Last Sunday's Gospel: The Kingdom of Heaven

Parable of the treasure in the field. Possibly Rembrandt.

The gospel reading at last Sunday’s mass was a string of short parables describing the Kingdom of Heaven. An essential subject, yet, as usual with parables, it is hard to make out what is really being said. 

“Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid. In his joy, he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

“Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who is a merchant seeking fine pearls, who having found one pearl of great price, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.

Parable of the pearl. Mironov.

“Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a dragnet that was cast into the sea and gathered some fish of every kind, which, when it was filled, fishermen drew up on the beach. They sat down and gathered the good into containers, but the bad they threw away. So it will be in the end of the world. The angels will come and separate the wicked from among the righteous, and will cast them into the furnace of fire. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Jesus said to them, “Have you understood all these things?”

They answered him, “Yes, Lord.”

This seems intentionally funny. Really? Was that all so understandable to you?

He said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been made a disciple in the Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who is a householder, who brings out of his treasure new and old things.”

Matthew 13: 44-52, WEB

Therefore? How does this statement follow from what has come before? Why are we even talking about scribes?

Now let’s back up. Start with the treasure in the field. An obvious contradiction here. Why, having discovered the treasure, doesn’t the man just take it? Why rebury it, then buy the field?

And the pearl. Is it obvious that a merchant is better off having sold his entire inventory for one pearl? Is there any reason to suppose he would get a bigger profit out of it than out of another pearl, simply because it is more expensive?

For that matter, who fishes with a dragnet from the beach? How do you drag a net from a stationary position on the beach?

These seem to be a series of riddles. Let’s try to solve them.

The field that must be bought in order to yield its treasure must have an inexhaustible yield. The pearl that is more profitable than all other pearls combined must have an inexhaustible value. The sea that yields abundant fish even standing and casting at the shoreline must be inexhaustible.

And the scribe?

The scribe, that is, the writer, genuinely does, in his regular profession, have an inexhaustible resource. He draws on imagination and memory: “new and old things.” There is no end to the treasures the mind can produce.

Jesus suggests the situation of the scribe sums up the other examples. That is, the kingdom of heaven is most justly comparable to—or is—the memory and the imagination. These are our experience of the spiritual world.

Accordingly, the association of the prior examples seems dreamlike, an association if image motifs, rather than making some rational point: a treasure in a field, then a treasure from the sea, then good and bad things emerging from the sea, then good and bad people burning in a furnace.

Together, it sounds like the imagination, like a reverie.

One implication, since this is so, is that every scribe, every writer, every artist, is a disciple of the kingdom of heaven. It is essentially a spiritual office.

One might mistakenly thing this statement weak: that the Kingdom of Heaven is “only imaginary”; “made up”; “a fiction.” Jesus denies this by his reference to the burning of souls by the angels. This world of the imagination is, he says, more consequential, more meaningful, than the world we only sense with our vegetative senses. It is where the truth is revealed, and the real values of all things.

We ignore or trivialize it at our ultimate peril.

Now, perhaps, we see it only at a distance, and indistinctly, as through a glass darkly. But one day we will see it face to face.