First Reading : 1Kings 3.5-12
Gospel : Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52
The pearl of great price (Matthew13.45).
If you were watching the antiques road show last Sunday, you will have seen what a pearl of great price might look like. Fiona Bruce had on her table three treasures. The smallest one, which turned out to be the most valuable, was a pink pearl, about the size of a child’s marble, which was said to be worth about £200,000. In these days of gross inequality, I dare say there would be billionaires enough to bid against one another at that sort of price for an object of such rare beauty, but in the Palestine of Jesus’ day, the price of such a precious jewel would have been beyond the reach of their imagination.
Over the past couple of Sundays we have been studying in Matthew’s gospel a collection of the parables Jesus told to help the people of his time to navigate their way through the moral challenges of life. As Jan explained last week, the intellectual climate of Jesus’ day was influenced by Zoroastrian notions of a global struggle between the Lords of Good and Evil, culminating in a day of Final Judgment. Such ideas will have coloured the minds of Jesus’ listeners, and very likely his own mind as a man of his time, even if as a devout Jew the key elements of his own thinking will have been deeply rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures. Many of us would question nowadays whether a God whom we have learned to identify with Love would condemn to an eternity of punishment in a fiery hell the persons whose creation (s)he had lovingly willed. As we ponder this morning’s parable of the fisherman sorting his catch to save the good fish and discard the bad, we should beware of stretching the meaning of Jesus’ stories or parables beyond the specific point they were intended to make, in this case a warning that there will be a day of reckoning when we will have to answer before God for what we have done with our lives.
In the creeds we assert our belief in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, but we cannot imagine what it will be like to stand, stripped of all pretense, in the presence of God. These are mysteries which we cannot hope to penetrate, but it is my firm conviction that there are at least two things which will go with us into eternity – namely Truth and Love – for these two are themselves characteristic of the nature of God.
God is Truth, absolute and unchangeable. I believe that is part of what St John means in the prologue to his gospel: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Of course it was not any old word. It was the Word of creative power, the Word of intrinsic Truth, source of the Wisdom that inspired Solomon, the Word that became flesh in Jesus and lived among us, full of grace and truth (John 1. 1, 14). We rely on the revelation of that God-given Truth like the man who built his house upon a rock. But Truth is also a rock which is hard and inexorable. We shall fall and be broken if we try to ignore the Truth about God.
However, God is also Love, that perfect Love which we see and know in the person of Jesus Christ. The stained glass window in the chancel behind me is a perpetual reminder of St John’s profound insight into the nature of God. We read the words DEUS CARITAS EST – God is Love – and those who abide in God abide in love (1 John 4.16). Knowing that God is Truth and Love, we can be sure, when we face judgment, that the Truth we have lived and the Love we have shown will survive to stand in the merciful Presence of God, even if our souls may have to undergo a painful yet ultimately glorious process of purification and refinement, as Newman suggests in The Dream of Gerontius. Whatever you may think of Newman’s vision, we cannot ignore the prospect of judgment which is so often present in Jesus’ parables about the kingdom of heaven, but judgment is only half of the story.
I want to turn now to the theme of hope and joy which is also deeply embedded in th parables of the kingdom. Just as the 30, 60 even 100 fold yield from the sower’s seed which fell on good ground was hugely generous by the standards of the primitive agriculture Jesus knew, so too the effect of a mustard seed or a pinch of yeast is truly amazing. The kingdom of heaven, to which our souls are drawn, is a treasure worth any price we could conceivably pay. When the merchant sees the precious pearl, he sells everything he has to buy it.
When Jesus told these stories to the crowds gathered around him on the sunny hillsides above the Lake of Galilee, I wonder whether he fully realized what they would mean when he had to apply them to himself. It’s all very well telling stories about merchants selling everything to buy the treasure in a field, or the most spectacularly beautiful pearl. We nod our assent. The crowd will have murmured their approval. But what Jesus is really saying is, if you want to possess the ultimate treasure of knowing God’s presence in your life both now and for eternity – for that is what the kingdom of heaven is about – God will give it to you, but you can hold nothing back, for the kingdom is about Love, and Love holds nothing back.
When it came to the point, Jesus himself, in great anguish, found that for him, holding nothing back for Love’s sake meant allowing himself to be put to death by crucifixion. Drawing on his understanding of the Truth about the Loving Spirit of God, as expressed by the prophets – especially Isaiah and Jeremiah – he seems to have understood that if he set no limits to what he would do and suffer for Love’s sake, then his Spirit of Love, his warm-hearted God-given Spirit, beyond the reach of death, would be set free to dwell in the hearts of those who would put their trust in him, just as He had put his trust in his Father. Access to the kingdom of God would no longer depend on scrupulous obedience to an impossibly demanding set of rules. Instead, those who loved and trusted him – Peter and James and John, Mary and Martha, all his beloved disciples, together with all who would come after them – we would all know what it meant to receive God’s spirit, his own spirit, planted in our hearts, making us in Jeremiah’s words truly his people, just as He is truly our God ‘for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord’ (Jeremiah 31.33-34).
This is the pearl of great price for which the merchant was prepared to sell all that he had. It is offered to us when we put our trust in His Love, and reaffirmed Sunday by Sunday as we receive in holy communion the tokens of His body and his blood, through which we dwell in Him, and He in us. Only, we too have to be ready, by his grace, to hold nothing back, for Love’s sake.