“Jesus said to his disciples: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant searching for fine pearls. When he finds a pearl of great price, he goes and sells all that he has and buys it.’” (Matt 13.44-46)
In Mark Twain’s classic novel, “Tom Sawyer,” he tells of the day that Tom decides to go in search of treasure. Twain describes the day in this way, “There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure. The desire suddenly came upon Tom one day.”
“He sallied out to find Joe Harper, but failed of success. Next he sought Ben Rogers; he had gone fishing. Presently he stumbled upon Huck Finn the Red-Handed. Huck would anwer. Tom took him to a private place and opened the matter to him confidentially. Huck was willing. Huck was always willing to take a hand in any enterprise that offered entertainment and required no capital, for he had a troublesome super-abundance of that sort of time which is not money.
“‘Where’ll we dig?’ said Huck. ‘Oh, most anywhere.’ ‘Why, is it hid all around?’ ‘No indeed it ain’t. It’s hid in mighty particular places, Huck–sometimes on islands, sometimes in rotten chests under the end of a limb of an old dead tree, just where the shadow falls at midnight, but mostly under the floor of ha’nted houses.’”
And so begins the hunt for hidden treasure for Tom and Huck, an adventure that takes them into the forest, then to Widow Douglas’ yard at midnight, and finally to a haunted house, where they stumble across a plot that brings them more adventures than they had imagined. The pearl of great price, they learn, always comes with a personal price.
As we study the sacred writings selected for today’s scrutiny, we find the Rabbi from Galilee stepping into the shoes of Tom Sawyer, inviting his disciples to join him in the search for treasure buried in a field. When it is found, he assures them, it will bring them incomparable joy, even if it has required of them great sacrifice as they search for it.
Jesus, like Tom, also understands that while we can dig for the treasure “most anywhere,” it also is found in “mighty particular places,” reminding us that finding the treasure is going to require of us both time and toil, trial and distress. But, if we stay with the task, we will be rewarded with the proverbial pearl of great price.
Of course, the Rabbi is not talking about a literal chest buried in the ground filled with precious gems and pearls and golden pendants. He is simply drawing a comparison between buried treasure and the kingdom of God, also not a literal place, but a figurative place where people live in the world under the rule of God, shaping their lives according to his will, and not according to their own wills.
That kingdom of God, always the principal theme of the Rabbi’s teachings, is not other-worldly so much as it is this world, but a world transfixed and transfigured by the ways of God, meaning it is a world that is inundated with love, not hatred, inhabited with selfless people, not selfish people, and infused with the sounds of peace, not the sounds of war.
In other words, it is a world where the ways of God have become the ways of humanity, as it was in the beginning, a time long ago, now vaguely remembered before we lost our way, before becoming a people whose divine image had become terribly tarnished and frequently indecipherable beneath our self-absorption and our self interests.
Perhaps it is for this same reason that the Rabbi is clear in saying that this kingdom of God is buried, implying that it is not readily seen, and that it is something we must search for, suggesting that it is not easily acquired. This should come as no surprise to us. Today’s world has accumulated eons of human depravity and spiritual deprivation, making the quest for God’s world a difficult journey, requiring of us both holiness and heroism, which are–in the end–one and the same thing.
The Galilean does not sugarcoat the sacrifices that we must suffer if we are to search for this treasure buried in the fields of this world, telling us that we will have to sell all that we have in order to have it, by which he means we will have to trade everything that this world considers important for the things that God considers important. For people saturated with selfishness and strife and self-importance, the trade will not be easy, but if we persevere in the search, the tradeoff will be great, with our finding a joy that nothing in this material world can jeopardize.
The psychologist Michael Tomasello has conducted multiple experiments that offer us a greater understanding of what is innately human and what is culturally learned behavior, these studies suggesting that often we have compromised our basic humanity for inclusion within a particular culture, just another way of saying we have traded the ways of God for the ways of this world.
For example, Tomasello says that if an adult drops something in front of a two-year-old child, that child will more likely than not pick it up to return it to us. As he argues, this is not a learned behavior, but something humans are naturally inclined to do, that is, to work together and to share.
Yet, he also says, as children grow, this reflexive desire to help–without any expectation of reward–becomes changed by culture, so that now collaboration and cooperation are discouraged, with children taking on the ways of the culture rather than following the ways of the heart.
Surely, Tomasello’s point is worth our consideration, especially in these troubling times of turmoil and turbulence, when collaboration and cooperation with anyone other than the members of our own clan or crowd are considered betrayal and blacklisted, with the corrosive consequences becoming clearer and deadlier as each day passes, a fundamental understanding of one human family now on the brink of annihilation by tribalism, sectarianism, and exceptionalism.
As the Galilean pointed out long before Tomasello did, there is another way, a way buried deep in the dirt of this world, the same dirt from which we all were formed, each and every one of us, a way that must be uncovered and rediscovered if we are to survive. We must search for it as if our lives depend on it, which, in fact, they do.
And that way is the kingdom of God, called a buried treasure by the Teacher of Galilee, a treasure discoverable if and when we give up the ways of this world, which are rooted in division, differentiation, and suspicion, in order to regain the ways of God, which are rooted in harmony, hospitality, and basic humanity.
Miep Gies lived to be a hundred years old, but she is most remembered for the two years she hid Anne Frank’s family in the attic of an office building in Amsterdam, in this way keeping them out of the clutches of the Nazis whom she had witnessed trucking the Jews out of Amsterdam to concentration camps, where they would be exterminated in furnaces or decimated in work details.
Every day for two years, Gies bought food for the Franks, avoiding suspicion by buying the extra food from different suppliers. She never carried more than what one shopping bag could hold or what she could hide under her coat. Without fail, she took food, magazines and news of the war to this hunted and hungry family.
When the family finally was found by the Nazis, Geis went to the police station the next day, offering her own money to buy their freedom. She failed, not because of any lack of effort, but because of the officer’s lack of humanity. In the end, she was the one who retrieved and saved Anne Frank’s diaries, returning them to Anne’s dad after the war was over and he had returned. Anne herself never made it home.
Gies could have been executed for hiding the Frank family, her arrest avoided only because she recognized the accent of the police officer and told him they were both from Vienna. He decided to let her live, although cursing her for her kindness to the Jews she had hidden and helped, his own humanity nowhere to be found behind the Nazi uniform.
When the Galilean spoke of the Kingdom of God, he was speaking of Miep Gies. She was willing to give up everything for somebody else, and, in so doing, she found the pearl of great price, the heart of God.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 