Out of joy he sells all that he has and buys that field  

In seeking to see the nature and significance of religious profession, whether it be temporary or permanent, a common scriptural lens through which to look is two connected parables of the Kingdom spoken by Jesus in the 13th chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew. There we hear that “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.”(13:44-46). A typical way to make the connection with vowing to live in obedience, forgoing a family or privatized possessions, and remaining in a particular place while moving forward on the arduous road of conversion, is to interpret the relinquishments as a prelude to gaining the great grace-filled prize which others often cannot readily recognize. This is doubtless both legitimate and illuminating.

Yet there is another way we can read these parables that sheds light from a different angle. Recalling that ‘it is not we who have chosen him but he who has chosen us’, and mindful of how the Kingdom of Heaven is first initiated by the actions of the One who is King of both Heaven and Earth, we might flip the standard interpretive script so that Jesus himself is the primary actor in these parables. Then we ourselves, and indeed all human persons, are the treasure hidden in a field or the pearl of great price, which Christ has joyfully and heedlessly relinquished everything in order to have, divesting himself of the privileges of Divinity in order to hold and heal our broken humanity with a tenderness deeper than all trouble. And having purchased where we lie he cannot help but disinter us, eagerly moving heaven and earth back into alignment so that we might rise from the “grasp of the grave.” Such is the work of salvation, an awesome labor of love aided and abetted by our own cooperation with this regenerating but relentless extraction from entombment, as the human hands of God’s heart move away the accumulated mire of a world burdened and darkened by death and sin. Profession is a part of this process, a reaching for the presence extended by the Mystical Body into whatever confinement we remain inert and interred in, that we may take our true place in the Kingdom, brought back to life through the Spirit breathed into us by the Son.

Thus we are enabled to enact what is perhaps the epitomizing exhortation of St. Benedict’s rule, “to prefer nothing whatever to Christ”, who, (as the completion of the quote from Cyprian of Carthage points out) “did not prefer anything to us.” We reach for him who has first moved so radically towards us, speaking to the ear of our hearts words like those spoken to his friend Lazarus: Come out, come to me, come with me! May we continually respond, giving to our Incarnate God the delight of taking to himself the treasure he has given everything to have.          

Brother Andrew made his Simple Profession on Sunday, October 5 during Chapter.