The first reading is about prayer.

Solomon is before the Lord:

he is deeply conscious of his responsibilities for others

and so he prays for aid in governance.

This was the treasure he sought, as he prayed:

Give your servant

a heart to understand how to discern between good and evil.

In the Old Testament

‘the heart’ was the seat of both the emotions and the intellect.

‘a heart to understand’ encompasses both thinking and feeling.

Solomon doesn’t pray

for a heart to discern between good and evil,

but for

a heart to understand how to discern between good and evil.

He doesn’t just want to make right judgements,

he wants to make right judgements because he knows what he is doing.

Most of us have responsibilities for others, for example,

for children – infants, teenagers, or grown-up,

for elderly and infirm parents,

for spouses,

for close friends,

for people we work with.

That responsibility may sometimes be exercised

through advise and guidance, through giving counsel,

and sometimes through making decisions that affect them.

Today, in this Mass,

we should make Solomon’s prayer our own:

a prayer for an understanding heart,

a prayer

for the gift of wisdom,

as we seek to fulfil our responsibilities

towards those we care for.

Turning to the Gospel,

Jesus preached

the Kingdom of heaven

– what it meant to be one of God’s subjects,

under God’s protection,

and sharing God’s concerns.

Jesus shared his intimate knowledge of God His Father,

through his words and his actions.

He preached the Kingdom with great vigour,

insisting that it was open to all,

especially the poor and the outcast,

insisting that being God’s loyal subject

concerned interior attitudes not outward observances,

insisting on the real effect, the influence, the productivity,

of those who hear, really hear, his words,

of those who commit themselves to imitate his life.

Today we hear:

The kingdom of heaven

is like a treasure hidden in a field which someone has found;

he hides it again,

goes off happy,

sells everything he owns and buys the field.

Maybe the Jerusalem Bible translation lets us down here,

most translations refer to ‘joy’, rather than ‘happiness’,

and they link the reaction to the subsequent action.

So an alternative translation [NRSV] is:

The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure in a field,

which someone found and hid;

then in his joy

he goes and sells all that he has and buys the field.

There are three key features to this illustration of the Kingdom

– three things being emphasised.

One is the call to commit wholeheartedly:

For the man gains the treasure by

‘selling everything he owns’.

The second is that

what is gained, the treasure,

becoming God’s subject by following Jesus,

is much more valuable than what is given up.

The third is that it is the joy of discovering this treasure

that enables the wholehearted commitment.

For some people

there is a particular time they would point to

when they first realised the treasure that is knowing Jesus,

for others there may be no such special moment,

for them the realisation may have grown more slowly,

or have always been with them from childhood.

However we come to the treasure, as mixed-up people,

none of us will have finished

‘selling everything we own’.

This takes a lifetime.

What about the ‘joy’ that drives us to commitment to Jesus?

There are two things to say about this:

First, it is a fruit of the Holy Spirit,

it is a consequence of the gentle,

and often unrecognised,

touch of the living God on our innermost selves;

second,

though it is sometimes breaks through into fleeting feelings,

it is not an emotion – its real nature goes much deeper than that.

It is the recognition

of what matters to me,

of what attracts me,

at the deepest, most profound, level.

Today, in this gospel, we are invited

to look into our hearts;

we are invited

to pay attention to the pulls deep within each of us –

pulling us towards what is good;

pulling us towards what is true;

pulling us towards what is beautiful;

we are invited to recognise that it is

in and through these pulls that real joy is present.

We are to feel the Holy Spirit’s work within us

drawing us into the Kingdom,

and we are to give thanks to God for this in this Eucharist.