grasp the message that Jesus wants to give us in all the parable details. First of all, the treasure of the Gospel does not immediately attract the eye and attention; it is a hidden treasure. What draws everyone's attention are the eye-catching things that immediately attract: property, feasts, riches, success, vacations, palaces... these things immediately attract attention. The Gospel is a hidden treasure. ‘Pay attention," Jesus tells us, "for all those things that attract your attention will not lead you to the fullness of joy; you will always lack something because you are well made because you are made to have this treasure; only then will you have the fullness of joy.’ 

Its presence is hidden in the field, yet there are clear signs to find it. The field is the world, but you must be on the lookout. What could be the signs that everybody should be able to see? Who hasn't heard, for example, some phrase that surprised him, some phrase in the Gospel, some saying of the Lord that has astonished him, that has made him reflect, realize that he was in the presence of the Lord, of new wisdom, out of the ordinary, different from everyone's reasoning? He who perceives these signs understands: ‘Here is a treasure that could give a whole new meaning to my life.’ It's a hidden treasure; if you're stunned by the flashy things of this world and bewildered by everything social networks propose to you, you do not realize the treasure of the Gospel. Then, pay attention because you could lose it. 

Second detail of the parable: The discovery of the treasure happens by chance; the finder was not looking for this treasure; it happened to him by pure luck. This is precisely what can happen by discovering the Gospel's treasure; you can know it by chance. We have many examples of people who met Christ by chance; they were interested in something else; their life was far away from the Gospel; maybe they were only interested in their professional career, but one day, they heard a co-worker think differently from the others, they asked themselves: What kind of wisdom is this? And they became involved and sought to understand more about that wisdom, which was the wisdom of the Gospel. 

Maybe they stumbled upon a page of the Gospel while looking for something else online, stopped to reflect, and realized that this was a treasure they didn't even know existed. Or they entered the church because they wanted to be near a friend and listened to a homily that perplexed them: ‘Here is a proposal for life that I never imagined existed.’ And they began to dig for this treasure. 

Third characteristic: The person who begins to see signs of the presence of the treasure is a wise, intelligent person; he understands that what he sees on the surface is a tiny part of the treasure and wants it all. So what does he do? ‘I don't want one page of the Gospel, one beautiful sentence of Jesus; I want the whole Gospel.’ Here's the purchase of the field. 

Fourth significant detail: Joy. Because of the joy he experiences, he sells everything and buys that field. Joy is the central theme of the parable. What moves this person is to have understood that he can make the business of his life; the center of the parable is the joy of discovery. 

The commentators of this parable, and also of the following one, have often insisted on the necessary renunciations: ‘To choose the kingdom of God you must make sacrifices, you must renounce’ ... They forget an essential thing: joy. How many people do not approach the Gospel and the Christian community because they are afraid of being deprived of joy! This depends very much on our preaching; we must present the Gospel as the only proposal of life that makes us fully happy. Let us stop making Christianity the religion of sadness, of sacrifice, of mortification, which only in the end makes us worthy of happiness. In the past, there was too much insistence on renunciation; even renunciations were invented that were an end in themselves and made no sense. 

Here, we speak only of gain, of fortune, of happiness. The true disciple who has understood the treasure does not mention much of what he left behind; he always speaks of what he has found. And now comes the question: How much does the field cost? This field costs everything you have; you have nothing left but the treasure of the Gospel. If you want the field, which is the kingdom of God, you will have to stake your life; you will have to turn the value scale of your life upside down. If before you put at the top bank account and that goal guided all your choices: you chose friends if they were in your interests, you accepted God and the saints if they helped you in your business, and in the last place, you left (often happens) alms to the poor... Now, if you want the field, you must reverse your choices: at the top, you will put love and the gift of all you have because you want to make yourself happy and give life to your brother. 

This is the price: all that you have; otherwise, you will have to resign yourself to it. You will go ahead, and in the end, you will have to leave everything because at the 'customs,' all the goods you didn't deliver to buy the field will be seized. What's the fear? To lose because you didn't dare to bet your goods to win the kingdom of God, to have that treasure. 

The problem is that Jesus' promise cannot be verified; you have no concrete proof that you will have the fortune by 'buying' that field. You have realized that this is a real treasure that no one can take away from you and that it will be yours forever, but you have no evidence. On the other hand, the concrete material things proposed to you as treasures give you evidence, although they are not the treasures that will fill your life with joy. 

Last detail: Haste. He who wants to conclude a deal should not waste time; if he is undecided, hesitating, or waits a few years, that is time lost to enjoy the treasure. Let's consider some hesitations because the farmer certainly had them. It's just that he didn't have the evidence that, underneath, there was all this great treasure; he couldn't verify; he had an intuition and gambled it all away. You can have some doubt, but at one point, you must make up your mind. Otherwise, you will lose time to enjoy the whole treasure, the Gospel. 

Let us now listen to the second parable: 

“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.” 

In his parable, why does Jesus put a pearl seeker in the scene? What is the meaning of the pearl in the culture of Jesus' time? For the Oriental people, nothing was as precious as pearls because they symbolized beauty. In Hebrew, "pearls" is pneninà, a name often given to Jewish girls. In Greek, they are called margarité, and Margarita is a name given to girls, symbolizing beauty. This parable is not about someone who finds a treasure by chance but about someone who appreciates beauty and goes in search of it; he does not find it by chance. This means he has already discovered much beauty but is not yet satisfied. In the parable, it indicates the seeker of the wisdom that makes a person beautiful. When we say: ‘What a beautiful person!’ we say it because of the values he embodies, because of his generosity, his wisdom, his righteousness, her services, and her concern for others. We love a beautiful person. But to become a beautiful person, it is necessary to live according to the wisdom that is the cause of that beauty. 

The readers of Matthew's Gospel know many beautiful pearls of wisdom. Let us think of the Egyptian wisdom in Alexandria, the Egyptian city that was the center of the wisdom of the then-known world. The heart of the empire kept a unique library in which the human wisdom of that time was concentrated and contained all Egyptian wisdom. Let us also think of the instruction of the Tao Te Ching ("The Way"), by Lao Tse, dating back to 2500 B.C., which addresses his son, longing for him to become beautiful, and therefore educates him and advises him to be sincere and honest. Here is a pearl of wisdom that makes a person beautiful. 

There are many other very famous texts like the instruction of Merykara, the last pharaoh of the tenth dynasty of Ancient Egypt; for example, the father teaches the son how to behave when he should speak and when he should be silent to be polite. The dialogue of a man desperate with his soul is presented as the artist's song and so much wisdom. The seeker is not satisfied with the Greek philosophers or with Mesopotamian wisdom. We also have instructions and many sayings that educate us to become beautiful. 

The Jews were convinced they possessed the most beautiful pearl: the Torah. If you follow the Torah, you become beautiful because it says, "You shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not be an adulterer, you shall not bear false witness; believe in one God." If you let yourself be guided by this wisdom, you become beautiful. 

What does Jesus want to tell us in this parable of Matthew's Gospel? That none of these beauties will thoroughly satisfy you. Some people don't care about becoming beautiful; they do what they want, and even if they are ugly, they don't care. But we have in our nature the need to look for beauty. And what happened today? It happens that one looks for many pearls of beauty. Somebody goes to Buddhism, Confucianism, and Islam, and in these pearls shine many beauties, it is undeniable, but if you stop on them, you will remain unsatisfied. 

With the parable of the pearl hunter, Jesus wants to tell us that you will only be magnificent if you incarnate the wisdom of the Gospel. And here we have, as in the first parable, the insistence in the urgency; you must decide immediately because the sooner you are magnificent, the sooner you will be satisfied because you are made for this beauty. A beauty more beautiful than those who embody the Gospel is impossible because if you come to love and give your life, even for those who hurt you, you cannot go beyond that. This is the ultimate beauty. 

And now let us listen to the last parable: 

“Again, 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 and sit down to put what is good into buckets. What is bad they throw away. Thus it will be at the end of the age. The angels will go out and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth. ‘Do you understand all these things?’ They answered, ‘Yes.’” 

In the third parable, Jesus sets a scene that he witnessed many times before. On the shore of Lake Tiberias, he saw the fishermen casting their nets, and in these nets, they find everything; there are fish, but there are also sticks, leaves, and rags. Maybe he also heard cursing because cleaning the nets is not easy. What is Jesus telling us? When he called his apostles, he sent them out to be fishers of people; that was their mission, that is, to bring people out of the polluted waters of pagan life, dictated by the impulses of the evil one, and bring them to his pure water, which is the water of the Spirit, the water of life. 

There is everything in this net. The original Greek text says that there are beautiful things in it, καλὰ, kalá (good), and also what is evil: σαπρὰ (saprà). We immediately understand there is something beautiful and rotten in this net thrown by his disciples by the apostles; it refers to the Christian community in which something good and rotten is present that belongs to life and death. And so immediately, we are led to give the interpretation: ‘Yes, this is true; in the Christian community, there are beautiful people in this net, but there is also a group of bad people.’ The good people, of course, are us, and the bad people are those that we can also point out... 

But this is not the meaning of the parable. In every person, even if he has been drawn from the waters of paganism, there is a dead part, the rotten part of our life, which is built up when we consent to the impulses of the weeds present in each of us. And then there is a beautiful part; I repeat, these two parts are present in each of us. The beautiful part is the life built when we listen and follow the promptings of the Spirit, the voice of the Son of God who is in us. 

What does this parable want to tell us? The evangelist Matthew wrote his Gospel in the '80s; 50 years have passed since Easter, and he is a shepherd of souls; he carries in his heart the life of his communities, and what is he seeing? He realizes that the initial enthusiasm that had animated these communities has begun to fade; many are feeling good because they belong to the Christian community, they have given their adhesion to Christ, and they have been baptized, but many are beginning to take the baptismal commitments lightly and adapt themselves to the way of life of the pagans, to their principles and values; in short, in them, more than the good wheat, the weeds arise. 

And Matthew feels he must shake these communities. Of course, he's addressing his communities, but this is our current situation. How does he give this wake-up call? He resorts to the language he has at his disposal, which are the apocalyptic images we must decode because they do not belong to our culture, mentality, or language. It speaks of the furnace, fire, angels, weeping, and gnashing of teeth. This does not belong to our language; we must understand what he is telling us, what reproof he wants to give. 

What are these images? It reminds us that we have the possibility of building a failed life in front of us that ends in weeping and gnashing of teeth even if we belong to the Christian community. It alerts us and invites us to be careful even though we have been taken out of the polluted waters, even though we belong to the kingdom of heaven, and we are fortunate to have remained within the net. Yet the life of some may be rotten and fail. 

He also speaks of angels; angels separate the rotten from the beautiful. Who are these angels? They are those mediators of salvation, of the word of God, of the tenderness of God, who care for their brethren and try to make them aware of their condition to clean the rottenness in everybody. This is the message given to us today: those of us who have become aware of the reality of this Christian community and our brothers' condition. We must work to separate them from the rottenness, that is, from non-life; each of us is called to be one of these angels. 

The fiery furnace is the fire that burns the rottenness, and this rottenness, I repeat, is not the people. In Matthew's language, this is a warning: he's asking us to remember that it will be excruciating to come to the end of your life and to meet the Lord... It will be painful to realize that perhaps a significant part of your life and your person is rotten; you will remain beautiful, but the rotten part will be eliminated and burned. So there is a threat, but there is also fantastic news because the Gospel is always beautiful. It tells us that each of us will remain the beautiful part, and the rotten part will be burned up; thus, in the end, only the beautiful will remain in the kingdom of God. 

And now, the conclusion of the Gospel passage of this Sunday presents what biblical scholars consider the signature of the evangelist. Let us listen: 

“And he replied, ‘Then every scribe who has been instructed in the kingdom of heaven is like the head of a household who brings from his storeroom both the new and the old.’” 

In the last verse we just heard, we have the self-presentation of the author of the Gospel according to Matthew. The scribe became a disciple of the kingdom of heaven. There is no doubt that the author of the Gospel according to Matthew, was a rabbi, a Jew who converted to Christ and said of himself that he brought out of his treasure new things and ancient things, not old things. The old is no longer necessary; the ancient retains its value. 

What does this rabbi who converted to Christ say about himself? He says: ‘I have been able to grasp in the ancient things, the ancient wisdom, the one I mentioned, the Egyptian, Greek wisdom, Mesopotamian and especially the wisdom of the Torah, and I was able to grasp all the beauty of the ancient, but I embraced the new, which is the Gospel of Christ.’ 

I think the message is very relevant to us. When you welcome Christ and you belong to another culture, you belong to another religion. You should know that when you accept Christ, you do not renounce anything of the beauty of your culture and your religious practice. You must do like this wise rabbi: know how to grasp the beauty in the ancient traditions and then fully accept the Gospel, which is the new. 

I wish you all a good Sunday and a good week.