July 24, 2014
The following is a homily for the Scripture readings for Sunday, July 27.
Only three have done it – won three major golf championships by the age of 25. Last week Rory McElroy, who won the U.S. Open in Bethesda, Md., two years ago, joined Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods as the third golfer to achieve this benchmark. They interviewed him after this victory. “You are going to be disappointed,” he said to the news people. “It was all very simple: process and spots. I tried to pay attention to the process of my swinging, and then roll my put over a specific spot. Process and puts, that’s all it was.” As the interview was ending, Rory indicated where golf was in his life: “When I wake in the morning, I’m thinking golf; when I sleep at night, I’m thinking golf. Golf is everything.”
Maybe this is why Rory’s wedding to his tennis girlfriend got put off: golf is everything. He doesn’t want to be distracted. And it raises a question for all of us: what is “everything” – the all-absorbing interest of our lives? I bet most of us would say our families. Some would say their jobs. Very few of us would claim our favorite sport. Yet Jesus puts another idea before us, something else to absorb us: the Kingdom of God.
We hear these parables which Jesus cloaks in what we would call economic language: the way you buy a field, the way you bet on the price of an item – that’s the kind of intensity you need to be part of the Kingdom of God. It might puzzle us, though. Here we are, Catholics and Christians for many years: have we ever thought of ourselves as living for the Kingdom of God? Is the kingdom our buried treasure or our priceless pearl?
Why do you believe? Why are you a Catholic? Would we ever say: “Because I’m living for the Kingdom of God? More likely because we’d say: “I want to go to heaven.” Or, if we are a bit more jaundiced: “I don’t want to go to hell.” But behind the images of heaven and hell, which have been so colored and distorted over 2000 years of Christian history, behind them is the singular image of the Kingdom of God.
What is the Kingdom? It’s God’s transformative action in the present moment, and extending into eternity, whereby the hopes and dreams of humankind come about. Not like a Disney kingdom, not like some medieval realm, the Kingdom of God can extend to every person in any situation. It is the radical renewal of our relationship with God, accepting God as the Father of endless love, so that it transforms our relationships with everyone else. It is a state where kindness, generosity, mercy, peace, and the pursuit of justice reorient the way we live with each other. It is the era in which God’s qualities of love, healing and grace characterize our everyday world. “Thy Kingdom come; they will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”