17th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
THE HIDDEN TREASURE ‘
The only safe repository for your money is the earth’, according to the wisdom of the ancient rabbis. So it was, that people often hid valuables in the earth and the practice was not confined to the Holy Land. We have only to think of our Irish monks who routinely buried their treasure in the face of attacks from invaders. So when Jesus presented the parable of ‘The Hidden Treasure’, His listeners would have clearly understood the image He was using. He was inviting them to go deeper. The treasure is God and to find Him we need to dig as the man in the parable did. He made his discovery during a day’s work on the farm. God reveals Himself in the commonplace. He walks with us in the ‘theatre of the ordinary’. ‘When you see God in small things, you will see Him in all things’. The treasure is near, then and our hearts will always be restless until we unearth it. We need to dig deeper, to ponder, to tune-in, to look beneath the surface of things, to search in unlikely places… Did you ever watch ‘The Antiques Roadshow’? .