When one of our sons was three, we took him to the store so he could buy a toy he'd been saving for. He knew exactly what he wanted and had saved enough money. So we walked in, got the toy, and took it to the cash register. Everything seemed to be going well until the cashier took his carefully-saved money. Then he fell apart, and started yelling "she took my money!" We had explained, in advance, how it was going to work and he had agreed, but when the moment arrived, it was a very difficult choice to make. He really did want the toy, and in the end he paid for it; but for awhile it wasn't clear what was going to happen.
This is often a difficult lesson to learn: that in order to get something we want, we have to give up something else. Even accepting a free gift involves letting go of whatever is in our hands at the moment to make room for the gift. I've known many people who say they want to follow Jesus Christ, but when it comes to Sunday morning aren't willing to give up the extra sleep they want, or the opportunity to spend the whole day in recreation. "I have to go back to work on Monday; I really need this time for myself." As I talk to pastors, I get the impression that this is a growing problem in our culture; a significant number of people in our churches, who think of themselves as serious believers, only attend corporate worship an average of one or two Sundays a month. And, for the most part, these people never grow to spiritual maturity, because they're not willing to give up very much for the sake of God's kingdom. Others maybe attend worship regularly but aren't willing to set aside any time to cultivate God's presence. They wish, at times, that they had a stronger relationship with God, but when it comes down to it they're not willing to give up any of their time to bring that about. This is a hard lesson, that in order to get something we want, we have to give up something else. It's one thing to struggle with this problem when we're three years old; at that point it's a simple issue of development and maturity. But if we go on year after year holding tenaciously to the things we already have, unwilling to part with any of our treasures (things like time, recreation, or work), there's something more serious going on.
These two parables point us in the right direction. They both make the same point: when we see the value of God's kingdom, we will joyfully lay aside everything that stands in the way of possessing it. In the first parable, a man stumbles across a treasure buried in a field. It was common in the ancient world to hide money and other valuables in this way. There weren't any banks, and with bandits as well as frequent enemy invasions, it wasn't safe to hide anything with significant value in the house. Many treasures were lost in this way; maybe the people died or were taken into exile by invaders before they could dig it up. No doubt over time some just lost track of the exact spot and were unable to ever recover their treasure. Even today, some are being dug up in Palestine (Robert Mounce, Matthew, pp. 134-35).
So this man finds one of these lost buried treasures in a field, and because he doesn't own the field, he immediately hides it again then goes out and sells all he has and buys the field (which, then, makes the treasure his). Some people get bogged down at this point by the question of whether what this man did was ethical or not, and they're so bothered by that problem that they miss the whole point of the parable. A parable is a story that makes a particular point; it's not saying, "go out and do this," but rather "here is a picture that tells us something important about the kingdom of heaven." If we get stuck on the ethical problem of whether this man should have done things differently or not, we're likely to miss what the parable is saying. The point of the parable is that this man was so pleased with this treasure he had found that he joyfully parted with everything he had in order to possess it. The second parable says the same thing in a different way. A merchant is traveling from place to place, looking for fine pearls, and in his travels he discovers one of such value that he sells everything he has in order to buy it. These parables are saying, the kingdom of heaven is of such worth that when we see the truth about it we'll gladly part with anything that stands in the way of possessing it.
The first thing to notice is that the motivation for this sacrifice is not guilt, or a sense of duty, but a realization of the exceeding value of the treasure. Notice the phrase, in verse 44, "in his joy." This isn't a picture of someone who says, "I don't like this one bit, but I'm going to do it anyway because it's the right thing to do." I talked to one man, several years ago, who was just as concerned as I was about the current trend of sporadic church attendance. "My mother taught me to be in church every Sunday," he said. That was a good thing, to learn the habit of dragging himself to church whether he felt like it or not. But there was something lacking. He wasn't able to get beyond the idea of doing the right thing, doing his duty. There was no joy in it, and in the end he wasn't any more spiritually mature than the people who only attended half the time.
Neither of these parables is about the benefits of sacrifice. The point is not, "it's good for you to give up something; it'll make you into a better person." They're not laying down a legal obligation, saying, "if you do this you'll be saved." Neither of the characters in these parables is being dragged kicking and screaming; they are joyfully parting with everything they have because they're so taken with the wonder of this treasure they've discovered. They're like the apostle Paul, when he tells the Philippians, "Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord" (3:7-8). Not, "I've come to see the worthlessness of everything I previously valued." He's making a comparison. Everything now seems insignificant compared to "the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord." We have a hymn chorus that says the same thing: "turn your eyes upon Jesus; look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace." It's not that the things of earth are worthless; it's that the wonder of who Jesus is causes them to fade by comparison: "I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord."
The second thing is that not everyone discovers the value of God's kingdom in the same way. We need to be careful about making too much of the details of a parable. Usually a parable makes one major point, and the surrounding details may or may not be applicable. It's usually a mistake to look for a hidden meaning in every aspect of the story; but it's also a mistake to go to the other extreme and say, "every parable is only saying one thing." The New Oxford Annotated Bible has a good balance: "In general the teaching of a parable relates to a single point, and apart from this the details may, or may not, have a particular meaning" (note on Matthew 13:1-52).
Having said that, there's an instructive difference in these two stories: the first man stumbles across a treasure he wasn't seeking, while the second man finds something he's been diligently looking for. The important thing is not how we discover the treasure of God's kingdom but how we respond to that discovery. The characters in these two parables make their discoveries in very different ways, but they both make exactly the same response. People come into God's kingdom in a wonderful variety of ways, sometimes in ways that make no sense at all to us.
One of my favorite evangelism stories is about one of the leaders in Operation Mobilization, a man with an exceptional gift in evangelism. One day, when he was still a student in Bible College, he was out with a group of friends witnessing to people in Chicago. At the end of the day they were traveling in a van on their way back to their dormitory and he saw a man standing at a bus stop. Something about the man caught his attention and as the van went by he leaned out of the window, yelled "read this, it's really important," and threw him a booklet. Six months later, he was visiting a church in Chicago and a man stood up to give his testimony about how he came to Christ. The man began, "well, it's really a strange story; about six months ago I was standing at a bus stop, deeply depressed, when a guy threw me a booklet from a van...." St. Augustine was converted by a voice coming over the wall saying, "take up and read." He never knew where the voice came from, whether it was the voice of God or of an angel, or if it was someone speaking words intended for someone else. But God spoke to Augustine through those words; he knew beyond any doubt that God was calling to him and he picked up his Bible, read, and was converted to Christ. People come into God's kingdom frequently in surprising ways; we need to allow them to follow a path that's different from the one we've followed. The important thing is not how we come to the realization that God's kingdom is a treasure that exceeds everything else we have; the important thing is how we respond to that realization.
The third thing is that receiving God's kingdom means, of necessity, laying aside all the other things that are competing for first place in our affections. You may ask, "but isn't salvation a free gift?" Yes, it is, but we can't receive it if our hands are full. We can't receive the gift if there's no room for it in our lives. We need to be careful about taking those passages that stress that salvation is a free gift and separating them from their context in the New Testament. Jesus says, "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth.... For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" (Matthew 6:19, 21). Just a little later, He goes on: "No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth" (v. 24). God offers us, freely, an unspeakable treasure in the gospel; but in order to receive it, we need to lay aside our other treasures to make room for it. If we grasp for everything, like our popular culture encourages us to do, we'll end up with nothing in the end. That's the point of Jesus' words: "Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it" (Matthew 10:39). Listen to this verse in The Message: "If your first concern is to look after yourself, you'll never find yourself. But if you forget about yourself and look to me, you'll find both yourself and me."
St. Augustine spent his early life running from God. His mother was a Christian, and she prayed fervently for him. But he was over thirty by the time he turned to Christ. Looking back on his life, he didn't say, "thank God I had all that time to myself before I became a Christian, before I had to give up so many things that I enjoyed." He didn't say, "well, you know, it's not so bad; I was able to do all those things I wanted to do when I was young, so now I can lay that all aside and diligently follow the path of duty." When he looked back, he saw that the loss was not in turning to Christ, but in persisting so long in resisting Him. He was grieved, not in what he had to give up, but that he had lived so many years in alienation from God, the source of all good.
Here's what he says, looking back: "Too late have I loved you, O Beauty, ancient yet ever new. Too late have I loved you! And behold, You were within, but I was outside, searching for You there - plunging, deformed amid those fair forms which You had made. You were with me, but I was not with You. Things held me far from You, which, unless they were in You did not exist at all. You called and shouted, and burst my deafness. You gleamed and shone upon me, and chased away my blindness. You breathed fragrant odors on me, and I held back my breath, but now I pant for You. I tasted, and now I hunger and thirst for You. You touched me, and now I yearn for Your peace" (The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. Hal M. Helms, Book X, 27). In Christ, he found a treasure that exceeded his wildest imaginations, and he looked back with sorrow on the years he'd wasted fleeing from Eternal Beauty. When he saw the truth, he gladly parted with all his treasures and spent the rest of his life making room to welcome Christ into every area of his life.
Why do we grasp so tenaciously for our treasures? Why are we so unwilling to part with them (and I'm not thinking here only of material possessions, but also of things like time, work and recreation)? St. Augustine gives us a good answer at the beginning of his Confessions: "You awake us to delight in Your praise; for You made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You" (Book I, 1). God had made us for Himself, and our hearts are restless, filled with longing and a sense of incompleteness. So we try to fill our hearts with the things of this world; it feels threatening to think of letting go of them. But when we use created things in this way, they dull our hearts and keep us from seeing the beauty of Christ. And they never quite do what we're hoping for. They always disappoint us on some level.
The answer is to cultivate an awareness of the "unsearchable riches of Christ" (Ephesians 3:8). We're not called to give up things just for the sake of doing without. The two men in these parables didn't sell all their possessions because they wanted to be free from the constraints of earthly life or because they had decided to wander the world in search of the divine. They sold all they had because they had found a treasure that exceeded their wildest imaginations. They had found a treasure which led them to joyfully part with everything they had. The emphasis is not on what they gave up, but on what they found. Our need is not to empty our lives for the sake of being empty, but to make room for Christ. If we do that, we won't look back years from now and say, "Oh, I wish I hadn't parted with all my treasures." We'll find ourselves saying, with St. Augustine, "You gleamed and shone upon me, and chased away my blindness. You breathed fragrant odors on me, and I held back my breath, but now I pant for You. I tasted, and now I hunger and thirst for You." Or with the Apostle Paul: "Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord."
