Today we conclude listening to Jesus’ third sermon or discourse in Matthew and heard the last three of the seven parables in that chapter (Matt 13:44-52). The parables about finding treasure hidden in a field and finding a pearl of great value remind me of those who did not know Jesus and came to faith in him. The parable about the fishermen separating fish after a catch into good ones and those that have to be thrown away reminds us of the parable of the wheat and darnel we heard last Sunday about the end of time when the wheat and darnel are separated and the darnel burned (Matt 13:24-43).
A great example of finding the hidden treasure or the pearl of great value is St. Paul who found Jesus to be the fulfillment of his Jewish faith. He wrote in his letter to the Philippians that the advantages he thought he had for being Jewish were nothing compared to knowing Jesus:
Whatever gains I had, these I have come to consider a loss because of Christ. More than that, I even consider everything as a loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him. (Phil 3:7-9)
St. Paul brings home to us in a very concrete way that the hidden treasure in the parable is Jesus himself. Jesus is the one and only treasure. Everything else fades by comparison. We have been privileged to know Jesus from childhood but some people find Jesus later in life. For them, finding Jesus is like finding the hidden treasure and the pearl of great value.
In 2004, I attended a conference on Judaism and Catholicism in Washington, DC. Many of the attendees were Jewish people who had found Jesus and became Catholic. Every speaker began their presentation by briefly telling us about their journey to find Judaism fulfilled in Catholicism. One of the speakers was Roy Shoeman and his account is also one chapter of a book he edited: Honey from the Rock: Sixteen Jews find the Sweetness of Christ. His parents fled from the Holocaust eventually finding themselves in New York where he was born and raised Jewish. He was a devout Jew and thought that 2,000 years ago Jesus had watered down or mongrelized Judaism. Unfortunately, due to the influence of culture and college life, he ended up living fifteen years in what he called hedonistic agnosticism though he did well in the ways of the world, becoming a professor at Harvard Business School. He wrote, “Anything I tried, whether a career switch or a romantic relationship, only produced a momentary illusion of purpose that soon faded, leaving me with the desperate sense that there must be something more.” (Honey from the Rock p278)
God used everything in his life to bring him to Him. When he was skiing on the Alps, the beauty of the Alps made him aware of the presence of God for the first time in many years. One morning when walking on a beach in Cape Cod, he had an experience of God. He found himself looking at his life after his death. He saw everything he would be happy about and everything he would wish he had done differently. He wrote, “I saw that everything that had ever happened to me, especially those things that had seemed the worst disasters at the time—the things that had caused the most suffering—had been the most perfect things that could have been arranged for me by the hand of an all-knowing, all-loving God.” (Honey from the Rock p280) He saw that his two greatest regrets when he would die would be wasting time worrying about not being loved because God loved him every moment, and wasting time not doing anything of value in the eyes of heaven. In a sense, he experienced personally the third parable in the Gospel today—at the end of time the good fish being kept and the others being thrown away, or the parable last Sunday, the wheat and the darnel.
He prayed there and then to know God’s name; he didn’t mind if it were Buddha and he would have to become Buddhist, Krishna and he would have to become Hindu, Apollo and he would have to become a Roman pagan, so long as it was not Christ and he would have to become Christian! God didn’t reveal his name then. He went back to his routine but was now happy. Visiting someone, he saw a book on the coffee table The Hundred Greatest Miracles of Modern Times and looking through it he saw about Fatima and the miracle of the sun and was angry that he had never heard about it because his constant complaint in Hebrew school was why God performed miracles in the Old Testament but no longer.
A year to the day after his experience of God in Cape Cod, Our Lady came to him and from that moment he was in love with Our Lady and knew he had to be a Christian. He didn’t know the difference between Protestants and Catholics and went to a Protestant church. When he asked the pastor about Our Lady and received a disrespectful answer, he knew that was not the place for him. He went to Marian shrines. He went to Masses and experienced a desire to receive the Blessed Sacrament though he did not know what it was. His love of Our Lady and his desire to receive the Eucharist led him into the Catholic Church in 1992. The more complete account of his journey to Catholicism in Honey from the Rock is fascinating.
Roy Shoeman is fortunate to have found the hidden treasure and pearl of great value. May all others who are searching also find Jesus.
The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure
buried in a field,
which a person finds and hides again,
and
out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant
searching for
fine pearls. When he finds a pearl of great price,
he goes and
sells all that he has and buys it. (Matt 13:44-46)
© Fr. Tommy Lane 2026
This homily was delivered in a parish in Ireland.
More Homilies for the Seventeenth Sunday Year A
Jesus and Mary our treasure 2023
God turns everything to good for those who love him 2011
Second Reading Related: Homilies on turning everything to good
Finding the treasure and pearl: conversion to Catholicism