To modern western ears this may sound like a far fetched story; but, as usual, Jesus was in fact telling of an every day occurrence in Palestine.
As a young boy, I read about pirates burying chests filled with gold on some remote island. In the 49’er days of our statehood, sourdoughs were known to bury their gold nuggets and dust before Wells-Fargo came onto the scene. And it has been rumored that the great golfer, Sam Snead, buried all his winnings in tomato cans in the back yard. But in the days of Jesus, it was a common practice. Palestine was a land of wars and still is. At any time, a man’s back yard might become a battle ground and his house looted. So burying valuables in the ground was one of the most common ways of safeguarding one’s property. The Rabbis had a proverbial saying: “There is only one safe repository for money --- the earth.” I wonder what the Rabbis would say today in light of the current real estate crisis.
Folk-lore is full of tales such as the one we read today. There is one about Alexander the Great who was present when the king of a certain country was called upon to decide a case. A man who had found a treasure in a field, which he had bought from another, wished to return it to the seller. The seller refused to take it back on the grounds that he had sold the field with all its contents. The king settled the matter by deciding that the treasure should be given as a dowry to the daughter of the one man who was going to marry the son of the other. Alexander laughed and said that in his country the king would have killed both men and confiscated the money.
The story that Jesus told was not an improbable happening but rather about something which happened so often that many such stories circulated.
To some readers, this parable probably raises a moral question. When the man found the treasure, he immediately concealed it and rushed off to buy the field without revealing what was in it. This sounds almost like some of the insider trading on Wall Street that we have read about in past several years.
It may be that the man was within his rights. The Jewish Talmud Law is quite clear about findings. “What belongs to the finder and about what must information be given? These things belong to the finder --- if a man finds fruit or scattered money, these belong to the finder.” It would then seem that the man was within his rights. And yet the whole parable has an atmosphere of haste. Why the haste to purchase the field if the treasure legally belonged to the finder anyway?
It has been suggested that Jesus was telling this story of a sharp minded man to get a point across to his disciples. Rhetorically, “If a man will go to all that trouble to get a treasure that perishes, how much more should you spend all your energies and make every sacrifice to get the treasure that matters most of all?” In other words, “If only Christians were as earnest about things of the Kingdom as sharp-minded business people are about the things of business, what a difference it would make in this world of ours.” The one point of the parable is the finding of the treasure and the sacrificing of everything for it; so a person should sacrifice everything for the Kingdom of God.
When we come to the meaning of the parable, the first thing that stands out is the accidental way in which the treasure was discovered. It was found when the man was not looking for it. There have been people who have met Jesus Christ in what looks like a completely accidental way.
Charles Spurgeon, one of America’s greatest evangelists tells this story of his conversion. He was fifteen years old and was off to church one New Year’s morning in New York City. But a blizzard kept him from reaching his church. He turned down a side street and came to a small Methodist chapel. The preacher who was to conduct the service had also been delayed by the blizzard so one of the church officers was called forward to conduct the service for about fifteen people. He was not prepared, obviously. All he could do was keep repeating the text, “Look unto me and be ye saved all the ends of the earth,” because he had nothing else to say. Something about Spurgeon caught the impromptu preacher’s eye; he turned to him and said, “Young man, you look very miserable; and you will always be miserable – miserable in life and miserable in death – if you do not obey my text.” Then he suddenly shouted at Spurgeon, “Young man, look to Jesus! Look, look, look!” Spurgeon recounted, “I did and then and there the cloud was gone, the darkness had rolled away, and that moment I saw the sun.” It looked like a series of the sheerest accidents which made Spurgeon stumble on the grace of Jesus Christ.
It often happened that Jesus came most unexpectedly into a person’s life. An extreme example is Simon of Cyrene. It was the ambition of every Jew once in a lifetime to attend the Passover in Jerusalem. Jews from abroad would scrape and save for the greater part of a lifetime to make it possible. That was probably what Simon had done. He was making his way to the holy city and the sacred temple when he found himself with utter unexpectedness carrying a cross for Jesus (Matthew 27:32). I believe that God is looking for us even before we look for Him.
The man in the parable was at his day’s work when his shovel hit against the treasure and his whole world was changed. And so it is that you and I are likely to come up against God in our daily work. It is one of the amazing facts of life that the day’s work can produce the greatest things.
For years, Johann Sebastian Bach was teacher and organist at St. Thomas’ School in Leipzig. His salary was about $600 per year. His duties entailed training the boys’ choir, playing at worship services, weddings and funerals, and – most amazing of all – produce new compositions every Sunday. They were never published; they were simply written, sung, and then stored in a cabinet where they aged and were forgotten … music that we cherish today such as “Jesu, joy of man’s desiring.” His day’s work in Leipzig produced 265 church cantatas; 263 chorales; 14 larger works; 24 secular cantatas; 6 concertos; 4 overtures; 18 piano and violin concertos; 365 organ works and 162 pieces for the piano.
It is not in longing for some other task than our own but in doing our own faithfully and well that we find happiness and God.
The man in the parable seized the crucial moment when it came. He didn’t stop to make a full and critical examination. He acted as did Charles Spurgeon.
One of the greatest dangers in life is that we may be moved by some high impulse, but we do not act at once and that impulse dies. If we would possess the treasure of the Kingdom we must seize the moments however unexpectedly they come – and they will come, not in times of vain longings for what we don’t have, but in a day’s work.
I close with these words from a familiar hymn by James Russell Lowell (Hymnbook, Hymn No. 361):
Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,Amen.
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some new decision, offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.
