Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

July 26, 2020

1Kings 3:5.7-12, Ps 119, Rom 8:28-30, Mt 13:44-46

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

* While I was a seminarian in Rome working as a guide to the necropolis underneath St. Peter’s Basilica where St. Peter’s tomb and bones were unearthed in the 1940s, I was asked to give a special private tour to a couple from Houston, George and Annette. George’s father, George Sr., had financed the excavations. After the tour, I was able to join them for a meal and talk to them about what his father had told him about the excavations, something that led to a conversation about his dad and how he had gotten his start. It was a gripping story that illustrates not only in a pristine form what the American dream is all about, but also showcases the chief lessons Jesus is teaching us in today’s Gospel parables.

* George, Sr., was orphaned at age 7 in St. Louis. He worked super hard in school in order to get a scholarship to study at a good university. After college, he served during World War I in the Army Air Corp and, after the war went to Mexico and Cuba to work in and learn the oil business. In 1929, the year of the great depression, he went to Houston, where his wife Susan was from, with very little money but a lot of hope to fix that situation. He had learned during his time in Tampico (Mexico) and Havana the types of surface formations that increase the odds of finding oil underneath. So he began to drive up and down the back roads of East Texas in search of these formations. Most nights he would come back with a search as empty as his gas tank. He did this for almost a whole year, until one day, following a creek bed outside a town called Conroe, he spotted a formation like the one for which he had been looking. At great risk to his family, he sold basically all they had to obtain the land. The risk paid off. Eventually two wells were struck and he became over time one of the wealthiest oilmen in Texas — and with his family, great philanthropists to various good Catholic causes.

* George, Sr., made millions during the Great Depression, at a time when, obviously, so many others were struggling to survive or losing all that they had. Some might say that he was just lucky, in the right place at the right time. There’s no denying that he did have some good fortune — for example, his being in born in the age of automobiles that he could take to survey land, his wife’s being from Houston rather than some oil-barren location, and so on — but to a large degree he made his luck by excelling in three things: first, he had a hunger for a finding a treasure that could help him not only to support his family but to do great good with his life; second, a recognition of what would lead to that treasure, as he scoured back road and creek beds; and third, a willingness to sacrifice all he had to obtain that treasure.

* Jesus is saying that Christians need the same three virtues in today’s twin parables of the treasure buried in a field and the pearl of great price. The parables are simple enough to understand. The first is of a poor peasant finding a buried treasure in the midst of his work in the field. There were no real banks in ancient Palestine. People would often bury things of value in secret locations in fields. There was also no sense of “finders keepers, losers weepers”; whatever was discovered in a field belonged not to the discoverer but the owner because the land was essentially his bank. That’s why the peasant needed to buy the field. It’s quite obvious that the one selling had no idea that an ancient treasure was buried on his property. He didn’t place the same value in the field as much as his laborer did. For the peasant,