Scripture

Oct 7, 2024 ∞

Sermon on the Mount: fractal structure and meaning

The Sermon on the Mount is often considered the core of Jesus’s teachings. But if you just read the sermon beginning to end, it comes across like it has no structure, like it’s just a random walk through unconnected topics. I propose that it does have a structure, and a very informative one.

In the sermon, we often see things divided into four sections, and the third of the four doesn’t quite fit with the other three. For a clear example, consider what I’d say is the second section of the sermon, which contains four lessons:

6:1 “Be careful not to display your righteousness merely to be seen by people. Otherwise you have no reward with your Father in heaven. 6:2 Thus whenever you do charitable giving, do not blow a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in synagogues and on streets so that people will praise them. I tell you the truth, they have their reward. 6:3 But when you do your giving, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 6:4 so that your gift may be in secret. And your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you.

6:5 “Whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, because they love to pray while standing in synagogues and on street corners so that people can see them. Truly I say to you, they have their reward. 6:6 But whenever you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you.

6:7 When you pray, do not babble repetitiously like the Gentiles, because they think that by their many words they will be heard. 6:8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. 6:9 So pray this way: Our Father in heaven, may your name be honored, 6:10 may your kingdom come, may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. 6:11 Give us today our daily bread, 6:12 and forgive us our debts, as we ourselves have forgiven our debtors. 6:13 And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. 6:14 “For if you forgive others their sins, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 6:15 But if you do not forgive others, your Father will not forgive you your sins.

6:16 “When you fast, do not look sullen like the hypocrites, for they make their faces unattractive so that people will see them fasting. I tell you the truth, they have their reward. 6:17 When you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, 6:18 so that it will not be obvious to others when you are fasting, but only to your Father who is in secret. And your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you.

Give in secret
Pray in secret
The Lord’s Prayer
Fast in secret

Or consider the fourth section, also with four lessons:

7:13 “Enter through the narrow gate, because the gate is wide and the way is spacious that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. 7:14 But the gate is narrow and the way is difficult that leads to life, and there are few who find it.

7:15 “Watch out for false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are voracious wolves. 7:16 You will recognize them by their fruit. Grapes are not gathered from thorns or figs from thistles, are they? 7:17 In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. 7:18 A good tree is not able to bear bad fruit, nor a bad tree to bear good fruit. 7:19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 7:20 So then, you will recognize them by their fruit.

7:21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter into the kingdom of heaven – only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. 7:22 On that day, many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, didn’t we prophesy in your name, and in your name cast out demons and do many powerful deeds?’ 7:23 Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you. Go away from me, you lawbreakers!’

7:24 “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them is like a wise man who built his house on rock. 7:25 The rain fell, the flood came, and the winds beat against that house, but it did not collapse because it had been founded on rock. 7:26 Everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 7:27 The rain fell, the flood came, and the winds beat against that house, and it collapsed; it was utterly destroyed!”

Narrow gate vs. wide gate
Bad fruit vs. good fruit
Fruit matters more than words
House on sand vs. rock

Those two sections are kind of obvious, and help us identify the first and third section. The first section is all of chapter 5, which also has four distinct lessons.

Beatitudes
Salt of the earth/light of the world
Righteousness through keeping Torah properly
Antitheses

What’s left is the third section, and it’s not nearly so obvious as the other three, but it does have a pattern. The catch here is that each of the four lessons in this section is actually two lessons, and each pair (except the third) is on the same two subjects. The first half of each is about God providing for our needs, and the second half is about generosity in our treatment of others.

Treasure in heaven vs. earth / good eye vs. bad eye
Do not worry / do not judge
Speck vs. plank / pearls before pigs
Ask, seek, knock / do unto others

We can now put these four sections in order, with some proposed section headings.

Being God’s children:

Beatitudes
Salt of the earth/light of the world
Righteousness through keeping Torah properly
Antitheses

How God’s kingdom looks:

Give in secret
Pray in secret
The Lord’s Prayer
Fast in secret

God providing/treating others well:

Treasure in heaven vs. earth / good eye vs. bad eye
Do not worry / do not judge
Speck vs. plank / pearls before pigs
Ask, seek, knock / Do unto others

The way of life vs. the way of death:

Narrow gate vs. wide gate
Bad fruit vs. good fruit
Fruit matters more than words
House on sand vs. rock

Now, for our final trick, let’s take those section headings and see where else we find those same ideas. Oh, wait! It’s the Lord’s Prayer! Consider that prayer as a set of four couplets, which in Hebrew fashion repeat the same idea twice.

Our Father in heaven / hallowed be your name. God is our father, and we are those who make God’s name be seen as holy throughout the world. Two ways of saying the same thing, because that’s simply what it means to be God’s children. The Beatitudes, salt and light, and the antitheses are all how we should be as people, so people see God through us.
Your kingdom come / your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Two ways of saying the same thing, because God’s kingdom on earth looks like God’s will being done, and what God wants is people being right internally rather than doing good things for show.
Give us this day our daily bread / forgive our sins as we forgive others. Just like in the third section of the sermon, each lesson is a pair of lessons about God providing and about our treatment of others. This doesn’t look like two way of saying the same thing, but it is. God gives us what we need, and that is identical to God forgiving us as we forgive others.
Lead us not into temptation / deliver us from evil. Two ways of saying the same thing; we have a choice to make, and we must choose well.

In summary, the Sermon on the Mount has four sections, each section has four lessons on the same topic, and both the third section and the third lesson in each section stand out from the others. The sections are all topics from the Lord’s Prayer, which is itself one of the mismatched third lessons. It’s structure that appears at multiple levels and the lowest level references the top levels all over again. The Sermon on the Mount is a fractal.

Oct 5, 2024 ∞

Virtue ethics

Let’s talk about ethics. I’m not any sort of expert, but the great Dr. Anagonye once explained that there are three kinds of ethical systems: rule-based, virtue-based, and consequentialist. Either an action is right because it’s consistent with the rules, it is right because it is the thing a good person would do, or it is right because good things come of it.

Virtue ethics are particularly interesting. If you should, for example, be a brave person, the right action for you is the one that is bravest. And because we are creatures of habit, that action actually makes you a braver person. We live as the person we want to be, and it becomes easier and easier to be that person over time. We become better by acting better. We don’t exactly fake it until we make it, but it’s not far off.

I would suggest that Christian ethics should be understood as virtue ethics. The human problem, from this perspective, is that we are lacking virtue. It’s not that we are people who have done bad things, it’s that we are simply bad people. We can’t not do bad things, selfish things, short-sighted things, self-destructive things. Our nature is sinful. We need our hearts replaced or there is no hope for us to survive, and truthfully, is it even worth living as the creatures we have been?

But we can’t change alone, and God, hallelujah, in his mercy has not left us alone. He isn’t demanding perfection from us; he’s offering it to us. As Christians, the right action is the one that Christ would do (WWJD YODO and then face judgment), because that is the action that makes us more like Christ. These sad beings we are cannot survive; if you gave a human immortality and then said “BTW that one thing will kill you” we’ll do exactly that one thing. We have to change, or we will and must die.

So just for fun (because this is my idea of fun) I searched scripture for virtue lists. I came up with a couple dozen, containing about 200 distinct entries. I then grouped them. First I note there are three particular virtue clusters, which are almost meta-virtues:

Commitment to truth, a recognition that external reality exists and a desire to become correct
Humility before God, continual recognition that his ways are correct and ours are wrong
Commitment to restoration, recognition that things are not the way they should be and the drive to fix them

Put another way, recognize that objective rightness does exist, everything (including you) is broken and dying, and God’s way is the way of life. The rest is just figuring out what that way of life looks like. And what do you know, the other virtues can be summed up under the fruit of the Spirit. Approximately:

Love and respect
Faithfulness
Patience and hope
Kindness, compassion, mercy, and generosity
Gratitude and joy
Forgiveness and peacemaking
Integrity and self-control

So if you find yourself trying to understand Christian ethics as a giant list of detailed rules, maybe back up and consider that rules should be pointing you toward virtues. The central question is, who are you trying to be? Then go be that person.

Oct 4, 2024 ∞

Where did all these demons come from?

Another question about demons interests me that I’ve never seen addressed: where did they come from, anyhow?

Read through the whole Old Testament. There’s not a mention of demon oppression anywhere. The closest we get is Saul who is oppressed by an evil spirit from God. (This is not “evil” in the moral sense, but evil in the sense of causing injury.) There’s mention of a “demon” in Leviticus, but it’s not explained, and doesn’t seem to be the sort that oppresses people. In Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar is driven from human society in a fashion that looks kind of like demon oppression, but it’s not described as such. In the Old Testament, we just don’t see demon oppression as a phenomenon.

Yet in the gospels, Jesus can’t step outside without tripping over a demoniac. We go from a world with no mention of demons in it, to demons everywhere you look. It’s pandemonium! And Matthew, Mark, and Luke also feel no need to explain to the audiences what’s happening, “Oh, this was during the great dimensional cross-rip of the Judean Tetrarchy.” They just assume their audiences know what’s up with all the demons and go on with telling their stories.

(John, on the other hand, doesn’t mention any demons, which is an interesting point in itself.)

It’s a little better (???) when we look at the Second Temple literature, in between the Old and New Testament. In Tobit, about 200 BCE, a Jewish woman living in Ninevah after the Assyrian deportation is oppressed by a demon who kills every man she marries, until her final husband exercises the demon by burning fish organs. (The Deuterocanon is trippy sometimes!) And 1 Enoch from about the same time period elaborates at length on how the spirits of the Nephilim from Genesis 6 became evil spirits tormenting mankind. One might assume the writers of 1 Enoch feel a need to explain the origin of the demons they encounter in the world. And there are other second-temple-era references to demons, such as Solomon having knowledge of how to drive them out.

Clearly the original audiences of the (synoptic) gospels were expected to not be surprised that Jesus casts out demons, nor that there are so many demons to cast out. If we assume the biblical texts genuinely describe demons, it seems like either 1) at some point a bunch of demons showed up in Israel that just weren’t there before, or 2) demons were all over Israel in the Old Testament period too, but nobody wrote anything about it.

So what changed?

Here’s a guess, and it’s only a guess. But when Jerusalem fell to Babylon and the first temple was destroyed, Ezekiel had a vision of God’s glorious presence up and leaving. And while a second temple was constructed, that presence of God was never understood to have returned. Indeed, the Jewish people of the second temple period understood themselves to still be in exile, despite having bodily returned to the promised land.

Perhaps during the Old Testament period, demons really were everywhere in the world. Everywhere except Israel, because Israel was protected by the presence of YHWH. When he withdrew his presence, that protection was lost. So in the second temple period we read about in the gospels, Israel was subject to the same demonic “infestation” as the rest of the world always had been. And after Pentecost, when God’s presence returned to his new temple, the Church, demons have again been largely driven out of the entire world.

None of that explains why John doesn’t talk about demons, of course. That’s another post.

Oct 1, 2024 ∞

Spirit of Python

I’m a fan of the late Dr. Michael Heiser. If you want to spend four hours listening to an exquisite exposition comparing the early and late dates of the Exodus, he’s your guy. What he’s probably best known for is his study of the spiritual world-view of the biblical authors, which is the kind of thinking that leads me to posts like this.

Acts 16 has a particularly interesting story.

16:16 Now as we were going to the place of prayer, a slave girl met us who had a spirit that enabled her to foretell the future by supernatural means. She brought her owners a great profit by fortune-telling. 16:17 She followed behind Paul and us and kept crying out, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who are proclaiming to you the way of salvation.” 16:18 She continued to do this for many days. But Paul became greatly annoyed, and turned and said to the spirit, “I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her!” And it came out of her at once. 16:19 But when her owners saw their hope of profit was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities.

A few things catch my attention about this passage.

There are all sorts of examples of demon oppression in Matthew, Mark, Luke and Acts (though notably almost none elsewhere). The language here is different. This isn’t described as a demon or an unclean spirit. Instead, it’s a spirit of divination. In Greek it’s a spirit of Python, which as a programmer I just find hilarious.
This spirit doesn’t torment the girl. It seems to do nothing at all to harm her. In fact, the spirit doesn’t seem to do anything objectionable! Paul really is a servant of the most-high God proclaiming the way of salvation! At a glance, this girl/spirit is helping!
Paul doesn’t drive out the spirit on sight. He waits days, and finally only drives it out because it annoys him enough.
This spirit has enough people convinced that it can tell the future that the girls' enslavers are making a profit. How? Does it just put on a good show? Or can this thing actually tell the future? Or maybe somewhere in between, it doesn’t know the future, but it knows things the girl couldn’t otherwise know, like how demons would recognize Jesus on sight.

I suggest that this spirit is an example of something not found elsewhere in scripture: a neutral spirit. It isn’t working directly for God, but it also isn’t trying to be a force of chaos and death by harming people. Maybe it wants to serve God but doesn’t know how to do it well, maybe it has some other tiny agenda. But it’s just hanging out in this girl and making her life… interesting.

Now, this girl can’t be running around all day not making a profit. Her enslavers wouldn’t let that go on. And we note that Paul driving out that spirit isn’t an obvious solution to his annoyance; the girl can still run around proclaiming exactly what she has been! Yet she apparently stops when her profitability is removed. Presumably this spirit is calling out Paul as a servant of God because that will somehow make money, and when the money stops, so does the proclamation.

I suggest this group is using Paul as a draw for larger audiences. The spirit’s declarations bring people to Paul, and the bigger the crowd, the more people are going to want to pay for a foretelling from the girl. If the enslavers think Paul is a huckster like they are, then they might just see this as synergy between their two “acts.” In short, they’re making a profit off Paul’s spread of the gospel. And there’s no way Paul will put up with that for long.

Oct 1, 2024 ∞

Romans 13 and the presumed justice of civil authority

How Christians should interact with civil government is a deep topic, which I don’t plan to comprehensively address here. But I do want to talk about one passage, Romans 13:1-7.

13:1 Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except by God’s appointment, and the authorities that exist have been instituted by God. 13:2 So the person who resists such authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will incur judgment 13:3 (for rulers cause no fear for good conduct but for bad). Do you desire not to fear authority? Do good and you will receive its commendation, 13:4 for it is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be in fear, for it does not bear the sword in vain. It is God’s servant to administer retribution on the wrongdoer. 13:5 Therefore it is necessary to be in subjection, not only because of the wrath of the authorities but also because of your conscience. 13:6 For this reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants devoted to governing. 13:7 Pay everyone what is owed: taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.

This passage is often understood to mean that all authorities everywhere are put in place by God. There is certainly a degree to which that is true, in that God has the power to remove any authorities and is choosing not to in many cases. But the idea that God specifically selects all civil rulers is not found in this passage. Let me explain.

In this passage, Paul says that the authorities that exist have been appointed by God. We tend to assume that he is making a universal statement about all authorities in every context. Here’s the problem: he also says that the authorities will commend you if you do what is good. To be consistent in our reading, we would have to assume that that is also a statement about all authorities in every context. Agreed?

But that simply cannot be! Paul himself has been assaulted by authorities for doing good. Paul has been the authority that assaults others for doing good. The entire gospel Paul preaches is that of a man who was crucified by the authorities despite having done no wrong! There is no way Paul could ever say “all authorities everywhere will commend you if you do good.”

So what is happening here?

Our mistake is in universalizing this passage. We hear Paul say “the authorities that exist” and assume he’s referring to all authorities in all places in times. In fact, Paul is writing to Christians in Rome around 56 AD. Perhaps everything Paul says about those authorities is true: they were appointed by God, and would reward those who do right. We have no evidence of any empire-wide Roman persecution of Christians until after that point. In fact, not long after writing Romans Paul travels to Jerusalem and the temple authorities try to have him killed, while it’s the Roman authorities that keep Paul alive! Clearly Paul doesn’t see Rome as a force necessarily working against Christ and his Church at this point in history.

There’s every chance Paul wouldn’t say the same about the authorities in Rome a few years later, since they had him executed.

So what can we learn from this? Well, apparently some authorities are appointed by God, but not necessarily all. Which ones? Presumably the ones that reward the good and punish the wrong. The authorities appointed by God are God’s servants, even if they don’t realize that’s what they’re doing. Authorities that do not serve God, on the other hand, authorities that work against God, Paul says nothing about in this passage. We have to look elsewhere for guidance on dealing with them. Perhaps that’s for another post.

Oct 1, 2024 ∞

Salt as fertilizer

Jesus tells his audience for the Sermon on the Mount that they are the “salt of the earth.” What, exactly, does that mean? I thought I knew before I started writing this. Part of the purpose of this blog is to work out my own thoughts, even if it’s in public!

Matthew is the only one to use the phrase “salt of the earth” but Mark and Luke both talk about salt losing its saltiness, with variations. The variations may help us figure out what’s happening.

Matthew: You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its flavor, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled on by people.

Mark: Everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with each other.

Luke: Salt is good, but if salt loses its flavor, how can its flavor be restored? It is of no value for the soil or for the manure pile; it is to be thrown out. The one who has ears to hear had better listen!

Let’s start with Mark, whose text is honestly confounding. Jesus is talking about how avoiding hell (Gehenna in this case, we’ll talk about “hell” later) is worth any cost. And then he says “everyone will be salted with fire.” (Or maybe he says “Every sacrifice will be salted with salt.” Or maybe both, the manuscripts vary.) As best I can tell, nobody is sure what this means. Jesus seems to jump from avoiding hell to being salted with fire, to salt losing saltiness, to having salt in ourselves and being at peace with each other. There’s no obvious thread here.

Now, I think there is a train of thought happening here, but I’m going to have to save that for another post. For now, let’s look at the words being used.

The word for “salted” shows up nowhere else in the New Testament except Matthew 5 and Mark 9. But in the Old Testament it does show up in Leviticus 2:13 and in Ezekiel 16:4.

That Ezekiel passage is particularly interesting, because it implies newborns should be salted. Why, exactly? Well, again, nobody seems to know, but it’s been a thing discussed for a long time. So is Jesus saying fire will do for us what salt does for newborns, some form of cleaning and purification? But then, why would we have salt in ourselves? The language doesn’t quite fit.

In the Leviticus 2 passage, it’s specifically grain offerings that have to be salted, so at least it makes some sense to talk about having salt in yourself, if you (or whoever Jesus is addressing here) are the grain offering. And grain offerings were offerings by fire, so that’s consistent at least with everyone being salted with fire. The fire applied to the people (which is presumably unpleasant) is like the salt of the grain offering, perhaps suffering to be made a holy offering to God, much as Paul compares himself to a drink offering. Maybe that’s something Mark has going on.

Except for Luke, where that makes no sense at all. Luke talks about salt being fit for soil or a manure pile, not for offerings to God. This is salt as fertilizer. Their salt wouldn’t have been our chemically pure table salt, it would have been obtained by evaporating sea water, and sea salt has all sorts of great plant nutrients in it. Salting the earth doesn’t ruin it, it turns it into a productive field, because really, who would be stupid enough to ruin perfectly good land in a context where your society needs every scrap of food it can grow? Now weirdly, in Luke we get no explanation of why Jesus suddenly starts talking about salt. He doesn’t compare it to people or make any apparent point with it. This may require further consideration in another post.

Can we square salt as fertilizer with Mark’s usage? Mark’s “have salt in yourself” makes sense, if we are ourselves the manure the salt is mixed into, so we can be fertilizer. So while Matthew says “you are the salt” and Mark says “have salt in you,” they’re using slightly different metaphors, but either way the purpose is for us to apply that salt to the world, preparing the world for growth. That’s consistent with the common agricultural/harvest metaphor for the coming of the Kingdom of God; the purpose of God’s people is to prepare the world for the growth of the Kingdom. But what does it mean for everyone to be salted with fire?

Now I want to get into the Greek a bit. I claim no expertise here, but as far as I can tell, the word here translated “everyone” is really just “all.” All will be salted with fire. The idea that it’s “all people” is an assumption by the translators from context, but it could also mean “all the world” or “everything.” Now, the idea that everything will be salted by fire makes more sense, if we understand salting to mean “preparing for new growth.” The world will be prepared for new growth by fire coming to destroy the corruption that already exists, and the disciples will be part of that as long as they don’t become corrupt and lose their own potential for facilitating that growth in the world.

There are some very smart people who read the salt passages differently than I do, of course. If you’re convinced that salt really is about purification rather than fertilization, I’m not claiming to be an authority that can tell you otherwise. But I do think this is a very significant theological point. If we assume these passages to be directed at all of Christ’s disciples, we ourselves should have salt in us, and be salt to the world. But are we just preserving the world against destruction, or are we making the world ready for new growth? These are very different perspectives of what exactly our purpose is.

I would suggest that God’s acts of creation are not just bringing something from nothing, they’re bringing order from chaos. As we have been assigned the task of reflecting God’s image to creation, we are invited to participate in that ongoing work of creation. Clearly we are not here to merely preserve what we have been given, but to make things grow. God’s people are the fertilizer of the earth; be sure to keep that fertilizer in yourself, so you can do the job you were meant to do.

Sep 30, 2024 ∞

The Antitheses

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives the six antitheses. “You have heard it said X, but I say to you Y.” I suggest that these six are specifically chosen to represent six figures who were, or should have been, leaders of God’s people. Let’s take a look.

First, we read about murder, anger with a brother, and offerings to God. Who does that make you think of? Cain.

Second, we read about adultery and looking at a woman to desire her. That’s David.

Third, divorce. This is actually kind of interesting, because there are surprisingly few people in the Old Testament who get divorced. Maybe Sampson, maybe Vashti. But the big one is Ezra, who commands the returned exiles to divorce their foreign wives, in a fashion it sounds like Jesus would not approve.

Fourth, oaths. There are a few notable oaths in the Old Testament. Jephthah comes to mind. But in this case, I’m going to suggest it’s Nehemiah. We’ll see why in a minute. Nehemiah leads the returning exiles to take an oath to obey the law of God.

Fifth, retaliation. Now, I’m going to go off the rails here. I promise I’ll explain. This is John Hyrcanus. Hyrcanus was a Maccabean king/high priest who conquered Israel’s historical enemies of Samaria and Edom about 100 years before Jesus.

Sixth, hate for enemies. This is particularly interesting because nowhere in scripture is anyone commanded to hate their enemies. Jesus seems to be responding to Essene teachings. (The Essenes were, in short, a Jewish monastic group who lived in the wilderness and was devoted to maximal personal purity. You can probably thank them for the Dead Sea Scrolls.) Now, there’s one historical figure who looks a lot like an Essene: John the Baptist. And the Baptist is not exactly all about reconciliation with certain people.

So our six figures form a chiasm, a structure with three pairs mirroring each other around a center pivot!

A: Cain
- B: David
  - C: Ezra
  - C': Nehemiah
- B': John Hyrcanus
A': John the Baptist

Ezra and Nehemiah in the center are an obvious pair, all about return from exile. David and John Hyrcanus are kings who represent the greatest achievements of their eras. Cain the first one after the first Adam, while John the Baptist is the last one before the Last Adam. Together, all six represent leaders of God’s people, both before and after the return from exile, who in some way or other didn’t quite Get It. Jesus is using them as object lessons for the broader message of Matthew 5: who are God’s people supposed to be?

Sep 30, 2024 ∞

Inheriting the Kingdom of God

I like thinking about how Jesus would have been understood by his Jewish audience. For today’s example, let’s look at two parables: the treasure hidden in the field, and the pearl of great price. (Matthew 13:44-46)

Rabbis like Jesus would often assume that their audience was deeply familiar with the Hebrew scriptures, and they would make references to stories that were always on everyone’s mind. Let me suggest that Jesus is doing exactly that in both these parables. Let me also suggest that each of these parables has two characters: the buyer and the seller. We are meant to be comparing them.

Let’s focus on the pearl for a moment. The man buying the pearl is a merchant. When do merchants buy things? When they can get a good deal, when what they’re buying is worth more than the price tag on it. The seller in this story has this pearl and is willing to part with it. They don’t see the value, but the buyer does.

The same is true for the treasure in the field. Western readers often ask, is it right for the buyer to buy the field without telling the seller what he found there? But just like the pearl, it’s the seller’s job to know the value of what he has. If I find a rare book in a used bookstore for $2, I’m not going to go to the seller and say, “Don’t you know how much this is worth!?” I’m going to buy the book!

So if Jesus is referencing someone from the Old Testament, who is it?

Esau. Esau, firstborn to Isaac. Esau, inheritor of all God’s promises to Abraham. Esau through whom all nations of the world would be blessed. Esau, whose progeny brought salvation to all mankind.

Except not, because he _really _wanted those lentils. (Side-note: when Hebrews talks about Esau being an “immoral person” it uses the word porne. He’s literally a whore for stew.) Esau stood to inherit the most valuable birthright in the history of mankind, but he didn’t see its value. Jacob did.

The Kingdom of God belongs, not to those who are born into it, but to those who do whatever it takes to get it, and will not let it go.