"Radical Stories, Radical Christianity:
The Treasure and The Pearl"
Matthew 13:44-46
January 21, 2006

After a couple of weeks of exploring fairly lengthy parables during this sermon series on
“Radical Stories, Radical Christianity,” and with each of these earlier two parables, the
ones about the sower, and the other about the weeds and wheat, having an
explanation provided by Jesus himself, one of which seems to be somewhat tongue and
cheek, we now arrive at the complete opposite when it comes to parables on this
particular Sunday.  The other two earlier parables were long and the explanations
given by Jesus were detailed, but today we have two very short parables, with no
explanations of them from Jesus at all.  But, of course, that lack of explanation is what
Jesus had wanted in the first place—he didn’t want to give the answers to the quiz, so
to speak, because teasing out those answers for ourselves was really a lot of the point
in telling those stories to us in the first place.  The searching for the answers or even
answers was part of the journey that Jesus wanted to place before his disciples, and,
frankly before us as well.  

You know, I’ve actually enjoyed being guided by Jesus’ interpretations of his own
stories, though its been interesting struggling with those explanations because even
the clarifications are never simple—they never quite fully explain things, or you never
quite know whether he’s completely serious in his clarification: last week was one of
those moments where he probably threw us for a loop, giving his earliest disciples what
they wanted to hear, hoping that one day they would dig a little deeper into the parable
he had just told them about some wheat and weeds growing together in a field.  But
today, we get no explanations from Jesus:  we just get two sharp, quick parables, full of
life, with people on the move, doing the extraordinary, and maybe even the unethical, in
order to get what they wanted: treasure hidden in a field, the greatest and most
beautiful pearl.  And again, its important to remember that what seems so simple is not
so simple, and certainly not so obvious.  Why we would think that the parables are easy
to understand, when, in fact, Jesus tells them in order to remind us that the God we
think know, the God we think we understand, the God we think we’ve got in a neat box,
is still as mysterious and intriguing as we humans are, sometimes?  The radicalism of
these stories is that they unhinge us from our presumptions about who we think this
God is that this Jesus speaks of, and I think part of the journey in listening to the
ancient stories of the Christ is to be reminded of how much we don’t know about God
as much as it is to give us a clue about what this God might be like and what God would
have us to do to help bring about this kingdom of God that Jesus seems to be
obsessing about bringing about in this world.  

When I was in high school, my first job was bagging groceries at a local grocery store
chain like Hardings here in town, but near the end of my junior year, I scored a new job,
something that kept me out of the heat and humidity of the East Texas sun.  I became a
pharmacy tech at K-C Pharmacy, working with Wally, the owner/pharmacist, a man of
few words and little warmth, but a good guy, and easy to work with.  I worked at his
newly built building right next to the only doctor’s office in town, and my job was to
actually read the prescriptions and then type the instructions for the label, and he
would check it over, and then place it on the bottle itself—this was before the age of
computers, at least in his store.  Not a lot of interesting things would go on, pretty
standard stuff filling prescriptions, but every once in awhile, we would get a script in for
pain medication or something that was very addictive and prized by addicts, and it was
usually a young person, in their twenties, and the prescription was typically from the
same doctor who practiced in one of the larger towns around us.  Wally would look at
me when I handed him the prescription, giving me a knowing glance, because usually it
was pretty obvious that the young person wanting his prescription filled was an addict.  

It took me awhile to spot these folks.  They walked in nervous, sometimes wearing too
many clothes for that time of the ear—their skin seem shallow, the eyes unfocused, and
it was the eyes, the eyes are what give away the addiction, and it was eyes that gave
away how deeply the disease had rooted itself within them.   Wally didn’t have a lot of
compassion for these folks, and I am sure that is because he had seen a lot more than
I had at that point in my life.  But I couldn’t help feeling sorry for some of these men and
women—not because they weren’t responsible for their part of their addiction, but
because it had clearly come to completely dominate their lives.  They came looking for
the next chance to lose themselves to feeling nothing or, for those who felt dead inside,
the chance to feel something, from those drugs.  And because they needed those
drugs in order to feel something or nothing, getting those drugs was the most important
thing to them in that moment, when they stepped through the door of our pharmacy—
the shadow of obsession, deep and wild and insatiable, stepped into the door with
every one of them—obsession that drove them to doctors who would write them the
scripts for these drugs for the right price.  It was, ironically enough, a sobering moment
for me as a teenager, and a reminder of what we humans will do in order to soothe our
inner demons.  

And it was that kind of obsession that came to mind when reading and studying these
parables this past week, seeing these two parables as hinting at the kind of itch that
must be scratched—and even then, it never quite ever stops itching, never stops
asking for yet more and more.  The stories that Jesus tells here are not nice, neat, cute
stories about people loving God a whole lot—these stories are about people being
obsessed with God, and the kingdom of God that this Jesus of Nazareth says he is
bringing about through his mere presence amongst those early disciples and his living
presence with us, today, and in the greater world.  Let me own up to something up front
today: I really struggled with this analogy, this metaphor for this pursuing of the
kingdom of God, because addiction is so pervasive in our culture, as it is in probably
every culture, if we were to be honest, though it manifest itself in different ways.  I
struggled with using this analogy because addiction is so obviously destructive to the
one who is struggling with their drug of choice, whether it be drugs, or alcohol or
shopping or gambling, or eating, or not eating, for that matter.  Many of us have either
experienced addiction personally, as someone struggling with it for ourselves, or we’ve
certainly seen the disease rip through a member of our family or somebody in our own
circle of close friends.  

So, I know, I know that this cuts close to the bone, and its dangerous and irresponsible
and maybe uncalled for on my part to say that these two men in Jesus’ parables are
obsessed with the kingdom of God like an addict would be for the drug of their choice—
but, of course, the Gospel is all of these things—it is dangerous, it is irresponsible, and
it does and should offend us: its demands are uncalled for and it asks of us to have the
same kind of obsession that the person standing in the waiting area of K-C Pharmacy
in Texas has, waiting for that one thing he believed would bring him peace.  I could
have used the word passion, or the word zeal, or maybe even fervor, but, you know, to
be frank, we overuse those words in this culture, like we overuse the word “the,” and it
carried nothing of what seems like the craziness of these two guys in the parables we
have before us today.

Let me explain, before we call for a congregational meeting to dismiss me as your
pastor.   The first parable has a man who accidentally discovers some sort of treasure
hidden in a field that is not his own—he is trespassing on someone’s else land, and in
doing so he find a treasure trove.  Now, I think  you could argue that it was unethical for
this man to go on someone else’s land, find something that was not his, and then go
and buy that land, knowing that the poor owner doesn’t what kind of valuable stuff he
has in that field.  Sure, he didn’t steal it, but he kind of did, didn’t he?  I mean, what if
someone found out that your home was sitting underneath a huge oil deposit, and they
didn’t tell you that when they mysteriously showed up with an offer you couldn’t refuse?  
Later, when you found out why Exxon was interested in your property, I think you would
be just a little bit ticked off, to be put it mildly.  

But the whole point here is that obsessions, deep, gnawing, overwhelming addictions
do that to people—they make people skirt the edges of ethics, though, of course, it
doesn’t mean that they do anything necessarily illegal.   “Legal” and “ethical” are not
necessarily the same thing, of course.  Jesus likens an obsession with the kingdom of
God to a man who becomes overwhelmed with the need to buy a field with a treasure
he found by trespassing on that land in the first place.  No, I’m not saying that the
kingdom, that place, that space that Jesus puts before us over and over again, this
thing that he says is being born in us and among us, because he is present with them
and us—I am not saying that the kingdom of God necessarily means we are called to
be unethical…but it may mean that sometimes, of course.  

If you’re a Christian hiding Jews in your basement in World War II, you don’t tell the
truth to the German soldier at your door, asking you if have seen any Jews lately, no
matter what the Scriptures may say about lying.  Doing the kingdom of God, birthing the
God into this world by how we live our lives, means being so obsessed with justice and
goodness that I am willing to illegally hide Jews in my basement during the Nazi
Holocaust, putting my life in danger, and breaking the law of the land, and yet still
knowing that the Apostle Paul says to submit to every governmental authority placed
over us.  I think this story about a fairly seedy guy whose obsession with this treasure
he found in a field is so overwhelming that he is willing to go to any lengths in order to
possess it, I think this story is meant to remind us that if we find the treasure of the
kingdom of God, it will elicit in us that same kind of illogical action that the woman at the
door has when she is talking to the Nazi’s—risking it all, including your own family in
order to shelter another’s person’s family.  When you’ve stumbled on such a precious
treasure, you will do anything to get it, pacing the pharmacy waiting room, knowing that
cops may show up any minute if Wally bothers to call them; or standing at the door
talking to the Nazis, knowing your house contains two families and not one.  Of course,
one obsession is death-dealing, and the other is life-giving, but they’re not that far
apart from each other, at least not far enough apart to make us too comfortable with
the parable.  

But there is a good news in second parable: it’s cleaner, less complicated by ethics,
because the merchant is doing what he is paid to do—find the best pearls.  But he finds
the greatest one, the most beautiful one, and he puts all his resources into buying that
one pearl.  Its odd, but the pattern in these parables is: find, then sell, then buy—but
you would think it would be: find, then buy, and then sell, make some profit on it, but
that isn’t the case.  These two guys don’t seem interesting in making a profit on their
investment—their obsessions with the treasure and pearl have completely
overwhelmed them, and they willing to sell everything in order to have this one thing.  
This is probably not a great idea for the pearl merchant to put all of his eggs in one
basket, his pearls into one pearl—one likes to keep a diverse portfolio, so to speak—
but the kingdom is not about being safe and secure, about only worrying about your
family when the Gestapo comes to your door.  It’s about gambling that all of us are
worth something, that all of us are worth saving, taking the gamble that Christ did on
the cross thousands of years ago.  

It’s absurd; really, it is the stuff of fanatics, of addicts, of crazy people, with no good
clear perspective.  And it is also the Gospel, the kingdom of God being born in the
world, being born beyond even the obvious borders of the Christian church.   It is
reflected in the old Negro Christian spiritual we sung earlier today, with those words
sung in slave quarters some 150 years ago

I heard my mother say,
I heard my mother say,
Give me Jesus,
Give me Jesus,
give me Jesus,
you may all this world,
just give me Jesus.”

And then the second verse, with its stark testimony, with its obsession in full view of us
some decades later:  

“At midnight was my cry,
at midnight was my cry,
at midnight was my cry,
give me Jesus,
give me Jesus,
you may have all this world,
just give me Jesus.”  

That’s the kind of obsession that drives drunks to drink, that protects strangers when
the instinct is to only protect your own, that says nothing matters but to follow after the
way of this One who has the words of life.  In the midnight hour, when the chips are
down, and you and I are asked what matters most to us, I hope we can say that it is the
kingdom of God, the realm of love that Christ speaks of here, and that he will gives his
life for later, and that he asks us to give our lives for—‘you may have all this world, just
give me Jesus.”  It is craziness, these stories, these parables—they ask too much of us,
these radical invitations to love and to live like Christ did, and in doing so, change the
world, one moment, one life at a time.  It is too much…and yet, and yet…