Matthew 13:44-46
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
March 30, 2025
How much we are willing to give out to have something reveals how much we value it. I’d love to have a front row seat at a Dodger home game, but not at the price I’d have to pay to purchase one. I adore my Boys in Blue; but, to be honest, only up to a point.
To live in “the kingdom of heaven” is to live under the reign of God. How much I value such a life is shown in how much I’m ready to pay to have it. Will I fully give myself to it and give up what I must to let God rule over my thoughts, words and deeds? Will I allow God’s commandments to determine my action? Will I let go of my ego and serve others when I get no credit for it? Will I defer my self-centered agenda to the larger good?
In all of life, sacrificing like that only makes sense if we value the return from the sacrificing as something that more than compensates for the losses we incur. It is for the sake of going to the Olympics, that the marathon runner gives up a life of physical ease and dietary self-indulgence; for the sake of a deeper relationship together, that a married couple lets go of “playing the field”; for the sake of the joy of seeing a young person laugh often in childhood and flourish in adulthood, that people forego buying themselves some luxuries in order to be able to give more robustly to a ministry like Rising TIDE.
Jesus promises that the payoff for our self-denial for His sake is well worth any price, and that the reward for an “all-in” investment in the kingdom of heaven is an all-out blessing.
In today’s scripture, Jesus tells back-to-back parables about someone giving up what they value mightily for the sake of what they value most of all.
In the first parable a man finds a “treasure hidden in a field”. The first thing he does upon finding it is hide it in a new place! He’s using his head and realizes that the owner of the field, before selling it, would first go to his old hiding place, dig up his nest egg, and secure it elsewhere.
What this finder of someone else’s treasure does is unethical; but it does show he’s all in on obtaining what he’s set his heart on. To make it his own, he compromises his morals, engages in hard manual labor and exposes himself to the risk of criminal prosecution.
Then, to have the funds to buy the field that contains his treasure above all treasures, he sells all his other treasure – “all that he has,” Jesus says.
By this parable, Jesus is asking would-be disciples, “How much does having the kingdom of heaven matter to you – that is, how much are you willing to give up to have it?”
Of course, when we think of buying a field with a hidden treasure from God in it, we’d like to think of it as a beautiful field we’d love to buy even without a treasure in it – say, a green meadow full of fragrant flowers.
But often the field which holds for us God’s treasure looks at first like a bleak place – an abandoned lot of rocks, weeds, discarded tires and broken bottles.
For Joni Eareckson Tada, who at the age of 17 broke her neck and became a quadriplegic, the field God wanted her to buy and make her own was a wheelchair and the inability to blow her nose or use a restroom by herself. Yet, though she recognizes no one would want to buy her field, she now says she wouldn’t trade it for the world. For what initially seemed only a place of desolation ended up being a place of consolation as it drove her in her desperation into deep intimacy with God; and that intimacy gave her the opportunity, by the joy she developed despite her disability, to catch the eye of many and to win over to Jesus the heart of some. The treasure hidden in her hard field is the highest treasure in her life: knowing Jesus and making Him known to others.
Joni says she’s had to pay a lot to buy her field: It’s cost her, she says, giving up self-pity and resentment over a body that no longer works, tossing aside some long-harbored dreams to dream still more wonderful dreams, investing hours lying in a bed – unable to move – to dive deep into the reality of God and now, sixty years later, still using the pick of God’s word and the shovel of prayer to dig up new treasure from her field.
Joni notes that her field, a life with unusable legs and arms, and now with chronic pain, still looks bleak; but to her it’s a beautiful field because below its ugly surface she’s found her greatest treasure.
The second parable tells about another person’s “all-in” investment in gaining his heart’s desire. Jesus speaks of “a merchant in search of fine pearls”. Jesus doesn’t indicate much about him, but it’s easy to imagine him a keen appraiser of pearls who, with a trained eye to distinguish between the merely good and the utterly magnificent, scours the bazaars and offbeat places of the world for a truly exquisite pearl. One day he happens upon a pearl so breathtaking in its beauty and value that he feels he must have it, no matter the price. To have this one-of-a kind pearl which he treasures as the prize of his life, he sells everything else he holds precious: all his other pearls, his business, his home, his diversified investment portfolio, everything!
By these two parables, Jesus depicts how we have the kingdom of heaven just to the extent we make it our highest priority and keep it our highest priority by staying ready to give up whatever might prevent us from making it our own in all its blessedness.
Because Jesus claims to be the King of the kingdom of heaven, He asks us to be “all-in” on gambling on His being the treasure, the pearl, worth the loss of anything and everything else – on His being extravagant compensation for any required sacrifice of time, money, comfort, ease, delusional pride or self-indulgence.
Is He worth it?
He is, if in fact He out of love made an all-in investment of Himself for our sake when at Calvary He gave Himself up to damnation, betting His life on the chance that, by doing so, some of us self-absorbed human beings might fall in love with Him and follow Him into the kingdom of heaven.
He had no guarantee we’d respond. But He thought us worth the gamble. The first all-in investment is His!
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