In the Holy Land one can buy all sorts of souvenirs. Some visitors return home with a bottle of some perfume which they were told was like the one which Mary of Bethany, as the Gospel tells us, used to anoint Jesus’ feet. The Gospel tells us that she brought ‘an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard.’ To test the authenticity of the perfume a simple question can be asked: ‘How much did you pay for this perfume?’ If the cost was equal to the year worth salaries it makes sense to investigate the authenticity of the perfume further. Otherwise the perfume isn’t worth even of the space it takes in the luggage.
I realise that these words may disappoint some who spent ten dollars on the fake perfume but can you imagine how disappointed Judas was when he saw what Mary did? He would need to work for a year, without eating, drinking and paying rent, to save up for such perfume. His disappointment revealed two things about him. Firstly, he was good at calculating the worth of material things. Secondly he was hopeless at calculating the value of spiritual, divine things.
            My Dear Sisters and Brothers! The First Reading for today, taken from the Book of Kings, gave us some useful prayer which the young King Solomon prayed. Please listen to the prayer again: ‘Give your servant a heart to understand how to discern between good and evil.’ This is a prayer which can turn our mentality up side down. It does so because we tend to associate understanding with our mind not heart. We also perceive that heart is for love and not for such an ‘unromantic’ thing like discerning. A singer even sung: ‘I know, the heart does not obey orders.’ If it were true there wouldn’t be any silver or golden jubilees of marriage. If it were true there wouldn’t be people like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Maximilian Kolbe and many other known and unknown saints. Just imagine how sad and disappointing our world would be. Our Father in heaven doesn’t want us to live in such a world that’s why he has given us this prayer for ‘a heart to understand how to discern between good and evil.’ Our Father in heaven has given us also the Holy Spirit so that we could delight in good, so that the Psalm 118 which we prayed between our Readings today could become the prayer coming from the depth of our soul: ‘I love your commands more than finest gold. Your will is wonderful indeed; therefore I obey it. The unfolding of your word gives light and teaches the simple.’
            When Mary of Bethany anointed the feet of Jesus she acted like the people in the first two short parables we heard this Sunday: someone who found treasure hidden in a filed and a merchant finding a beautiful pearl. These two people gave up all they had in order to get the treasure and the pearl. However all those passages of the Gospel cannot be explained by the practical mind of Judas or the emotional approach of the singer I have mentioned. The passages bring us into the discerning heart of Mary, the treasure seeker and the pearl merchant. It is the heart which finds that Jesus is good. He is good to us indeed but he is also the goodness himself. He is worth of all we are and have. He is worth of every effort we make to live life which is all about following him. If following him doesn’t cost us something is wrong. We are like the people coming from the Holy Land with a ten dollar bottle of perfume thinking that they have something authentic.

            From my childhood home I remember a framed picture of Jesus walking with his disciples through a filed of wheat. The picture has been lost but as I have grown up a question has been coming back to me: Was it a picture of a past event or a present one?
In the Gospel we find a passage showing Jesus walking with his disciples through fields of wheat while his hungry disciples were picking the ears of wheat and eating them. We even know that it happened on Saturday which was a Sabbath day. Thus we could say that the picture I mentioned captures something which did happen two thousand years ago when Jesus lived in the Holy Land.
However the Gospel for this Sunday, and the Gospel for last Sunday as well, reveals to us the mystery of Christ which extends beyond the boundaries of the Holy Land and the timeframe of his life there two thousand years ago. This mystery Christ illustrated through the two parables about the sower and the seed. He is the sower. In the parable we heard last Sunday he explained that the seed was his Holy Word which came to different kinds of people symbolized by different kinds of soil. In the Gospel today our blessed Lord speaks about the seed which are the people of his kingdom. The seed, his Holy Word as we heard last Sunday, makes a miracle that those who welcome it like the fertile ground become the seed themselves. They have been so transformed that there is no difference between what Christ proclaims and what they practice. ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field.’ Thus the picture I mentioned before can be seen as what is happening before our very eyes. Christ the Lord walks through the filed of our own world. The picture reveals a present event as well.
My Dear Sisters and Brothers! The parable Jesus told us today is not idealistic. It captures the reality of evil present in our midst. Something we struggle to come to terms with. As Jesus explains to us evil is no by-product of what God has created. It is the result of the action of the evil one. Jesus also reminds us that evil is no abstract. Evil is not something which circulates in the air. Evil becomes apparent in the people who accept the lure of devil and allow it to posses them. ‘While everybody was asleep his enemy came, sowed darnel all among the wheat, and made off.’ The darnel is weed which at the beginning looks like wheat. Only after some time of growing they can be told apart. However even when the people who have been lured by the evil one are identified Jesus forbids removing them. This will be the task of his angels at the time of harvest when he returns is his glory to judge the living and the dead. The task of his Church now is to heal the darnel so it may not only resemble the good seed but to become good seed too. The medicine comes from two other short parables we have heard today.
The first parable was of a mustard seed which ‘is the smallest of all the seeds.’ However when ‘it has grown it is the biggest shrub of all and becomes a tree so that the birds of the air come and shelter in its branches.’ Two thousand years ago on the Golgotha a small mustard seed was planted. It was the cross onto which the Son of God was nailed. Such an insignificant carpentry item. Definitely it didn’t resemble some other work of human hands like the Great Wall of China which can be seen from the space. It was the cross on which there was barely room for one person. However this cross has grown in a mysterious way. Over millennia generations of people who have suffered physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, morally, etc. have been turning to this cross of Jesus on which there is room for everyone. I call you who are listening today: turn to this cross of Jesus too. There is room for you too. Believe in the redeeming power of the one who was hung upon it.
The second parable was of ‘the yeast a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour till it was leavened all through.’ When the dead body of Jesus was taken down from the cross some good people placed it in the tomb of Nikodemus. However through their act of kindness the invisible but merciful hand of the Heavenly Father was at work. The Heavenly Father, like that woman from the parable, placed the Body of his Son in the history of humankind and in the history of every woman and man. This Body in God’s plan was not placed in the tomb to decompose but to be the leaven. When the Lord Jesus rose from the dead on the third day he began leavening those individuals and communities which welcome him.
Some time ago I came across a loaf of bread on which was written that some thirty-year-old leaven was used to make it. I am aware that some bread makers boast using leaven which is even older. Two thousand years ago God has placed in the midst of humankind leaven which was eternal. It was his Son Jesus Christ. I call you who are listening today: Believe that the Lord Jesus has risen. Accept this Good News of his Resurrection so that you too and our community can be ‘leavened all through.’ We will be leavened by leaven which comes from the Holy Trinity. We will be leavened by this leaven to have in us the life eternal.
The picture of Christ walking through fields of wheat… What a powerful and lifegiving picture it is!

            A person after hearing the Gospel passage which we have just heard asked: ‘Why did Jesus say that people who are like a path are wrong? What’s wrong with a path? If we didn’t have paths or roads it would make our life difficult.’
            What that person said is a proper reaction to a parable, and what Jesus told in the Gospel about the sower was a parable. A parable aims at triggering some questions in us. Even if at first the questions may be far away from the core of the parable they can be the beginning of a personal and spiritual journey leading to the core of what Jesus said.
            My Dear Sisters and Brothers! There is nothing wrong with a path or a road providing they are in the right place. However Jesus spoke about the Word of God which he scatters like a sower scatters seeds. What do sowers expect from the seeds they sow? They expect and hope for an abundant harvest. This is the expectation and hope of our Blessed Lord too. He expects that each one of us, and our faith community, can be like rich soil where his word, his Good News, his Gospel, can become life giving word rather than a piece of literature. That’s why the Lord Jesus keeps sowing his word so abundantly that he could be called prodigal. There is a parable of the prodigal son who wasted all he received from his father. However it was the father who was prodigal. He not only gave a lot to his younger son but even after the boy had wasted it all he didn’t hesitate to welcome him back to the family and its wealth. Similarly Jesus Christ appears to be prodigal in his sowing activity. Should we be surprised? Like Father like Son. Jesus sows not only where the soil is rich but he sows where it is hard like a path and rocky and overgrown with weeds. What a waste! - our profit focused mind would say. However Jesus who speaks about a crop of thirty, sixty and hundredfold wants to evoke in us the desire to become the soil so rich that it can yield such a crop. Jesus is prepared to ‘waste’ a lot to convert us into rich soil.
Therefore he keeps sowing because only his word, his Good News, his Gospel can heal us in such a way that our hardness which shields us like the surface of a path can be cracked. He keeps sowing because only his word, his Good News, his Gospel can heal us in such a way that our patches of rock, our shallowness can be converted into deep Christian faith. He keeps sowing because only his word, his Good News, his Gospel can heal us in such a way that the thorns in us: our worries of this world and the lure of riches can be removed.
How merciful our Lord is! His word, his Good News, his Gospel which has been treasured and loved and passed on from one generation of believers onto next is still this seed which enables good and holy souls, who are like rich soil, to yield a great harvest, to fill the world with good deeds, thoughts and desires. The same word of Christ converts others, who are not ready yet, into rich soil. You can be assured that this treasure of God’s word will never run out.
I began this homily with a query of a person. It wasn’t simply to provide an answer but to encourage each of you to voice your own questions and reactions to what you hear at Mass or what comes out of your personal prayer or reading the Bible. Searching for answers and reaching out to your fellow believers to hear their insights makes you deeper in faith. The deeper you are in faith the richer soil you are.

            Fyodor Dostoevsky, a nineteenth century Russian novelist, wrote a book Notes from Underground. In the book the main character meets a scientist who tries to convince him that in a hundred years everything will be explained by science, that everything will be as clear as ‘two times two equals four.’ The man from underground whispers under his breath: ‘two times two equals four, two times two equals four.’ Then he asks himself: ‘What else will I do in such a world?’
            My Dear Sisters and Brothers! I remembered that page from the Dostoevsky’s book when I read the Gospel for today in which ‘Jesus exclaimed: I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children.’ The mere children here are not defined by their age but by their attitude to life. This attitude is all about their inquisitive mind which, by the way, should be the main characteristic of science. Let me give you an example of such a mere child with an inquisitive mind. It is Fr Michal Heller a theologian, physicist, astronomer who once met Richard Dawkins an ethologist, evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist. In the course of their conversation Dawkins said that God is not needed because everything can be explained by laws of physics. Then Fr Heller asked: ‘Where do the laws of physics come from?’ As he said later: ‘It was the end of our conversation.’
These days we know more then people did in the nineteenth century when Dostoevsky wrote his books. These days people know more then people did when Jesus walked the Holy Land. However I feel that I should bless Jesus’ Father and our Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that he still blesses our era with godly people, these mere children who may be annoying to some learned and clever because they keep asking the unsettling questions like Dostoevsky did in his book and Fr Heller did in his conversation with Dawkins. These questions come from them sensing that that our human world is bigger than what the laws of physics tell us or that two times two equals four.
In the Gospel Jesus points out to the fundamental source of knowledge. To reach this source we need to return to the first reading from the Book of the Prophet Zechariah from the Old Testament. Zechariah wrote about a king who would enter the City of Jerusalem riding a donkey. We recognise in Zechariah’s description a prophesy which was fulfilled on Palm Sunday when Jesus entered Jerusalem riding a donkey. Both the prophesy and its fulfilment indicate the humility of the king. We need such humility to be brave to ask big questions and to be openminded to accept the answers which may turn upside down our world and our knowledge. Over centuries the human world and knowledge have been turned upside down by various discoveries in different fields of science. Let’s remember that this is God’s revelation too. Gradually God has been revealing to humanity through the findings of scientists the mysteries of the world he created. Our God, our heavenly Father is not greedy, he doesn’t keep from us the knowledge which can benefit us.
However there is something which God has revealed through Jesus Christ. This revelation is that he is the Father of Jesus Christ and that he is our Father. If we think about the first and the most fundamental discovery every woman and man make it is that there is someone whom they can call mummy and someone whom they can call daddy. We don’t need sophisticated laboratories and extensive studies to discover this. It is revealed to us by the presence of these special people in our life. What Jesus reveals through his teaching and through his ministry is not limited to the fact that there is God in heaven. Jesus reveals that this God is yours and my Father.
Let us listen again to his prayer, to his conversation with God which we could hear in today’s Gospel. First Jesus says: ‘I bless you, Father.’ This is the foundation of what we need to know about God. God is our Father. Next Jesus says: ’Lord of heaven and of earth.’ God is Lord of heaven and earth but he is Lord of heaven and earth as Father.
My Dear fellow children of God! It is obvious that we live in the society which is secular and overwhelmed by science which isn’t seen as something what God keeps revealing to his children. We may ask ourselves the question which whispered the man from Dostoevsky’s book: ‘What else will I do in such a world?’ I believe that there is an exciting mission ahead of us. Not just to prove that there is God but to do what Jesus has done: to speak out that there is God who is our Father. That our world is not just determined by laws of physics but by the law of love of the Father who was at the beginning of it all and who by his loving providence nurtures us. Thus we discover a different warmth in this world. It is the warmth of the love of the Father.
With gratitude for having been given this revelation of having God as our Father I invite you pray with our heavenly Brother Jesus Christ the prayer from the Gospel: ‘I bless you Father, Lord of heaven and earth.’