Obviously the treasure and the pearl are of incomparable value. Obviously the occasion is unique and will never return. Obviously in such a situation one must act decisively and go for broke. Obviously one must give everything to achieve the reign of God; only those who lose their life will gain it. This dread paradox is also apparent in our double parable, just as it appears again and again throughout Jesus’ whole proclamation.
And yet, all that is embedded in and must be read in light of the unimaginable joy with which the two treasure finders act. “In joy he goes” cannot be missed. In that, the fifth position is correct. The joy and fascination of the find are so great that they shape the whole event. The day laborer does not hesitate for a second, nor does the merchant. They are captivated by the brilliance of the treasure and the shimmer of the pearl. They have been seized by a joy that exceeds all measure. This does not exclude the fact that (as we see in the action of the day laborer) they act cleverly.
Jesus is here speaking a crucial truth, and what is so marvelous is that he does not formulate it as a theory but tells it as a story. To be so moved by God’s cause that one gives everything for its sake is not something one can ultimately do out of a bare awareness of duty, a “thou shalt!” or certainly “you must!” That we freely will what God wills is evidently possible only when we behold bodily the beauty of God’s cause, so that we take joy in and even lust after what God wants to do in the world, and so that this desire for God and God’s cause is greater than all our human self-centeredness.8
The merchant holds to the light the pearl he has finally found, and the day laborer buries his hands in the silver coins. For Jesus, the reign of God is palpable and visible. It does not exist merely within people, and it is not hidden somewhere beyond history. Even now it can be seen, grasped, acquired, taken in exchange. That is precisely why it fascinates people and moves them to change their whole lives for the sake of the new, without in the process losing their freedom. The brilliance and joy of the reign of God are ultimately the gravity that moves us and that again and again causes the grace of God to win out in this world.
Jesus’ Fundamental Choice
It seems to me that the parables of the treasure and the pearl represent a key with whose help we can understand Jesus himself more profoundly. Every really good text anyone speaks or writes is autobiographical to some degree. The same is true of this double parable. Here Jesus has told something of his own story and the basic choice in his life—perhaps entirely unconsciously, but perhaps deliberately, though with reticence and the most profound tact.
Jesus himself had, after all, given up everything else for the sake of the reign of God. He had abandoned the security of family and marriage. He had relinquished the joy of having children. He had rejected the possibility of having a house or property or other means of security. Still more profoundly, he had refused to make himself central and so exercise religious power—the most sublime and dangerous form of power. He corrects someone who calls him “good teacher”: “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” (Mark 10:18). Jesus does not live for himself but is totally and exclusively surrendered to the cause of God. What is crucial is that this fundamental choice did not make him an oppressed and tortured person out of whom emanates a fear of having missed out on something, or a person in whom a renunciation with which he himself has not fully come to terms is translated into aggression against others.
Jesus is a man of unheard-of freedom. He is not the type of the tortured, bitter, dissatisfied, or disappointed. Nor is he the type of the tragic or heroic. He remains to the end a free person, despite the radicality with which he goes his own way. He remains to the end a man of complete dedication and humanity.
I think the double parable of the treasure and the pearl gives us the key to Jesus’ inner freedom and unbrokenness: it is true that Jesus had surrendered everything and continued to the end to give his all; in the end he had to die. But he did so like the day laborer and the merchant, who do not regret for a second the loss of their old property but instead act out of an unspeakable joy and fascination. In the blinding light of the discovery everything else pales.
It is only in this context that Jesus’ celibacy is comprehensible. If Jesus remained unmarried it was not because he despised sexuality or had a false attitude toward human physicality but simply because what had happened to him was like what he tells of in the parable of the hidden treasure and the precious pearclass="underline" he was seized and overpowered by the bliss of the reign of God—and not a reign that was coming some time in the future, but one that was beginning already, that one could already gain, that one could already cash in and deal with today.
The reign of God is happening already here in this world—today. It is happening wherever people believe the Gospel, accept the reign of God, allow their lives to be changed because of their fascination with it—when they turn back from their own life plans and toward the new thing God wants to create. The parable of the treasure and the pearl is about this earth, now, today.
Brothers, Sisters, Houses, Fields
The new thing that comes with the reign of God is not something purely spiritual, deeply hidden in individual hearts. The new thing was as concrete for Jesus as the treasure in the field and the precious pearl. It is the community of disciples he gathers around him. It is the “new family” of those who follow him. It is all those who hear his words and become sisters and brothers to one another. One day Peter says to Jesus:
“Look, we have left everything and followed you.” Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields—with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.” (Mark 10:28-30)
This paradoxical saying shows how real the promises on which Jesus and his disciples are counting truly are. They have left everything: houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers. But everything they have left they will receive back abundantly “now in this age”: a hundred sisters, a hundred brothers, a hundred mothers, houses, and fields. Jesus by no means meant that symbolically. He is talking about real relationships. He means really a hundred brothers and really a hundred sisters. He means a perceptible wealth in brotherhood and sisterhood. All this takes place on the ground of the new family, the common life of the community of disciples—in which, it is true, fathers no longer have a role to play. The patriarchalism of the Near Eastern family has been destroyed. God alone will now become the measure of genuine fatherhood (cf. Matt 23:9).
With all that, Jesus kindled a fire that has never been put out. It flamed up anew on Pentecost and burned in the communities that, in an unbelievably short time, sprang up all around the Mediterranean. Those communities understood themselves not as religious groupings in which individuals came together in order to be able to live their private piety in a better way. They regarded themselves as a social body “in Jesus Christ,” a new family, a new society.
Believing and allowing oneself to be baptized in the name of Jesus meant a transformation of one’s whole life, a new common life in the spirit of Jesus—and, where necessary, even a counter-world against ancient society. Faith in Jesus Christ was from the beginning more than mere interiority. Where the issue is the Gospel of Jesus it is always about the world and transforms the world. The widespread notion that within the church Christians learn faith in order to apply it in the world is a perversion, to the very root, of what Jesus actually wanted. Faith is from its first second about forming and transforming the world, and the church is the place where the material of the world is grasped and redeemed by faith.