Just this week, in reading the Cost of Discipleship (oddly the second Bonhoeffer reference in this thread, perhaps more than coincidence), I thought about these parables. It's easy to see the price as being almost impossibly large: everything I have? But now I reflect on how mercifully small it is.
Once, as a young, poor, engaged college student, I went to a charity auction, and fell in love with a handmade folding end-table that someone had made and put up for auction. I knew that as students, my wife and I were unlikely to have anything other than hand-me-down furniture in our first apartment; this table was small, but symbolic.
I threw myself into the bidding, to find to my dismay that the price kept going up to half of everything in my wallet, to everything in my wallet, and beyond. I had to give up. The carpenter must have noticed my disappointment, because after the auction, he walked up, and made an offer: he had a matching table in his workshop, almost done. Would I want that one for my last bid? That table cost everything I had, and yet it was only by grace I could afford it at all.
Imagine, the kingdom of heaven, on sale for the astonishingly low cost of only one human life...
This touches more closely the dilemma with which Jesus and we who follow him struggle. Some of us experience the truth that the kingdom is already present while also still arriving. We have experienced the seed growing within us and beginning to bear fruit.
We also know that this process begins as an inward experience that is difficult to describe, let alone offer, to someone who has not yet experienced it. This may account for the hiddenness: the fact that someone cannot know the kingdom until they discover it in themselves.
However, these two parable have always puzzled me. The treasure and the pearl are worthless if no one else knows that I have them. They might as will be rocks in a field.
The kingdom only becomes of value if I share it. And since I cannot effectively verbalize the deep reality of the kingdom to others, I have to reveal it in how I engage with them. I have to treat them as if they are already in the kingdom. Which, in truth, they are. They may not yet know it. But all beings are already in the kingdom.
This is not a matter of moving from one place to another. It is a matter of opening our eyes and seeing that, whenever we live as if in the kingdom, we are in the kingdom.
The parables of the sower and of the tares seem more open to this possibility. They both involve growing wheat that will feed others.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood this (Ethics. New York: A Touchstone Book, 1995.):
"To allow the hungry man to remain hungry would be blasphemy against God and one’s neighbor, for what is nearest to God is precisely the need of one’s neighbor.
"It is for the love of Christ, which belongs as much to the hungry man as to myself, that I share my bread with him and that I share my dwelling with the homeless.
"If the hungry man does not attain to faith, then the fault falls on those who refused him bread. To provide the hungry man with bread is to prepare the way for the coming of grace."
I would rather be the sower than the man with the treasure or the pearl. The sower trusts God’s grace to take each seed to the person who needs it. And God nurtures that seed in that person forever. There is no end to the possibility for it to sprout and grow.
Just this week, in reading the Cost of Discipleship (oddly the second Bonhoeffer reference in this thread, perhaps more than coincidence), I thought about these parables. It's easy to see the price as being almost impossibly large: everything I have? But now I reflect on how mercifully small it is.
Once, as a young, poor, engaged college student, I went to a charity auction, and fell in love with a handmade folding end-table that someone had made and put up for auction. I knew that as students, my wife and I were unlikely to have anything other than hand-me-down furniture in our first apartment; this table was small, but symbolic.
I threw myself into the bidding, to find to my dismay that the price kept going up to half of everything in my wallet, to everything in my wallet, and beyond. I had to give up. The carpenter must have noticed my disappointment, because after the auction, he walked up, and made an offer: he had a matching table in his workshop, almost done. Would I want that one for my last bid? That table cost everything I had, and yet it was only by grace I could afford it at all.
Imagine, the kingdom of heaven, on sale for the astonishingly low cost of only one human life...
This touches more closely the dilemma with which Jesus and we who follow him struggle. Some of us experience the truth that the kingdom is already present while also still arriving. We have experienced the seed growing within us and beginning to bear fruit.
We also know that this process begins as an inward experience that is difficult to describe, let alone offer, to someone who has not yet experienced it. This may account for the hiddenness: the fact that someone cannot know the kingdom until they discover it in themselves.
However, these two parable have always puzzled me. The treasure and the pearl are worthless if no one else knows that I have them. They might as will be rocks in a field.
The kingdom only becomes of value if I share it. And since I cannot effectively verbalize the deep reality of the kingdom to others, I have to reveal it in how I engage with them. I have to treat them as if they are already in the kingdom. Which, in truth, they are. They may not yet know it. But all beings are already in the kingdom.
This is not a matter of moving from one place to another. It is a matter of opening our eyes and seeing that, whenever we live as if in the kingdom, we are in the kingdom.
The parables of the sower and of the tares seem more open to this possibility. They both involve growing wheat that will feed others.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood this (Ethics. New York: A Touchstone Book, 1995.):
"To allow the hungry man to remain hungry would be blasphemy against God and one’s neighbor, for what is nearest to God is precisely the need of one’s neighbor.
"It is for the love of Christ, which belongs as much to the hungry man as to myself, that I share my bread with him and that I share my dwelling with the homeless.
"If the hungry man does not attain to faith, then the fault falls on those who refused him bread. To provide the hungry man with bread is to prepare the way for the coming of grace."
I would rather be the sower than the man with the treasure or the pearl. The sower trusts God’s grace to take each seed to the person who needs it. And God nurtures that seed in that person forever. There is no end to the possibility for it to sprout and grow.
Blessings, Mike