Better Light
Genesis 29:15-28; Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

July 24, 2004

There aren’t a lot of pearls in Wascana Lake or in Echo Lake or in Lake Diefenbaker, for that matter. We just don’t have the right kind of waters, the right kind of sea bed, the right kind of oysters, and never do we have enough heat. But we do know pearls and some of us want some. I’ll hear confessions later about how some of you really do understand how the merchant found one extraordinary pearl and sold all that he had to possess it. No need to explain that one at all. You can tell me what it’s really like.

Jesus was telling a lot of parables and this one always seems to have stuck in our imagination. Like a lot of parables, the analogy is only meant to go so far. If a merchant sold all he had to buy this one particular pearl, he would be dirt poor. A nice pearl to look at and turn around in his hands, but he would have nothing left at all unless he sold this wonderful pearl to recoup some income. And then he wouldn’t have the pearl anymore.

You can’t take the parable all the way precisely because Jesus is not really talking about pearls. The pearl here is the icon of the most important and precious part of your life, something that matters before everything else. Such a “pearl” you just might be willing, in a manner of speaking and living, to put aside the rewards of everything else in order to have that one treasure.

That pearl of great value assumes many shapes and colours. The Syrian Church has a long affection for the pearl (marganita) as the symbol of what shape the Gospel takes on. Hymns and poems and stories abound about the Pearl, one of them by a bishop and poet Jacob of Serug who died in 521. It’s actually a funeral sermon about a beloved Daughter of the Covenant - we might call her a nun today.

Her pearl that she had brought up from the darkness of the deep ocean to the safety of the light above the water was her virginity. She had preserved her virginity, carrying it safely all the way up through the dark depths of this evil world to the light of the kingdom of heaven at death. There is such great joy and rejoicing at her triumph upon her death, where she would no longer have to contend against the forces that work to destroy her pearl, that one cannot help but feel victorious too. The angels are jumping up and down with glee because now they have some who is like them (“who neither marry nor are given in marriage” - Luke 20:35), and has survived much more challenging and strenuous conditions than the angels have.

So there is one kind of Pearl. You might just have a different kind of pearl in mind as the thing you would sell all you have to possess. Another Jacob did.

The family saga continues and everything is normal except the circumstances. Jacob has gained by deception what he had thought was the pearl - the blessing and birthright bestowed by his father Isaac. In plotting with him, his mother Rebekah too believed that such was the stuff of pearls, even in the middle of the desert. “Esau was a hairy man, but I am a smooth man” is the scriptural signature of Jacob and Rebekah’s deceit. It worked, if getting everybody cursing you is a sign of receiving a blessing. Jacob got the clear message that his brother want to erase his blessing the permanent way, and so he became a fugitive all the way back to Haran, his mother’s ancestral region in northern Mesopotamia.

But when Jacob returned to the homeland he was not home, a stranger in a strange land. He did not really know whether the customs he grew up with were acceptable and appropriate here. What happened when he arrived is very similar to the encounters of Abraham’s chief servant whose mission was to find a good Aramean wife for his son Isaac. Water must make people talk in these arid places, for it all seems to happen at the well. Jacob meets people who know his uncle Laban, and by serendipity here comes his daughter Rachel, watering all the animals. It’s déjà vu all over again and Jacob is smitten, even kissing Rachel in relief that he is no longer a stranger.

Laban hears Jacob’s story, whether the whole story as we know it is not spelled out, but it is apparent Jacob is welcome to stay. I can’t have you work for nothing, Laban says to Jacob, even if you are family. What would you like for your wages? Money was not yet a commodity, so wealth came in the form of property. Jacob, however, had seen a pearl of great value, and asks for Rachel as his wife. I will serve the traditional seven years of indentured labour to attain her hand. All is agreed, happily so it seems.

Albert Einstein’s explanation of relativity that two minutes sitting on a hot stove is an eternity; two minutes kissing your beloved is like no time at all. Make that seven years as but a few days and you understand a little bit what it would take to sell all you possess. What are material possessions compared to the blissful kiss of the one you really love, the pearl worth everything?

Seven years are completed in a sentence or two and the wedding takes place, but Laban has another agenda. Somehow the older daughter Leah is slipped into the dark tent and Jacob makes love to the wrong sister, and then comes one of the funniest sentences in the Bible - “in the morning it was Leah.” I guess they did not talk in the dark. Maybe what goes around comes around, for Jacob had pretended to be Esau and his father recognized it was the wrong voice. Jacob just mumbled to distract Isaac; maybe Leah mumbled too.

We don’t do that around here, explains Laban a little too late; we never marry the younger daughter first. Work seven more years and you can have Rachel too. What Laban is not recorded as saying is that Jacob has Leah now, like it or not. That must have been a fun and eternally longer seven years. I don’t believe Rachel was happy either and when the story resumes, Jacob and Rachel get even somewhat with Laban for his 14 years of free labour. Jacob now knew better than anyone what it means to sell all you have to possess the pearl of great value. May we love as well, as faithfully, as enduringly as that scoundrel Jacob who though he’d been had and good, never took his eye off the pearl of his life.

It’s not an easy task to figure out what kind of pearl you would sell all for. In all these miniature parables, take note, you don’t get to choose your favourite or particular pearl. It chooses you, God chooses you: there it is and only then do you know what it is that you really desire.

The shape of the pearl changes. If one listens to the news and politics and opinions since September 11, it is not hard to see that security from terrorism has become the pearl of great price. Especially in these last several weeks of violence in England and Iraq and Egypt, there have been all sorts of proposals of wages for the hand of peace and security. There are some leaders who are very willing, perhaps eager, to sell all of our freedom to hold for a moment the pearl of security and freedom. Many say that is a regrettable, but necessary price in today’s complex, conflicted world.

Yet for Jesus, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant who finds a pearl of great value. You can call it by a lot of names - the kingdom of heaven, the Gospel, the covenant - but nowhere is the pearl of personal and community security from random acts of violence ever guaranteed in the Bible or Judeo-Christian history. We are guaranteed a love so strong that it changes our whole beings. We are guaranteed a forgiveness so embracing that at our worst we realize that once again we can become our best. The kingdom of heaven is already in the middle of our lives and existence transforming our hatreds, altering our vocations, liberating our bodies and our souls from the fear of fear itself, expanding and contracting that most human aspect of God’s creation - time.

The pearl for which I would sell all is to have time to love. I would rather spend eternity loving someone else than figuring out how to turn off the hot stove on which I am sitting.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan