TEXT: Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 26, 2026
July 26, 2026 Father De Celles Homily
17th Sunday Ordinary Time
July 26, 2026
Homily by Fr. John De Celles
St. Raymond of Peñafort Catholic Church
Springfield, VA
In today’s gospel, Jesus tells us,
“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.”
When Jesus speaks of the Kingdom, He means not just heaven itself,
but also the participation in heaven that takes place on earth,
the Church and the life of the Church.
And so, we see the Church as this treasure we discover, and Jesus tells us,
“Take it, accept it, buy it!”
Let’s work with this analogy a bit.
Notice Jesus calls it “a treasure buried in a field.”
He doesn’t say a “treasure chest” or a “bag of gold.”
So let your imagination picture what I picture when I read this:
I think of the discovery of not one but many treasure chests,
and each of those contains several jewelry boxes
stuffed with precious coins, gems, precious metals and jewelry.
This is the treasure of the Church, not really one thing,
but all the wonderful gifts that God gives to her.
Of course, the first and greatest gift is the gift of Himself,
but then He showers us with all these other riches that we rightly treasure.
So, in the treasure we discover a box filled with saints,
each a precious gem, but some so magnificent,
like the Blessed Mother and the Apostles and Magdalene,
that we stand in awe.
In another box we find angels,
then in another the Scriptures, and then Dogmas, Doctrines,
and so on.
Amazing, breath taking.
How rich we are in Christ!
But ever since the beginning of the Church,
people have tried to bury or steal or obscure these riches.
In the 1st century St. John and St. Paul warned us about
false prophets who were spreading “different gospels.”
St. John says,
“They are from the world;
therefore they speak from the world, and fthe world listens to them.
We are from God.”
Today we have the same problem,
especially as technology captures our attention and imagination
and creates artificial intelligence that increasingly replaces our own.
And there’s the explosion of communication that spreads
lies and false ideologies and dehumanizing morality
at the speed of light all over the world.
All of this creating of new artificial treasures, rooted in human frailty,
creates new false gods to worship.
But what does Christ tell us about the value of the artificial things of this world
when compared the true treasures that pour forth from the divine treasury?
In the parable today He says that when the man finds the buried treasure,
“Out of joy [he] goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.”
In other words, there is no comparison between the meager things of this world
compared to the treasures of the kingdom.
Now as I said, the treasure includes many treasure chests,
each containing several jewelry boxes
stuffed with all sorts of beautiful and priceless riches.
So, let’s open up one of those treasure chests, the one called “Sacraments.”
And from that chest we open one of the jewelry boxes called “The Eucharist.”
Of course, in that box we find the most sublime precious pearl of great price
called “the Body and Blood of Jesus.”
We find it placed in the center of a beautiful setting
of gold, diamonds, and rubies.
All these treasures we see in the Mass, with Jesus in the center,
and the treasury of music, rituals, prayers,
gestures, vestments, vessels,
Latin, Greek, and silence.
And none of these detract from the Blessed Sacrament at the center,
but compliment Him and emphasizing how wonderous It, or He, is.
Unfortunately, many people don’t appreciate this treasure
and try to bury it and forget about it.
Think of the Protestant schism that continues today:
Where is the beauty of the liturgy,
much less the sublimity of the Eucharist?
Sadly, some within the Catholic Church today are trying to do the same thing.
They dumb-down the language of the prayers and songs and rewrite the rituals
to appeal to “modern men and women.”
But they fail to appeal to angels and saints.
They try to make things relevant to young people,
but instead steal the treasures from their inheritance.
They try to bring the liturgy down to earth for the common man
instead of lifting the common man up to the beauty of heaven.
They manufacture liturgy rather than discover it
as a treasured gift handed down from God through the ages of the Church.
It’s like the difference between using a 3-D copier to manufacture a statue of Mary,
versus the divinely inspired Michelangelo creating the art of the Pieta.
The Mass becomes no longer “treasure buried in a field, which a person finds,”
but a trinket rolled off the assembly line.
Now let’s open another of those treasure chests, this one called “Moral Doctrine.”
Inside we find several jewelry boxes.
First let’s open the one called “Economic Principles.”
We open that one up and find many beautiful jewels.
First of all, the lustrous Commandments:
“Love thy neighbor as yourself.”
“You shall not steal…”
“bear false witness…”
“covet they neighbor’s goods.”
And then we find the virtues of temperance, self-discipline, industriousness, and diligence,
and the principles of the dignity of work, private property, just price,
subsidiarity, the common good, mercy, charity, generosity,
creativity and freedom.
Now, there has never been a perfect economic system in the world.
The only system officially accepted today by the Church is Capitalism,
as the Great St. John Paul II once wrote:
“If by ‘capitalism’ is meant an economic system
which recognizes the fundamental and positive role
of business, the market, private property,
and the resulting responsibility for the means of production,
as well as free human creativity in the economic sector.”
But then sinful people come along and replace divine wisdom with human pride,
and you find the introduction of systems that are corrupted by greed and theft,
such as, Crony-capitalism, oligarchic capitalism, Klepto-capitalism,
or narco-capitalism.
Or, on the other hand, we see the amazing resurgence today
of failed systems based on the corruption of envy and lies
such as Communism and Socialism.
All these have been condemned by the Church
as essentially rejecting the most beautiful and most valuable gems
in the divine treasure chest.
Now, let’s open one more box in that treasure chest of Moral Doctrine,
the box called “Sexual Morality.”
Some say that we spend too much time talking about this,
which is nonsense, because most Catholics know very little about it,
even though it is one of the richest and most beautiful
of all the treasures in the kingdom of God,
as it reveals the dignity and meaning of the human body,
and explains God’s plan for the gift of marriage and family.
It’s a beauty that is rooted in God’s own self-gift to man of His love and life.
Again, though, most people in the world today,
and even most people in the Church,
try to bury this treasure by ignoring it or purposefully misstating it.
They try to re-make sexuality,
changing it from a treasured heavenly gift
into a manmade, manipulated commodity,
with no more meaning than water or air,
and no more beauty than dirt or mud.
They take a diamond and crush it, mix it with sand and water,
and use it to pave the road to despair and hell.
They take gold, melt it down, and manufacture it into a gun and bullet
to bring pain, suffering and death.
No!
Behold the treasure!
Take the jewels and gold and form them into a crown, a ring, or a chalice.
Something beautiful, something lasting.
Something worthy as a gift to the beloved and to God.
I think of this particularly as 58 years ago today, on July 25, 1968,
Pope St. Paul VI issued his famous encyclical Humanae Vitae,
reiterating the apostolic teaching of the Church
on the procreation of human life.
This teaching is truly “a pearl of great price” in the great treasury of the Church,
and all mankind should know it and prize it.
And married couples should, as it were, “sell all that [they] have and buy it.
These are some of the vast treasures we find
when we dig into the teachings and the life of the Church,
the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
But some say, “That’s just old stuff,”
and argue that in the parable,
Jesus says we should “bring from his storeroom both the new and the old.”
They ask, “Why do you reject all this new stuff?”
The church does not reject things that are new just because they’re new.
But She does reject them if they are not from the treasure we find in that field
that God has shown us.
This is what Pope Benedict XVI called the “hermeneutic of continuity.”
That is, we can see one of the Church’s teachings from a new aspect,
but we must still see the same truth.
In other words, we can look at a diamond from a different angle and see a new facet,
but we must keep our eyes fixed on the same diamond.
But we can’t take a lump of dung, throw it in the treasure chest and call it a ruby.
It’s always been this way with the world and the Church.
Jesus told us this would happen:
“The kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea,
which collects fish of every kind.
When it is full they haul it ashore…
What is bad they throw away.
Thus it will be at the end of the age.
The angels will go out and separate the wicked from the righteous
and throw them into the fiery furnace.”
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As we now open the treasure chest of the Sacraments
and enter into the rich gems of the Holy Mass,
let us give thanks to the Lord for this and all the treasures of the kingdom.
And as we leave here today,
let’s not take that treasure for granted or waste it or bury it.
Rather, let us cherish it and share it with all we meet.
Because whether they know it or not,
all the world is searching for our pearl of great price.