Ask For The Right Thing

God hands Solomon a blank check. “Ask what I shall give you.” Anything. And the young king, newly seated on his father’s throne, asks for the ability to tell good from evil. God himself notices what got left out of the request: long life, riches, the life of his enemies.

What we ask God for is an honest inventory of what we think is worth having. Most of us pray, more or less, the list Solomon declined to pray. Then the Gospel raises the stakes. A man stumbles onto treasure buried in somebody else’s field, goes home, sells everything he owns, and buys the dirt. He does it laughing. Out of joy, Matthew says. So here is the question today’s readings put to us, and it isn’t comfortable: do we believe the kingdom of heaven is worth what it costs, or do we only say we do?

“When he finds a pearl of great price, he goes and sells all that he has and buys it.” Licensed via Adobe Stock, ID 219239470.

The Readings

First Reading: 1 Kings 3:5, 7-12

At Gibeon the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night; and God said, “Ask what I shall give you.”

“And now, O Lord my God, thou hast made thy servant king in place of David my father, although I am but a little child; I do not know how to go out or come in. And thy servant is in the midst of thy people whom thou hast chosen, a great people, that cannot be numbered or counted for multitude. Give thy servant therefore an understanding mind to govern thy people, that I may discern between good and evil; for who is able to govern this thy great people?”

It pleased the Lord that Solomon had asked this. And God said to him, “Because you have asked this, and have not asked for yourself long life or riches or the life of your enemies, but have asked for yourself understanding to discern what is right, behold, I now do according to your word. Behold, I give you a wise and discerning mind, so that none like you has been before you and none like you shall arise after you.”

Gospel: Matthew 13:44-52

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net which was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind; when it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into vessels but threw away the bad. So it will be at the close of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.

“Have you understood all this?” They said to him, “Yes.” And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”

Scriptural Analysis

The King Who Asked Well

Start with where Solomon is standing. Gibeon sits about 6 miles northwest of Jerusalem, in the territory of Benjamin, and it was one of the towns handed over to the Levites. The Law forbade sacrificing outside Jerusalem, so the obvious question is why the king is offering a thousand burnt offerings on a hilltop altar. The answer is that the desert tabernacle was still kept at Gibeon, which is why Chronicles sends him there and why the sacred writer doesn’t fault him for it (1 Chronicles 16:39; 21:29).[1] This is the old worship, the tent Moses carried through the wilderness, and the temple that will replace it hasn’t been built yet.

Then God appears in a dream. In Scripture a dream of this kind is a revelation, the same way God spoke to Abram, to Isaac, to Jacob at Bethel (Genesis 15:12-21; 26:24; 28:11).[2] And by speaking to Solomon at all, God is confirming him as king. The blank check is also a coronation.

Look at how Solomon answers. He starts by naming himself a servant and a “little child,” which he was not in any literal sense; he was a grown man with a consolidated throne. He means he doesn’t know how to go out or come in, an idiom for leading an army and governing a people. The request pleases God precisely because it comes wrapped in that humility, and because what he asks for is the capacity to govern his people well.[3] The Latin renders his petition cor docile, a teachable heart. He asks for the kind of heart that can still be taught.

The Navarre commentary draws out something worth sitting with: Solomon’s request anticipates the order Christ later teaches us for prayer. The Roman Catechism puts it plainly. “We pray properly and well when the order of our petitions matches the right order of desires.”[4] Charity teaches us that God, the supreme Good, deserves the highest love, and that everything else we want has to be subordinated to him. Solomon prays in that order without having been taught it. Isaac of Nineveh, reading this passage in the desert centuries later, said the same thing to his monks: ask for things that are honorable from the One who will not hold back, and you will receive honor as a result of the wise choice your free will has made.[5]

And notice what Solomon gets. The wisdom he asked for, plus the riches and honor he didn’t. God is never outdone.

Ephrem the Syrian pushes further. The gifts described here, the sovereignty, the lofty mind, the wisdom no one before or after can match, belong most fully to Christ. Ephrem argues that the biblical language about Solomon only rings entirely true when it is transferred to the Prince of Peace, “whose wisdom and royal power were never preceded in time or overcome in greatness.”[6] Solomon is a sketch. Christ is the portrait. Hold onto that, because it is the hinge that swings us into the Gospel.

Three Parables, Three Claims

Saint Thomas Aquinas organizes these three parables with his usual clarity. Having already shown what blocks the Gospel and what makes it grow, our Lord now shows its dignity in three respects: its abundance in the treasure, its beauty in the pearl, and its universality in the net.[7]

Take the treasure first. Aquinas gathers the Fathers on what exactly is buried in that field. For Chrysostom it is the Gospel teaching itself, the treasure we carry in earthen vessels (2 Corinthians 4:7), hidden in the field of this world from the eyes of the unclean. For Gregory it is heavenly desire, buried in the field of spiritual discipline, which looks contemptible from the outside and tastes sweet on the inside. For Jerome it is the Word of God, “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3), hidden in the field of his own body because he was hidden in the flesh.[8]

Sit with Jerome for a second. Solomon asked for wisdom. Jerome says Wisdom himself was buried in a field, under the appearance of a carpenter’s son from Nazareth. Every reader of the parable is standing in that field.

Aquinas then asks why the man hides the treasure again after finding it. His answer is that we find it through faith and conceal it out of caution, and he gives three reasons. Hidden things burn hotter, like Jeremiah’s fire shut up in his bones (Jeremiah 20:9). Hidden things are safe from vainglory, which is why the Lord tells us to pray to the Father in secret (Matthew 6:6). And hidden things are harder to steal. He knows the obvious objection, that we were also told to let our light shine before men (Matthew 5:16), and he resolves it with Gregory: “let the work be in public, however much the intention remains hidden.”[9] Your neighbors should see what you do. God alone needs to see why.

Then the pearl. Pearls in the ancient world were reckoned worth more than gold, and the merchant here is doing something the first man wasn’t. The treasure was a surprise; the pearl is the end of a deliberate search.[10] Aquinas reads the one pearl in several ways, all of them worth having. Chrysostom and Jerome see the single true teaching found among many false ones. Gregory sees heavenly glory, since a man always wants to trade a lesser good for a greater. Augustine sees Christ himself, in whom every virtue exists at its highest, and also the one commandment of charity that fulfills the law (Romans 13:10), and also the Word of God who is the fountain of all wisdom (Sirach 1:5).[11]

Both men sell everything. Both men buy. Sacra Pagina makes the observation that the weight of the parable falls on the worth of what is found rather than on the size of the sacrifice.[12] Matthew supplies one qualifier that changes the whole emotional register: out of joy. Nobody in these parables is gritting his teeth. They have seen the price tag and think they are getting away with something.

Last, the net. The word Matthew uses is a seine net, the kind dragged between two boats or thrown from one and hauled to shore with long ropes.[13] Jesus is teaching beside a working lake. There were probably men doing exactly this within sight of him as he spoke.

Aquinas says the net signifies the teaching, or the Church, “since the first teachers were fishermen” (Matthew 4:18), and that it is cast into the sea, meaning the world. Here is the universality: the Law was given to one nation, and to that nation only (Psalm 147:20), while the Gospel gathers every kind (Romans 1:14; Mark 16:15).[14] The net comes ashore when it is full, that is, when the number of the elect is complete. The shore is the end of the world, where there is no more disturbance among the saints. The good fish go into vessels, plural, because the dwelling places in the Father’s house are many and the rewards are not identical (John 14:2).[15]

Someone will ask why we need this parable when we already had the wheat and the weeds a few verses earlier. Aquinas answers with a distinction that matters enormously for how you live in the Church. The weeds signify those cut off by a difference of doctrine, who are not of the Church. The net signifies those who are not cut off, the good and the bad together, inside.[16] The catch is mixed. It stays mixed until it hits the sand. And the sorting is done by angels, sitting, which is the posture of judgment (Matthew 19:28). Nobody handed you a bucket.

New Things And Old

Then Jesus asks the disciples if they have understood, and they say yes. That answer carries more freight than it looks like. Understanding is exactly what our Lord said the crowds would lack (Matthew 13:13-15), and understanding is the defining mark of the seed that fell on good soil and bore fruit (Matthew 13:23).[17] Sirach says a true scribe can penetrate the subtleties of parables and is at home with their obscurities (Sirach 39:2-3). The disciples have become the new scribes of the kingdom, trained, or literally discipled, in it.

And the householder who brings new and old out of his storeroom is, Aquinas says, Christ himself, the Lord of that house.[18] Augustine reads the line as a commission: you have been examined, so now go explain the Old through the New, since what was written before was written in figure (1 Corinthians 10:11). The new law adds new senses to the old without throwing any of it away. Solomon’s teachable heart, the tabernacle at Gibeon, the wisdom that pleased the Lord: all of it comes out of the storeroom and goes on the table next to Christ.

Daily Application

Begin where Solomon began, with your petitions. Pull up whatever you actually prayed for this past week. Health, money, a job, a difficult person handled, the mortgage. All of that is fair to ask for; Jesus tells us to ask for daily bread. And the Roman Catechism’s rule still governs the list: our prayer is ordered rightly when the order of our petitions matches the right order of our desires. So the honest examination is whether God shows up anywhere on that list as something more than the supplier of the other items.

Try adding one petition this week and putting it first. Ask for a teachable heart. Ask for the discernment to tell good from evil in the specific decision sitting on your desk right now. That petition costs you nothing and pleases God enough that he answered it with a kingdom.

Then take the harder thing, which is the joy. The Catechism notes that these parables demand a decisive choice, and the treasure and the pearl are what it uses to say so.[19] Most of us experience the cost of discipleship as subtraction. The habit we gave up, the Sunday morning we surrendered, the relationship we ended, the ambition we let die. That accounting is accurate as far as it goes, and the man in the field did the same math and came out grinning. So if following Christ has started to feel like nothing but loss, the usual remedy is to go back and look harder at what is actually in the ground. Adoration. An honest confession. Twenty minutes with the Gospel and no phone. Matthew’s word joy is doing real work in that verse. It is the evidence that the man knew exactly what he had found.

And take Gregory’s counsel about hiddenness seriously, because it protects everything else. Let the work be public and the intention stay buried. Serve at the parish, feed somebody, forgive the person who has no idea you forgave them, and then resist the urge to narrate it. A treasure left out in the open gets stolen. Vainglory is the thief.

Which brings us to Joachim and Anne, whose day this is. We know almost nothing about them. Their names come to us from a source written more than a hundred years after Christ died. Scripture gives us the legal genealogy of Jesus through Joseph and says nothing about Mary’s parents at all. And yet we can read them backward out of their daughter: the steadiness at the Annunciation, the immediate journey to Elizabeth, the fidelity to the Law at the presentation, the woman who kept things and pondered them in her heart. That formation came from somewhere. It came from a household nobody wrote down.

That is a treasure hidden in a field if there ever was one. And it is the whole vocation of a grandparent, which is why the Church keeps the World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly on the fourth Sunday of July, right alongside this memorial. If you are a grandparent, you are doing the most consequential work of your life in a room where nobody is taking notes. Teach a grandchild to make the sign of the cross. Say a rosary out loud where they can hear you. Tell them what you believe and why, in plain words, once. You will very likely never see the harvest. Joachim and Anne didn’t see theirs either, and their daughter is the Mother of God.

If you are on the younger end of that exchange, call them. The perspective of someone who has already lived through the thing you are panicking about is a pearl, and it is available for the price of a phone call.

The net is in the water and the field has been surveyed. Ask God for the one thing worth asking for, and then go buy the field.

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Notes

1. The Navarre Bible: Joshua–Kings, Revised Standard Version with commentary (Dublin: Four Courts Press), note on 1 Kings 3:2-14, 425.
2. The Navarre Bible: Joshua–Kings, note on 1 Kings 3:15, 426.
3. The Navarre Bible: Joshua–Kings, note on 1 Kings 3:2-14, 425.
4. Roman Catechism 4, 10, 1, quoted in The Navarre Bible: Joshua–Kings, 426.
5. Isaac of Nineveh, Discourse 3, in Marco Conti, ed., 1-2 Kings, 1-2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament 5 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 14.
6. Ephrem the Syrian, On the First Book of Kings 3.12, in Conti, 1-2 Kings, 14.
7. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, chap. 13, lect. 4, no. 1187, Latin/English edition (Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2013).
8. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, chap. 13, lect. 4, no. 1189.
9. Gregory the Great, quoted in Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, chap. 13, lect. 4, no. 1191.
10. Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 183-84.
11. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, chap. 13, lect. 4, nos. 1193-95.
12. Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 207.
13. Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 207; Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 184.
14. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, chap. 13, lect. 4, no. 1197.
15. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, chap. 13, lect. 4, no. 1198.
16. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, chap. 13, lect. 4, no. 1200.
17. Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 184.
18. Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew, chap. 13, lect. 4, nos. 1204, 1206.
19. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 546.