{"id":4351,"date":"2023-07-29T11:42:00","date_gmt":"2023-07-29T10:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/?p=4351"},"modified":"2023-07-10T14:29:01","modified_gmt":"2023-07-10T13:29:01","slug":"commentary-on-17th-sunday-of-the-year-a-30-07-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/commentary-on-17th-sunday-of-the-year-a-30-07-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Commentary on 17th Sunday of the year (A), 30.07.2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

Commentary by Donagh O\u2019Shea OP, www.goodnews.ie<\/a><\/h3>\n

Mt 13:44-52<\/b><\/p>\n

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.\u00a0 <\/em>
\nAgain, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.\u00a0 <\/em>
\nAgain, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad.\u00a0 So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. <\/em>
\n\u2018Have you understood all this?\u2019 They answered, \u2018Yes.\u2019\u00a0 And he said to them, \u2018Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.\u2019”<\/em><\/p>\n

A rich young man asked Jesus, \u201cWhat must I do to possess eternal life?\u201d\u00a0 Jesus replied, \u201cGo sell what you have, give the money to the poor, and come follow me.\u201d\u00a0 The young man went away sad because he was very wealthy.\u00a0 The sadness of Jesus must have been even greater.\u00a0 It may well have been this incident that brought today\u2019s parables to birth in the mind of Jesus.\u00a0 (It is true that the incident is recounted later<\/em> in the gospel (chapter 19), but then the gospels are not strictly chronological accounts.)<\/p>\n

Have you ever met an immensely wealthy man who was culturally impoverished?\u00a0 He has everything and yet he has nothing.\u00a0 He can enjoy his meals, but he can only eat as much as a poor man (or less); and just like anyone he doesn\u2019t dare drink too much.\u00a0 Books, theatres, museums, exhibitions\u2026 are all closed to him.\u00a0 Other countries, to him, are just poor places; historical buildings are only old houses; landscapes are just real estate; other cultures only examples of inefficiency.\u00a0 What is there to do?\u00a0 All he can do is make more money \u2013 which must be boring, since he already has too much.\u00a0 He can travel to exotic places, but he has to bring his dull self with him everywhere, which guarantees that everything will remain closed to him.<\/p>\n

That is only cultural impoverishment.\u00a0 Imagine spiritual impoverishment.\u00a0 No opening, no direction, no meaning, no value except possession; time, to such a man, is an unbearable burden, except when it is money or pleasure; other people are either clients or competitors in the market; and he himself\u2026 he prefers not to think about that.\u00a0 Finding such a life unbearable, such people are sometimes apt to embrace an extreme right-wing version of religion, to mask their spiritual impoverishment.\u00a0 It takes on all the shallowness and harshness of their own inner life.<\/p>\n

There is no account in the gospels of the subsequent career of the rich young man; he is never mentioned again.\u00a0 Not being open to the gift, he got only what he paid for.\u00a0 Jesus said about the rich, \u201cthey have had their reward.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carl Jung famously said that in his entire career as a psychoanalyst he had never met a person over forty whose fundamental problem was not religious.\u00a0 The \u201cpearl of great price\u201d is there within our grasp, it is being held out to us free of charge.\u00a0 It is free, but to take it we have to have empty hands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Commentary by Donagh O\u2019Shea OP, www.goodnews.ie Mt 13:44-52 “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.\u00a0 Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4352,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4351"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7901,"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4351\/revisions\/7901"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stmarys-tallaght.ie\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}