"Again, the kingdom of
heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of
great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it”
Matthew
13:45-6
What is the most valuable
thing that you own?
At first it sounds like a
relatively simple question, and it perhaps wouldn’t be hard to think of the
answer in terms of some simple possession or perhaps an investment. It may be
that you have in fact answered one of those insurance questionnaires in which
you are asked to put a number of dollars next to each of your possessions, just
in case they are destroyed in fire or tempest, or in case they are seized by a
thief; and so you actually specifically know which is the most valuable item on
your list.
Is it your car perhaps?
Or some real estate – that investment property? Or a piece of jewelry you’ve
inherited?
Our most valuable
possession is our holiday house down the South Coast of NSW. And it is curious
how much time and money you have to spend to protect the value of your most
valuable possession; and indeed how much of your heart gets invested in it.
Being on the South Coast, the house sits on top of what is in effect an
enormous termite mound. And it is made of wood – all of it, except the nails,
pipes and window frames. So I recently spent money getting the thing inspected
for termites and other pests. It was with great fear and anxiety that I read
the report – which was basically all clear I am happy to say. For now. At night
I could swear I could hear the terrible chewing jaws of the monstrous termites
eating away at my treasure – and that’s from my bed in Newtown.
But the idea that value
is to be measured in monetary terms is very one-dimensional and neglects the
personal and human dimension of our attachments. What we value most are the
things that are beyond value; or the things that are not worth anything in and
of themselves but have become invested with a particular significance. They are
better described as ‘precious’. Recently, my parents moved out of a large
family home to a somewhat smaller residence. This meant trawling through all
the strange things that they had kept, like my stamp collection and my primary
school assignments. Now, these things have no dollar value at all. But they
were of value to me. In fact, for me, some of these things were irreplaceable
and incredibly precious. No doubt my descendants will throw them out in time.
More than that: when I
think of preciousness I think of, not the things I like, but the people I love:
my wife, my children. When someone in grief says ‘I would give anything to have
back the one I have lost’, it is not too hard to get the impact of what they
are saying. When a court tries to compensate a person for, say, the loss of
their spouse in an accident, we get something of the absurdity of even trying
to put a price on the loss.
In his parable of the
pearl, Jesus wants to us to think very deeply about what is precious to us.
Imagine a merchant. His business is perhaps the sale of fine jewels and luxury
goods.
And he’s in search of
fine jewels. Why? Because he is a merchant. He’s a businessman, looking to make
a profit. Perhaps we should think of him traveling as far as the Red Sea – a
location we know pearls were found in the 1st Century – in search of
his goods.
And make no mistake, he
is after the most precious jewel of the ancient world. This was at least the
opinion of the Roman author Pliny, writing in the 1st Century. The
historian Suetonius wrote that the Roman general Vitellius, emperor for 8
months in 69 AD, financed an entire military campaign by selling just one of
his mother's pearl earrings. Cleopatra is said to have dissolved one of her
pearl earrings in a glass of wine and drank it, just so she could win a bet
with Mark Anthony that she could consume the wealth of an entire country in a
single meal. Recounting the story (and no doubt exaggerating a bit, who
doesn’t?) Pliny estimated the value of the pair of pearls at 60 million
sesterces. It is impossible to say exactly what that means in today’s money,
but that an ordinary soldier would have been 1000 sesterces per annum puts it
in perspective. It is a phenomenal sum.
So this merchant is after
the kind of goods that might make him a very tidy profit, if he plays it right.
That’s his business.
But then he makes a
surprising discovery: a single pearl of very great value. And, finding this one
pearl of very great value, he does something rather odd: he goes out and sells
all he has to buy it..
It’s a slightly strange
moment, because we are led to think of him as a businessman, and it is unusual
for a wise businessman to confine his portfolio to a single product. It is an
inherently risky strategy from a commercial point of view, because he has concentrated
his entire wealth on this one object. He has made no contingency plan. It is
not as though he has found a bargain, either: Jesus doesn’t tell the story as
if he has found the pearl at the back of some antique shop somewhere in
Alexandria going for a few pieces of silver. This pearl is of great price, and
it costs the merchant everything he has.
You can imagine him
returning to his family after his business trip and trying to explain to his
wife why the family home and its contents is up for sale.
What has enticed him?
It is the pearl.
This single fine pearl
has hooked him. There’s something almost obsessive about his behaviour - as if
he has not simply found a way to make a fortune, but has fallen in love with
the jewel. It has become the thing he must simply possess, even if it destroys
him as a businessman and makes his family life extremely difficult.
His behaviour suggests
that the pearl is not simply a white rock, but a gem of extraordinary
fascination and beauty. That’s the interesting thing about precious stones;
they are valuable because of their rarity and because of their beauty. They
have no particular function that makes them valuable, at least not primarily.
They do not gain their worth because we can put them to use in the service of
some industry; they do not help us to feed a city, or to guarantee our health,
or to protect us from enemies. They don’t do
anything.
They just are. They are
simply compelling for their own sakes. Their value lies in the awe that they
create. And in this case, the single great pearl is so compelling that it makes
this merchant behave almost like a drug addict – with such singular focus that
it makes ordinary life almost completely impossible. Desire for the pearl has
completely taken over.
He reminds me of no-one
as much as Gollum. His pearl is his ‘precious’. We would think of him as an
unbalanced person - a man who has lost interest in everything except this one
pretty thing. What would he do with the pearl once he obtained it? Would he
keep it in his pocket, and just look at it when he was sitting on the train? Or
would give it to his wife to wear, knowing that it could fall out of a clasp or
off a chain and be lost forever?
This, says Jesus, is what
the kingdom of heaven is like.
Now, that should make us
think carefully. Notice in the first place that Jesus didn’t say that the
kingdom of heaven is like the pearl of great value, but that it is like the
merchant seeking the pearl of great value, and his actions when he finds it. I
don’t want to overstate the point: but it helps us to see that Jesus is directing
our attention not simply to the pearl but to the response the pearl gets from
the one who recognizes its beauty.
It isn’t the only
reference to searching and seeking we can think of in Matthew’s gospel of
course. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says ‘seek first the kingdom and its
righteousness’. Indeed, a theme of the Sermon on the Mount is that the place
where God rules in his justice and peace and righteousness is something that
you have to long for. It is given to those who look for it – those who hunger
and thirst for righteousness, those who ask, seek and knock. It is worth being
obsessive about. If we only knew what it was, we’d give up anything and
everything to be a part of it. Our whole understanding of the value and
significance of things would be transformed if only we knew how singularly
precious the kingdom of heaven is.
But the complication of
the parable for me is this: God’s grace comes for free but it costs you
everything you have.
How can this be?
Well we do need to
recognize the limits of the analogy in the parable. The merchant purchases the
pearl. It is expensive. A poor man would simply not have a chance in this
story. He has been priced out of the kingdom of heaven.
But that’s not what Jesus
is saying here. He is saying rather: the grace of God is free, but it is not
cheap. Our mental habit is to think of those things that don’t cost us anything
as not really worth having – as somewhat disposable. I know of instances where
people have put a dollar value on an event they were putting in just to give
the impression it was worth coming to – as a kind of mental trick.
The kingdom of heaven is
not disposable or even recyclable. It is not made of plastic. It is, like the
pearl, rare and beautiful. It is utterly compelling - to such a degree that if
you grasp it the right way, it will take over your life. ‘When Christ calls a
man’, said Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘he bids him come and die’. And that’s right.
But this is not sad news,
since the one who dies for the sake of Jesus and the gospel, the one who leaves
behind all he has, the one who hates her mother and brother even – that one is blessed. That one has in the kingdom of
heaven all that she has left behind, and more again.
Ah, we always want to
think of it in terms of the economics though. We think: well, then, isn’t this
actually selfish thinking? Isn’t seeking the treasure of the kingdom of heaven
simply a displaced form of greed? Isn’t it just self-interest, the result of a
sound calculation?
But the kingdom of heaven
is not simply a transaction. Remember the disturbing obsessiveness of the
merchant, that he loved the beautiful, singular pearl for its own sake, and not
for its usefulness. It was not a means to some end for him. It was simply
itself. So it is with the kingdom of heaven: to long for it, and to seek for it
is not to wish yourself rich. It is to long for God himself; and to long to
belong to the world where God’s peace, and justice, and righteousness are established
everywhere; and to long for the world finally bear the fruit that even now is
ripening. The kingdom of heaven is beautiful: and the significance of its
beauty is that to long for it is not to calculate your own selfish ends, but to
long to be part of its way of being. It is not to long to own it, but to long
to owned by it.
The kingdom of heaven is
valuable in just the way the people we love are precious to us. It is beyond
economics. And it is like this because in it God shows us, not his accounting
skills, but his costly love. Love is
what makes this treasure priceless. Since God himself out of his great love
gives himself to us freely in his
Son, then it makes sense that in response to him we give him ourselves.
This parable asks us to
remember that we here have a magnificent obsession. If we ‘get’ the kingdom of
heaven, then we should not be surprised to find that what we value and how we
count value are completely changed. We should be less surprised than we are at
the baffled stares of our family and friends.
We should be happier to
take risks with our worldly goods in light of our heavenly treasure. We should be
less concerned than we are to be socially acceptable and – worst of all - nice.
And we should never
forget that the proper complement to the free grace of God is to follow Christ
with everything we have. It is striking to me that Jesus’ parables of grace
aren’t simply about telling us that God freely forgives: they always point us
to the fact that truly grasping free forgiveness means having an utterly
altered life. We are not meant simply to be believers, but followers; or,
better, being a believer means being a follower.
And that is the gospel
you and I are called to preach. Have we got the nerve to preach it? Have we got
the guts not simply to offer people a salve to their consciences, but to show
them that no riches compare to the pearl of great price? Have we got the
courage to call people not simply to tick a box but to a whole new way of life?
Let us pray for God’s help.
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