Trading Heaven On the Open Market

17th Sunday of the Year

The parables in today's Gospel describe the 'value' of the Kingdom of Heaven: the treasure buried in the field, the pearl of great price. These images, no doubt, were evocative among those to whom Jesus preached, those who lived on and off the land; and for the vast majority of Christian history, they inspired many to set the world at naught to win so great a prize. Living today, however, we must ask whether the market has shifted: do people still 'value' heaven as precious and costly? Is there any worth left in heaven at all? Does anyone still consider heaven valuable?

I'd propose that we often answer these questions too optimistically. Perhaps we like to think that everyone out there still wants heaven so that we feel better for going through all the fuss of religion ourselves. But if you were to ask people, bluntly, whether they want to go to heaven or not, I think the answer you'd receive would not be 'yes' or 'no', but a cold shrug, an indifferent 'what does that matter?'. On the stock market of what people value today, heaven doesn't sit at zero — it's not even traded at all.

Assessing honestly and accurately heaven's value in the current market makes all the difference in how we bring people to want it for themselves. On the one hand, in previous generations, you could scare people away from sin by, literally, instilling the fear of God in them. In preaching, this would take the form of warnings of hellfire and brimstone, with much fist-pounding against the pulpit. Think: Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" or, in the Catholic tradition, the visions of hell had by saints like Jean Vianney and John Bosco which inspired many of their sermons. On the other hand, and in other generations, a pious reflection on the joys of heaven would have gone far to rouse people to strive for it. Pier Giorgio Frassati encouraged young people with his motto, 'Verso l'alto!' – to the heights! – to move them up toward heaven.

Both approaches have their intrinsic merits and were effective in their own time, but to the average non-believer on the street today, warning them of the pains of hell or the loss of heaven won't get you very far. First, because our modern, material-focused world is totally closed-off to the supernatural, and heaven and hell are very much supernatural realities. But also, and I think more importantly, people's experience of reality is just, generally, pretty terrible. Mental unwellness and trauma are significant factors in most people's existence today. For the person who struggles just to get out of bed in the morning, how much worse could the pains of hell really be? And how can painting a pretty picture of heaven, complete with chubby cherubs laying on clouds looking dazingly at God, not be construed as what Marx called 'the opiate of the people': the pleasant, fanciful lie we tell ourselves to get through the agony of human living?

On the positive side, what's out there that promises relief is, to be honest, pretty great, at least at first. Few people are wise enough to recognize, or strong enough to admit, that wealth, pleasure, fame, or power (all of things for which Solomon is praised for not asking) won't do a thing to make them less miserable; but plenty will indulge in them when reality becomes too unbearable, and they will give enough of a reprieve to make them attractive again the next time. We've all been there often enough ourselves to understand the appeal, so why do we think our tired, worn-out, and outdated admonitions will do any good? Heaven, as it's weighed in people's estimation, just isn't all that valuable. For us, it may well indeed be the pearl of great price and the treasure buried in the field, but for the rest it's a meaningless concept, an empty promise, an illusion that wiser minds should leave aside.

Is, then, the proclamation of the kingdom of heaven a worthless endeavor? I don't think so (and I don't say that because otherwise I'd be out of a job). We just need to be intentional and careful about how we do it. The issue with those older forms of evangelizing is that they place the goal, the prize, at too far a distance from the present for anyone to care about it. But the 'kingdom of heaven' of which Jesus teaches is not only a reality to be enjoyed on the last day when we have, at last, left this vale of tears. Rather, Christ tells us elsewhere, "The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, 'Lo, here it is!' or 'There!' for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you" (Lk. 17:21). It is within you. The glory of which Paul writes to the Romans is not only our final destiny, something into which we will be changed, but the fruit of a transformation that is already taking place. Heaven is given to us even now, as a foretaste, in the midst of our woes, so that our earthly living bears the qualities, even if imperfectly, of the heavenly life for which we hope.

If the kingdom of heaven is to be proclaimed as an attractive, valuable prospect to this generation, it will be less the fruit of what we say than that of how we live. Christian living is not only for the sake of living with Christ in eternity but living in Christ even now. If people can see that there is a different way to live, a way of being-in-the-world that is not dominated by individualism and that overcomes the petty forms of argument with which the world is enthralled, then desire can be stoked, and they can be led to Christ in whom such living can be attained. But they need witnesses to know it's even possible and, even more, worth pursuing.

How we live matters, for it is by how we live that we preach Christ and his kingdom to the world. Our way of life describes the kind the kingdom in which we believe, and all that we say and do affects heaven's value on the market. When our life falls short of it, we do its share price no favors. When we live heroic, virtuous, and authentically Christian lives, then the kingdom re-gains its former value and can even increase beyond it. And just as in the natural order, no action or investment of ours, no matter how small, is irrelevant to moving the ticker in one direction or the other. All of its positive gain is the result of grace, but grace requires our cooperation. Christ employs us as stock-traders of his kingdom, to show the world the true value of the pearl of great price.

I believe with every ounce of my Christian faith that the kingdom of heaven can be proclaimed as a valuable enterprise. Its value has increased in my own accounting because of those who have shown me its true worth. May this Eucharist cause the kingdom to grow within us and make us its convincing heralds of its richness in the midst of a broken and impoverished world. 

Homily preached July 29/30, 2023 at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen and St. Thomas Aquinas, Hampden