Sunday, July 26, Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
“The Pearl of Great Price is You!”
Scripture Readings: Psalm 127; Deuteronomy 7:6-9; Romans 8:28-29; Matthew 13:44-52
Order of Holy Matins, Lutheran Service Book, p. 219
Hymns: “All for Christ I Have Forsaken” #753; “What Is the World to Me” #730; “Your Kingdom, O God, Is My Glorious Treasure” #654; “Lord of All Good” #786; “Fruitful Trees, the Spirit’s Sowing” #691
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
In our Gospel today, our Lord Jesus tells us four little parables about heaven’s treasures. What this world values as treasure is not what God values. The treasure God cherishes is YOU. That precious soul of yours is His “treasured possession,” a treasure He’s given everything He has to possess. God loves you so much that He gave up His own Son to death on a cross to save you. God our Father is the merchant in the story, YOU are the precious pearl, and the blood of Jesus was your purchase price. “He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all--how will He not also, along with Him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).
What is “the kingdom of heaven?” Where is it? What does it look like? What is its nature? How does it work or function? And how can I find it? And how do I get there? It’s hard to explain something too great for human words to express or for human minds to comprehend. “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him,” St. Paul says (1 Cor. 2:9). Jesus here is doing His best to explain what heaven is like to mortal human beings like us.
So Jesus speaks to the people in parables, He tells them stories, and points them to things in their everyday lives. He doesn’t talk down to the people, talk over their heads, or look down His nose at them. That would be cruel and condescending and wouldn’t do them any good. Instead He does all He can to help them understand; that’s loving and merciful.
In the first of His four little parables in our Gospel reading, Jesus says: "The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.” In Jesus’ day, in a world without banks or vaults or iron safes, treasure would often be buried in the ground to keep it safe. Then if whoever buried it was killed or died, and hadn’t told anyone where it was, the treasure might be forgotten. Maybe, if you were the fortunate one, you might come across a treasure like that, while digging a hole for a well or a ditch or a garbage pit or something. Should you buy that field without telling the owner that what’s buried there could be worth millions? Probably not the most ethical thing to do. If you spot a valuable antique at a flea market, do you quietly buy it for fifteen bucks, knowing it may be worth a hundred times more? If your conscience can live with that, I guess. That’s not the point of the parable, though; Jesus wasn’t there to debate ethics; He was reaching for far deeper things.
Jesus is talking about the kingdom of Heaven here. The field in His parable is the world. The treasure – hidden and disregarded as worthless by the world as it may be – is you and me. What God values isn’t what the world values; what He values above all things is us. Sins and warts and all, unlovely as we may sometimes be, His treasure is you and me. So treasured are we to Him, in fact, that is gave Him great joy to give up His most precious treasure, His only Son Jesus, to die on a cross to redeem us and buy us back from the devil and death and hell. “For the joy set before Him, He endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down on the right hand of God.” (Hebrews 12:2).
Imagine sitting in the crowd that day, to hear to your surprise that you’re not a nothing or a nobody after all, that you DO matter, that God considers little old you to be a priceless and treasured possession, no matter what your status may be in the eyes of the world around you. “Jesus loves ME, this I know?” “God loves me dearly, loves even ME?” If knowing that doesn’t do wonders for your self-image, I don’t know what will. If you have a self-esteem problem, or just a tendency to get down on yourself sometimes, the answer is to come to understand how much God esteems you! My wife’s dear grandmother used to wear a sweatshirt that said, “I know I’m somebody, ‘cause God don’t make no junk.”
The second of Jesus’ little parables uses a different illustration, but makes the same blessed point: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.” An earthly merchant, especially one who deals in pearls and diamonds and precious stones and such, is always looking for the “find of a lifetime,” that one pearl with that special size or perfect shape or rare and unusual color that will put it above all the rest. The same is true if you’re dealing in rare coins or stamps or baseball cards. (If you have a Babe Ruth or a Honus Wagner among your old cards, you might be in the money!)
The merchant in Jesus’ story (God again) found a pearl worth more than any other He’d ever seen; so valuable, in fact, that He was willing to sell everything He had just to have it. Again, to the point, God is the merchant, you and I are the precious pearls, and the blood of God’s own Son was our purchase price. If you’re having trouble thinking of yourself as a precious pearl (and I do, too, sometimes!) -- stop it! Embrace the truth about what God says about you instead. We don’t define our own worth, God does. What determines our value isn’t what the world thinks of us, or what other people think of us, or even what we think about ourselves. What matters is what God thinks of us -- and that He showed us by giving us His own precious Son. One look at a cross, or at a Communion Table, should tell you how much God loves you and how precious you are.
The third of Jesus’ little parables is yet another illustration the people He was talking to could relate to: “Once again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was let down into the lake and caught all kinds of fish. When it was full, the fishermen pulled it up on the shore. Then they sat down and collected the good fish in baskets, but threw the bad away. This is how it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
The fishermen in the crowd knew how this worked. Some fish were desirable and marketable. The Sea of Galilee had a fish known these days as St. Peter’s fish, a red-bellied tilapia, which was greatly prized, and also other types of wholesome fish that people liked to eat. But it also had catfish and eels, which the Jews were forbidden to eat because they lacked fins or scales. If you were fishing with a dragnet, naturally you’d haul in some of each kind, no helping it. All you could do was hall the net ashore, separate the good, commercially acceptable fish from the bad ones, and throw the bad ones away. (It’s worth noting, by the way, that on those occasions when Jesus filled His disciple’s net with fish, there were no bad fish in the net, and no sorting to be done; that’s how it works when you’re fishing with Jesus!)
So, says Jesus, this is how the Kingdom of Heaven works: The sea is this world all we fish are a-swimmin’ in, the good fish and bad fish alike. The net is the Gospel, the Good News about Jesus that goes out into all the world. At the end of all things, on that Last Day, it’s God alone who will do the work of sorting out the good fish from the bad. That isn’t up to you or me today (and I’m so glad of it!) God loves and values every human soul, whether that soul has come to know Him and love Him or not, and so should we. And God, by His life-saving, heart-changing Word, is more than able to change a bad fish into a good one. We all have one lifetime to come to Him and confess our sins and ask to be forgiven, and to be washed in baptismal water, so that good “born again” miracle can happen for us.
Whether a person has faith, and whether their faith is real and saving faith, is up to God alone to say. As for you and me, all we can do is keep throwing that blessed net out there, calling the people we love, the people we know, and the people we meet to come home to Him. I, for one, can’t bear the thought of a precious soul Jesus loves and died for ending up in that “weeping and gnashing of teeth” place. I’m not content to let that be, if there’s anything I can do about it. Hey, Church, let’s go fishing!
“Have you understood all these things?" Jesus asked. "Yes," they replied. (Although I’m not sure His disciples did understand just yet; they were like students who nod their heads and say, “Yes, teacher, we get it,” even though they’re still confused). So Jesus tells them the last of His little parables, the fourth one: "Therefore every teacher of the law who has been instructed about the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old."
This takes us to the reason Jesus teaches in parables again: Understanding doesn’t come all at once; we humans aren’t made that way. Jesus told His disciples, just before He was crucified, “I have much more to teach you, but it’s more than you can bear right now.” We don’t teach calculus to kindergarteners. You don’t expect your three-year-old to be able to do geometry or understand physics or drive a car. Education is by building blocks, one lesson built upon another, the Teacher teaching patiently as the child grows in knowledge and time goes on.
Hold on to those precious old things, those good old Sunday school lessons you learned as a child; then go deeper in the Word, as you’re given day-by-day to understand it more and more. “Your mercies are new every morning,” the good Psalm says; “Teach me Your Way, O Lord, and I will walk in Your truth.” Martin Luther’s advice was: “First study the forest, then study each tree, then begin to study the individual twigs and branches, until at last you’re turning over each leaf.” It’s a process, and a blessed one.
You are God’s most precious treasure, His precious pearl. He loved You so much that He came to find you, so much that He gave all He had to make you His own. But because He loves you so much, He won’t ever be content to leave you as He found you.
C.S. Lewis wrote: “Every father is pleased at the baby’s first attempt to walk; but no father would be satisfied with anything less than a firm, free, manly walk in a grown-up son.” So aren’t we all just works in progress? Our Father isn’t anywhere near finished with us yet!
May we all grow in Christ, day by day, in knowledge, faith, hope, and love; until all of us, precious pearls that we are, come to shine for Him in His Kingdom. “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose.” So good Father, in Your mercy, do work in all things for our good, until You make us everything You’ve saved us to be. In Jesus’ name; Amen.
Rev. Larry Sheppard, M.Div.
Trinity Lutheran Church, LCMS, Packwaukee, WI
St. John’s Lutheran Church, LCMS, Oxford, WI
pastorshepp@gmail.com