The Parables of the Hidden Treasure and the Pearl

After explaining the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat, Jesus ends his parables discourse with three rapid-fire parables. The third of these acts as a nice book-end to the discourse, so we’ll leave that for next time, but the other two will be our focus today. These are the Parables of the Hidden Treasure and the Precious Pearl.

Text

Once again, these two parables are found in the Bible only in Matthew’s Gospel. (Though, like the parables we looked at last time, they are also found, decoupled, in the Gospel of Thomas (Scott 119)*) According to Matthew, they go like this:

[13.44] The Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field. Upon finding it, a man hid it. Then joyfully he goes and sells everything he has and buys that field.

[45] Again the Kingdom of Heaven is like a merchant searching for beautiful pearls: [46] Upon finding a particularly precious pearl, he went sold all that he had and bought it.

Experience

These two are the flip side of my experience with the Parables of the Mustard Seed and Leaven: where I’m always excited by those ones, these two always leave me unimpressed. The theme that the Kingdom of Heaven is precious and worth every sacrifice seems clear enough, but the stories themselves seem a bit underhanded to me.

It is however striking that there is an apparent shift in point-of-view in these two parables. The rest of the parables in this discourse focus on what God’s doing, but the focus here seems to be on how we are to respond to what God is doing.

Encounter

If we follow the logic of Matthew’s narrative, Jesus addresses this parable to his disciples (likely a larger group than the Twelve (cf. Mark 4.10).

Each parable again only has one character. They are similar in that they both come into wealth, but differ in that one seemingly finds a treasure by surprise, while the other was specifically searching for it. Both characters must sacrifice everything they have in order receive the benefit of their discovery.

Explore

The initial steps of this study haven’t rustled up much of interest, so the rest of the study will focus on enhancing my curiosity: What else can we learn from these parables?

• How do these parables fit into the larger structure of Matthew 13?
• Do the details of the story contribute any nuance I might be missing?
• Can we rightly consider these parables doublets?

Literary Context

To situate ourselves once again in the chiastic structure organized around the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat, we’re now in the second doublet of parables, placed in between the explanation of that organizing parable and the closing parable, the Parable of the Net:

Weeds and Wheat

Mustard Seed and Leaven

Explanation of Weeds and Wheat

Hidden Treasure and Pearl

Net

Again, we would expect these to comment in some way on the themes found in the organizing parable.

Narrative Details

Much to my surprise, this study didn’t turn up too much of interest. (Quite the contrast from the last study, which revealed all kinds of fascinating nuance!)

Details in the Parable of the Hidden Treasure

The parable says nothing about the person who finds the treasure. But the situation described was completely legal in ancient Judaea, where anything found on a piece of land after purchase was the rightful property of the purchaser (Hagner 117). This stipulation had the potential to forestall a lot of disputes, since it was common practice to bury valuables as a way of securing them in the absence of banks and safety deposit boxes.

There is not much to say about the ‘treasure’, since it’s described so generically. Treasure was not a common symbol for God’s Kingdom in Second Temple Judaism, however the Wisdom tradition used it as a symbol for wisdom (Proverbs 2.4; Sirach 20.30) (Hagner 117).

Details in the Parable of the Pearl

The merchant here is a rare member of the middle class to be found in one of Jesus’ parables (Scott 316). We should think more of an antiques’ dealer here than a pearl-diver: he’s looking for treasure within various lots of merchandise. (This is implied in Matthew, but is stated explicitly in Thomas 76). The parable may also be said to “conjure up the exotic,” as pearls were generally found in the Red Sea or Indian Ocean. While pearls were a common symbol of wealth in the ancient world, there is only one clear reference to them in the Hebrew Bible, in Job 28.18, where they are listed with other foreign luxury items such as coral and crystal.

One Message or Two?

As Scott points out, there are definite differences between the two parables: of time (one is told in the present tense, the other in the past); of class (agrarian vs. merchant), of effort (accidental vs. intentional), and of hiddenness (one has been intentionally hidden, the other simply needs to be found) (Scott 319). To my mind, none of these seem reason to separate the two stories’ meanings, since they result from translating the story from one setting to another. If anything, it strengthens the doublet as it takes away excuses: no matter if you’ve been searching for the Kingdom all your life or stumbled on it by accident, no matter if you’re rich or poor, it’s still worth sacrificing everything else to obtain.

The one detail that does give me pause is that the nature of the comparison is different (Scott 319, Nuechterlein Proper 12A):

• “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a hidden treasure…”
• “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a merchant…”

So greatly linked are these two parables in the Scriptures, in how they are read liturgically, and how I’ve heard them taught, that in all my years of reading them, I never noticed this! If this is a meaningful difference, instead of being true doublets, the two stories look at a similar situation from two sides — less opposites than complements. The first focuses on the kingdom as something to obtain at all costs. But the second becomes similar to the Parable of the Sower or Parable of the Lost Sheep, focusing on God doing whatever it takes to be in relationship with creation. As Paul Nuechterlein writes on this interpretation:

In selling everything to get this one pearl, the merchant has effectively ceased to be a merchant! The pearl now owns him, if you will. He has nothing else with which to continue being a merchant. The merchant is now completely identified with the pearl. The kingdom of heaven is like God placing a great price on us and giving up everything in order to identify with us. (Nuechterlein Proper 12A)

If we were to read the pair in this way, they would work together to describe a rather passionate, reciprocal good-faith relationship between God and God’s people, which is the Christian (and Jewish) ideal anyway.

All this said, I still think the stories here were intended to be doublets: the Kingdom is likened to the whole situation, not just to the noun that’s the grammatical complement of the comparison. However, both this discrepancy and the change in verb tense suggest that the two parables were originally told independently and that their pairing here is the result of Matthew’s literary crafting of the discourse so that the earlier pair of parables are balanced out by another pair here. The Gospel of Thomas supports both of these assertions: It records both parables, but several chapters apart (Thomas 76 and 109); and like Matthew, it compares the Kingdom to the merchant, but it adds a tagline that implies the Kingdom is really the pearl to be sought: “You too, seek this unfailing treasure which stays where no moth can reach to devour it and no worm can destroy it” (Thomas 76.3).

So, despite that detour, our initial reading of these parables holds: Whereas the previous parables have focused on “the divine initiative of grace”, here “the human response” is emphasized; the Kingdom of Heaven is worth getting excited over and the “total investment” it requires (Case-Winters; NIV BTS; France 539; Hagner 117). In selling everything, the treasure-finder and merchant get rid of the very distractions and cares that Jesus described as thorny weeds in the Parable of the Sower, enacting the total commitment the Gospel demands.

Such a message is also appropriate to the private audience described for the parables in Matthew, as the disciples had likewise dropped everything and left their old lives behind to follow Jesus (France 540; Capon).

Challenge

Subversion of First-Century Expectations

No matter the century, any message of radical and total commitment is going to be subversive and controversial. The idea of the two men selling all that they have to make these luxury purposes is unrealistic, but of course that’s how hyperbole works. Total investment means total investment.

Contemporary Challenge

In our present climate of capitalism run amok, there’s something that feels a bit ‘icky’ about these transactional images that probably wouldn’t have felt strange to most audiences in history. The parables have an obvious parallel with the teaching from the Sermon on the Mount, that “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (6.21). In selling everything, the characters in today’s parables show exactly where their treasure and heart are. In a culture where so many of us are proving to be willing to sacrifice a lot of our common humanity for the promise of more and cheaper consumer products, these parables stand out as particularly relevant.

Moreover, we are so used to being sold and upsold, and even churches market themselves and position themselves advantageously in the ‘market’. Robert Farrar Capon’s comments on rethinking the Church’s modern colonial missionary history fit just as well for religious capitalism:

The mystery has been sold at spearpoint, at gunpoint, and at economic pressure-point; and such hard sells have even been justified on the basis of the mystery’s catholicity: “It’s good for everybody in the world,” the church has said in effect, “so who cares how we get them to buy it?” But the mystery is a mystery of love and wants nothing less than a free offering of complete simplicity. (Capon)

What he’s saying is that the Gospel is good news and our attempts to ‘sell’ it turn it into bad news. The true Gospel does not need to be marketed or sold — to say nothing of forced or coerced. When it comes to the Gospel, we’re all buyers. We’d do well to remember that. And as the modern martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer would remind us, in the spirit of these parables, it is all about costly grace: it is grace because it is free, and it is costly because it demands of us everything.

Expand

How does our emerging interpretation of these parables support our growth in faith and love? First it reminds us that God’s Kingdom is not some dreary thing but is glorious, exciting, and worth the cost. Second, it reminds us that it demands our total investment; we can’t be part-time disciples of Jesus, or follow him with one hand still on the cares of this world (Luke 9.62). To paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., we are called to be extremists, but extremists for love, grace and mercy.

Summary & Conclusions

Towards the end of a series of parables on the Kingdom of Heaven, Matthew has Jesus flip the script, shifting the focus from God’s immense generosity and grace to the significance of the human response to it. The parables we’ve looked at today show that no matter our class or life situation, whether we’ve been searching for God’s Kingdom our whole life or just stumbled upon it accidentally (for “the kingdom can be present and yet not perceived, because its present form does not overwhelm the world or overcome resistance to it” (Hagner 117)) the only thing the matters is that we find it, and when we do find it, we go with joy and commit our whole being to living it out.

 

* For full references, please see the series bibliography.