Christians Never Retire
Pope Leo said this morning that once you find the pearl, selling everything registers as gain rather than sacrifice. Today’s Gospel is filled with people already on the move.
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“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.” — Matthew 13:45-46
The merchant in today’s Gospel has a job description hidden in the Greek. Matthew calls him an emporos, a wholesaler who traveled for a living, as opposed to the kapelos who kept a stall in town and waited for customers to walk past. Jesus could have used the shopkeeper. He picked the man on the road.
Look at who fills these three parables. Someone is crossing a field that does not belong to him when his foot catches on something buried. A pearl dealer has traveled to reach the market he is working. Out on the lake, a net drags behind a boat. Nobody in this Gospel is sitting still.
Yesterday, on the feast of St. Christopher, I wrote about a ferryman who met God in the middle of a flooding river rather than safely on the bank. Today Jesus makes the same case three times in a row.
Pope Francis said it in his first long interview as pope: “Ours is not a ‘lab faith,’ but a ‘journey faith,’ a historical faith.” We’ll explore this more in depth below.
Motion on its own is just restlessness. What makes these three men more than wanderers is that they are looking for something, fueled by a desire they cannot argue themselves out of.
Preaching this Gospel at the Angelus this morning in Castel Gandolfo, Pope Leo XIV described the moment the search pays off. The parables “convey the surprise of those who find something far beyond what they could have hoped for, so much so that selling or leaving everything behind no longer seems a sacrifice, but a gain.”
He also named the counterfeit that runs on the same fuel: “the consumer culture influences our tastes, constantly creating new needs only to sell us solutions that never satisfy, and that sometimes even poison the heart.”
Force has nothing to do with any of it. What the kingdom uses is attraction, the pull a real pearl exerts on a man who has spent his career learning to spot one.
My favorite Tennessee writer, Alex Haley, the author of Roots, lived his life by a motto that embodies the spirit of this pilgrim on the move.
