Deacon Cornell's Homily

As wise as Solomon. When God grants a request, he does so with abundance. Solomon asks God for wisdom and God makes him the benchmark of wisdom. When I looked up wisdom on dictionary.com, the definition displayed from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary listed as the fifth reference: see the Bible, the wisdom of Solomon.

Wisdom means more than knowing things; it has a strong connotation of acting in a certain way, of living out the knowledge someone who is wise has. We often associate wisdom with those who are outside the normal power structures of the world, which is recognition that one who is wise lives life differently from those who are not so wise. The cartoon version of this aspect of wisdom is the guru up on the mountaintop, dispensing wisdom to pilgrims who make the hard journey up the mountain. But even our more serious images of those who are wise are of people who measure success very differently from our culture. The late Jesuit author Anthony DeMello tells a story about Diogenes, the Greek philosopher. Diogenes was not a favorite of the king because he did not always agree with him. One day another philosopher, who led a very comfortable life in the king's court because he always agreed with the king, came upon Diogenes just as Diogenes was about to have a meal of bread and lentil beans. He chided Diogenes, "If you would learn to agree with the king, you would not have to live on lentil beans." Diogenes wisely responded, "If you learned to live on lentil beans, you would not always have to agree with the king."

One of the primary ways that Jesus gives us wisdom about our faith is through the many parables that he told.  But as we heard in our Gospel readings from the last two Sundays, even the disciples  sometimes needed a little more wisdom in order to understand those parables.    Take the first two parables that we heard today, the parable of the hidden treasure and the pearl of great price. When I was younger, I understood those parables very differently. I understood the buried treasure and the pearl as representing the kingdom of God or representing our faith. And because those are so important, I understood Jesus urging us to sell everything we had to obtain them.  After gaining a little bit of wisdom along the way in the form of knowing what commentators or scholars to consult to help me understand scripture passages, I know that these two parables follow the same structure of all the parables that Jesus tells about the kingdom of God:  the protagonist is always God as was true in the parable of the sower, or the prodigal son.

In other words, in the parable of the hidden treasure, the man who finds the treasure is God. And the hidden treasure God finds is us, is all of creation, especially us humans, especially you and me. And because this treasure is so valuable to God, God sells everything he has, his only Son, to obtain us. You see, the kingdom of heaven is not some prize that we must compete for and earn. It is a gift from a God who looks at all creation and says,  "It is very, very, good." It is a gift from God who sent Jesus into the world, not to condemn it, or to put up obstacles between us and God, but to save it, to reconcile us to God. Instead of trying to figure out how to earn our way into the kingdom of heaven, we should be focused more on responding to this God who loves us so much.

As long as we hear these parables in the framework something we have to win or earn, we start focusing on how much we have to pay, or looking around to see if anyone is getting more than what we think is a fair share. We find it so much easier to point out how others are sinning than it is to look inside our hearts and see if we are responding correctly to someone who loves us enough to trade everything they have to save us. The other parable Jesus tells us today reminds us that it is not our job to judge others, to decide who is in and who should be out. Along with the parable of the weeds and the wheat, they remind us that God has a much different strategy and timetable for sorting out good and evil from the one we feel compelled to impose on everyone else.  

What does this mean to us? How does this have anything to do with how we live out our faith? Of course it has everything to do with it, but I will suggest one very practical effect: how (or maybe I should say whether) we celebrate the sacrament of reconciliation.  Reconciliation, like all the sacraments, is not just what happens at a moment in time or in the act of the rite. We need to prepare for celebrating Reconciliation so that we can fully respond the grace of the sacrament. I pray that all of us reflect very seriously on how much God loves us, as revealed in these parables, and then think about what in our lives stands in the way of loving God back, especially by carrying out Jesus' command to love one another. Let's look around at how our actions, or words, or attitudes have hurt our relationships and work on mending them. Then, when we celebrate the sacrament of Reconciliation, we will be much better prepared to really reconcile with God for how halfheartedly we have responded to His love up to now, and to more effectively live out of the grace of the sacrament in the coming days, weeks, months. Because  to really be wise, we need to live out what we have learned along the way. Even Solomon lost his gift because he did not live it out in his later years but turned away from God and the wisdom he had been given.  Our first two parables today teach us that our true value comes not from what we earn or how much we have as the world would proclaim, but from knowing who loves us, and how much we are loved.  Let us live with wisdom, doing all we can to respond as fully as we can to the love God gives us.             

homily index