Subscribe
Hello, friends.
Julia’s mother, my mother-in-law, was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany at the close of World War II. Her parents made a harrowing journey from Lithuania, one of the countries on the Baltic Sea in northern Europe. They traveled in a small group south from Vilnius all the way to Ingolstadt, caught between the Nazis on one side and the Soviets on the other, machine guns and bombs on both sides. Not much of that journey was ever talked about by those who made it, perhaps because of the trauma. But before her dad died, Julia’s mom sat him down and got the story recorded. And after he died, she gathered up the history and put it all in a portfolio for safekeeping.
Earlier this year, one of our kids heard that Lithuania has a law that allows the descendants of those displaced during the war to restore their citizenship. Over the past several months I’ve been working on it, and it’s been fascinating. I’ve pulled the portfolio out and worked through documents in Lithuanian and German: childhood records from the 1930s, passports and birth certificates from the 1940s, all part of building a chain of relationship to restore citizenship. If it all comes together, our children, and their children in perpetuity, will be citizens of both the United States and Lithuania.
Everyone has a folder like this, usually hidden away. I read that the Smithsonian has 155 million items, and only about one percent of them are on view. Maybe you have a folder kept safe somewhere. It’s safe and it’s lost at the same time, waiting for some event to bring it out into the open. Sometimes the folder is real, like this one. Other times it’s a metaphor for our histories, waiting to be remembered or to become useful.
This week I came across a few parables of Jesus that reminded me of this portfolio. These are the Comfortable Words this week, from Matthew 13:44-46 and 52:
“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.”
And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” (Matthew 13:44-46, 52, ESV)
One of the things I love about the parables is how varied the lessons are. Like a jewel brought out into the light, a parable hits you with its beauty, and as you look closely it shines from many angles. The weight of these parables is on the stunning value of the kingdom. But the light reflects in many directions.
Bonhoeffer focused on the cost of the kingdom. “Costly grace,” he wrote, “is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has.” To buy it costs everything. It’s a reversal of Jesus’ teaching elsewhere: you must forfeit the world to gain your own soul.
Others have focused on the joy in the parable. “In his joy,” it says. Selling is not sacrifice, they would say. It is what any sane person does once they have seen the treasure. If you want someone to count the cost, show them how little what they have is worth next to what they are gaining. It reminds me of C. S. Lewis’s line that we are far too easily pleased, like an ignorant child making mud pies in a slum because he can’t imagine what is meant by a holiday at the sea.
The church fathers Irenaeus and Origen read it differently: the Scriptures are the field, and Christ is the treasure hidden within them. Search the Scriptures and you find Christ everywhere, not just in the Gospels.
Others have reminded us that Christ is not the only treasure. We are his treasure. He sells everything to buy the world for the treasure in it: you and me. He gave up everything and suffered for something that didn’t love him back, or if it did, not very well. God calls his people “his treasured possession” in Deuteronomy and elsewhere (Deuteronomy 7:6). That’s remarkable, isn’t it? It’s a completely different understanding of where value comes from. The treasure’s worth is not its inherent value but the value God confers on it. God can make treasure of trash, and we can too.
All of those readings shine a different light of truth, and every one of them is about the treasure: what it costs, what it’s worth, who it is. But notice where Jesus puts it. In a field. Not in a vault, not in a treasury. In the dirt and mud, where people walk and work and sweat. That’s what I keep coming back to. The kingdom of heaven is Christ, but it’s more than Christ alone. It’s his work in the dirt of our lives and our world, everywhere he is at work to bring about the reality of his goodness. And it is hidden within the ordinariness and earthiness of our lives. We have to look for it.
I was recently sitting with an older man as he described how in love he is with his wife. He’s been with her for decades, and to hear him talk about her, it’s as if he’s a teenager falling in love. But suddenly he shifted to one of his greatest fears: losing that love. They aren’t going to live forever. He was afraid he couldn’t live without her, and terribly afraid to leave her alone. He couldn’t imagine either. I could hear how overwhelming the thought was to him. And it struck me that, in the midst of the ordinariness of their lives and love and fears, there was the kingdom of God. The gift of their marriage, of their love, of their momentary existence, was a treasure that will outlast their temporal concerns and fears. “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three,” the apostle Paul said (1 Corinthians 13:13). That is the treasure hidden in the field: their love in Christ, beyond their mortal lives. That is the gift of the kingdom, hidden in the field of their life.
And this is true of the kingdom of God in all our ordinary lives. What is the reign and rule of God, the goodness and blessing of God, in your life that cannot be taken or stolen, that cannot fade or fail? That is what we must contemplate. There is a hiddenness to the kingdom of God inside the ordinariness of our lives. We have to meditate on it, contemplate it. And when we do, when we discover it, its value grows exponentially.
Once the man buys the field, then what? Two temptations wait for him, and for us. The first is to forget the treasure. It strikes me that the parable never says the man went and dug it up. What if he went on with his life, building and tearing down, buying and selling, but never dug up the treasure? To live for the field instead of the treasure. The treasure must be dug up. It must be examined. It must be cherished over and over again.
The other temptation is to flaunt it. To treat it as something for show, to display but not to use. I think of those old china cabinets. They have drawers where treasures are forgotten, and shelves that display fine dishes that are never used. We can do this with our spiritual lives, like curating a museum or an art show of our great treasures.
An American economist in the late 1800s coined an expression for the growing leisure class: conspicuous consumption. It could be applied to a lot of spirituality today. We have a problem with conspicuous spirituality, a cheapened version of the real thing. It takes the treasure, which is intimate and personal and valuable, and turns it into a trinket for show, a trick we do to impress others.
But this treasure is a different kind of treasure. It is not for forgetting, and it is not for flaunting. A few verses later Jesus says, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”
You might picture the master of the house as the curator of a gallery, bringing out old and new works of art. But Jesus’s word takes us somewhere very different. The word here for treasure really means a storehouse. It’s not a museum but a treasury of grain and oil and cloth. “New and old” is provision language: this year’s and last year’s. And the verb, ekballō, is forceful. It literally means to throw out. It’s the same word Jesus uses when he tells us to pray that the Lord of the harvest would send out workers into his harvest. Extravagant sharing. The master of the house is not exhibiting. He is feeding.
Back to that folder of history and documents from Julia’s family. The treasure in it is not just a treasure for them. It is a treasure for us. Something old, brought out and transformed into something new, a blessing for our family today.
But the kingdom of God is not hidden in folders of family history. It’s hidden in our lives today. God is at work in your life, right now. One of the things I’ve enjoyed in this season is that Julia and I each have time to read Scripture and to pray. And when one of us notices some treasure God is speaking to us, we don’t keep it hidden away. And as we share it with each other, and it’s vulnerable to do so, it becomes a real encouragement, provision for the day and for the journey ahead.
That is the master of the house bringing out what is new and what is old. The old: the Scriptures, the story of what God has already done, the treasure others handed down to us. The new: what God is doing in you right now, this week, in the ordinariness of your life. Both are meant to be brought out. Neither is meant to stay in the drawer or on the shelf.
When you notice how the kingdom of God is hidden in the ordinariness of your life, it becomes a treasure not just for you but for others who need to experience it. The treasure of God in your life this week is the hidden work of God, meant to be shared with those around you. And when you share it, you are like the one who brings out provision, not just for yourself, but for those around you.
So as we close, I want you to take a moment right now and ask God two questions. Where is his kingdom hidden in the ordinariness of your life? And who has he placed in your path that you can share that provision with? Some blessing you have discovered, old or new, that someone else needs this week.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.