THE TEXT BELOW IS THE TRANSCRIPTION OF THE VIDEO COMMENTARY BY FR. FERNANDO ARMELLINI

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Greetings to all. 

Among the peoples of the Ancient Middle East, nothing was held in higher esteem than wisdom. A man could be rich; he could also be a king, powerful, and therefore feared; but if he was not wise, he did not deserve esteem. Wisdom was not understood as erudition but as the aptitude of the one who knows how to make the right decisions and to distinguish clearly 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 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 have accumulated over the years. 

The Qohelet, who had opened a school in Jerusalem 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 passed down through the elders’ tradition be enough to prevent mistakes in life? Can we trust what people consider ‘wisdom’? Which one will be the right choice among the many life choices presented to us? 

Today, Jesus, through two parables, wants to show 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, hides again, and, out of joy, goes and sells all that he has to buy that field.

In Jesus’ time, many stories circulated about hidden treasures that people had been lucky enough to find, and these stories were based on actual finds. This was because Israel had always been a land of war. Foreign tribes and peoples invaded its territory; it was always a land of passage. When wars broke out, 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 even buried real treasures in their fields, hoping to recover them later when the danger had passed. 

At Megiddo, a very important city mentioned several times in the Bible, archaeologists found a palace now called the “Palace of the Ivories.” A real treasure of ivories from Egypt, Syria, and Anatolia was hidden under the floor. The marauders did not discover it because it was 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. Before escaping, Josephus Flavius says 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 passerby, noticed a significant, peculiar flash; he was intelligent and sensed a treasure there. 

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

Now, let us grasp the message Jesus wants to give us in all the details of the parable. 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: 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 signs could everyone see? Who hasn’t heard, for example, a phrase that surprised him, a phrase in the Gospel, a saying of the Lord that has astonished him, that has made him reflect and realize 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 it; it happened to him by pure luck. This is precisely what can happen when 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 lives were far from the Gospel; maybe they were only interested in their professional careers, 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, paused to reflect, and realized it was a treasure they hadn’t even known existed. Or they entered the church 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 present treasure is wise and intelligent; he understands that what he sees on the surface is only 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.’ This is 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 the understanding that he can make the business of his life; the center of the parable is the joy of discovery. 

Commentators on this parable, and on the following one, have often emphasized 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 fear 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, sacrifice, and 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 as ends 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 speak 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 your 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, that treasure. 

The problem is that Jesus’ promise cannot be verified; you have no concrete proof that you will gain the fortune by ‘buying’ that field. You have realized that this is a real treasure 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 there was all this great treasure underneath; he couldn’t verify it; he had an intuition and gambled it all away. You can have some doubts, 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 seeking fine pearls. When he finds a pearl of great price, he sells everything he has and buys it. 

In his parable, why does Jesus place a pearl seeker in the scene? What does the pearl signify in the culture of Jesus’ time? For the people of the East, 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 treasure by chance, but about someone who appreciates beauty and seeks it; he does not find it by chance. This suggests he has already discovered much beauty but is not yet satisfied. In the parable, the seeker represents 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 maintained a unique library that gathered the human wisdom of the time and contained all Egyptian wisdom. Let us also consider the instruction in the Tao Te Ching (“The Way”) by Lao Tse, dating back to 2500 B.C., which addresses his son, longs for him to become beautiful, and therefore educates and advises him to be sincere and honest. Here is a pearl of wisdom that makes a person beautiful. 

There are many other famous texts, such as the Instruction of Merykara, attributed to the last pharaoh of the tenth dynasty of Ancient Egypt. For example, the father teaches the son how to behave, when to speak, when to be silent, and how to be polite. A man’s desperate dialogue with his soul is presented as the artist’s song, full of wisdom. The seeker is not satisfied with the Greek philosophers or with Mesopotamian wisdom. We also have instructions and many sayings that teach 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 commit adultery, 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 from Matthew’s Gospel? That none of these beauties will truly 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 a natural need to seek beauty. And what happened today? It happens that one looks for many pearls of beauty. Someone goes to Buddhism, Confucianism, and Islam, and in these pearls many beauties shine, 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 embody the wisdom of the Gospel. And here, as in the first parable, we have the insistence on urgency; you must decide immediately, because the sooner you are magnificent, the sooner you will be satisfied, since you are made for this beauty. No beauty is more beautiful than that embodied in the Gospel, 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 cast into the sea, which gathers fish of every kind. When it is full, they haul it ashore and sit down to put the good fish into buckets. They throw away the bad. Thus it will be at the end of the age. The angels will go out and separate the wicked from the righteous, then 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 he had witnessed many times before. On the shore of Lake Tiberias, he saw the fishermen casting their nets, and in those nets they found everything; there were fish, but also sticks, leaves, and rags. Maybe he also heard cursing because cleaning the nets was 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, to bring people out of the polluted waters of pagan life, dictated by the impulses of the evil one, and to bring them to his pure water, the water of the Spirit, the water of life. 

There is everything on the 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 that there is something beautiful and rotten in this net cast by his disciples, the apostles; it refers to the Christian community, in which something good and rotten is present, belonging to life and death. And so we are immediately 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 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 grows 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 to 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 the life of his communities in his heart, and what does he see? He realizes that the initial enthusiasm that had animated these communities has begun to fade; many feel good because they belong to the Christian community, have given their adhesion to Christ, and have been baptized, but many are beginning to take their baptismal commitments lightly and to adapt 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 issue this wake-up call? He resorts to the language at his disposal, which consists of 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 and what reproof he wants to give. 

What are these images? They remind us that we have the possibility of building a failed life in front of us, one that ends in weeping and gnashing of teeth, even if we belong to the Christian community. They alert us and invite 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 even though 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 the mediators of salvation, of the word of God, and of God’s tenderness, who care for their brethren and try to make them aware of their condition so that the rottenness in everyone can be cleansed. This is the message given to us today: those of us who have become aware of the reality of this Christian community and of 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 away 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 our lives and 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 beautiful, 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 this Sunday’s Gospel passage presents what biblical scholars consider the evangelist’s signature. 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 out of his storeroom both the new and the old.’ 

In the last verse we just heard, we have the author of the Gospel according to Matthew’s self-presentation. 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 who 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 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 belong to another culture, you also belong to another religion. You should know that when you accept Christ, you do not renounce the beauty of your culture and your religious practice. You must do as this wise rabbi does: know how to grasp the beauty in the ancient traditions and then fully accept the Gospel, which is new. 

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