Give Your Servant An Understanding Heart

07-30-2023Weekly ReflectionFr. Manasseh Iorchir, VC

You may have noticed that the whole Chapter 13 of Matthew’s Gospel provides different parables with which Jesus explains the mysteries of the Kingdom of God. You may also have noticed that during this part of Ordinary Time in Year A, the season of growth in our knowledge of God, the Church is pursuing a lectio continua (continuous Reading, Reading in a particular order) of both Paul’s Letter to the Romans and the Gospel of Matthew. The Readings of the previous Sunday were themed around the seamless application of God’s mercy and justice. This weekend, the Church invites us to meditate on what actually constitutes true wisdom and what we need to do in order to gain it.

In the First Reading, after Solomon the young King had built and dedicated the Temple in Jerusalem, the Lord appeared to him in a dream and asked him to request any favor and he would receive it. Solomon refused to ask for the mundane things that kings in his time would have desired. Instead, he recognized God’s benevolence to his father, David, and to him, acknowledged his youth and inexperience and asked for wisdom to rule well. God was pleased with the selflessness of his request and even offered to grant him all that he did not ask. This reminds us of Jesus’ teaching at the Sermon on the Mount where he instructed His Disciples to “seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well” (Matt6:33). God was pleased that the young King’s initial thought was to selflessly seek the welfare of God’s kingdom. This is wisdom: the capacity to know the right choices to make and the courage to make such right choices with verifiable consistency. Since Solomon selflessly placed the interests of God’s Kingdom first, God honored him disproportionately.

This seems to achieve thematic convergence with two of the three parables that Jesus told in the Gospel passage this weekend. In the parables of the man who finds treasure in a field and the merchant who finds fine pearls, both protagonists retreat in order to sell all they had before so as to purchase their life-changing discoveries. This is the astute application of wisdom, that we find what is true, life-giving and fulfilling, retreat to find the means to acquire it even if it is at great cost, and resolutely, as well as courageously, appropriate it to ourselves. The Kingdom of God, that state of life where God’s will is perfectly done, is not always obvious. Sometimes we need to find it, retreat in order to give up our past life of ignorance, pride and sin, in order to appropriate it to ourselves. To do this we need wisdom which the Holy Spirit is and which God is ready to graciously bestow on all who sincerely ask of Him.

In the third parable, Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to a net thrown into the sea which catches all sorts of fish which are sorted by the fisherman. Jesus is that fisherman who invites everyone into life with Him in the Kingdom of God. However, it remains His Divine prerogative to sort out the good from the bad on Judgement Day. This represents a gentle reminder that Christ’s Church, the visible manifestation of God’s Kingdom on earth, remains a Church of saints and sinners. While the saints among us must not be scandalized by the presence of sinners in the body of Christ, those who may not be able to honestly lay claim to sainthood at the moment must make sincere efforts towards repentance in order to enhance true transformation. We are wise when we know that God’s patience is aimed at enabling us to make the right relationship with Him.

May God grant us the wisdom we need to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness so that all good things will be added unto us.

Please be kind and may God bless you.

Fr. Manasseh