Dear Sisters, dear brethren in Christ, last Sunday we heard several of our Lord’s parables on the kingdom of heaven, drawn from examples in nature. The parable of the wheat and the weeds used a problem familiar to those who heard our Lord tell it: what can a farmer do about weeds, which he has not sown, that spring up in a field of wheat which he hopes to harvest? A farmer will know that it is unwise to try and remove the weeds too soon because the delicate shoots of wheat are as likely to be uprooted as the weeds. Although it seems contrary to what you might think, it is actually wiser to allow the weeds to stay there, for the sake of the wheat which will eventually be strong enough to gather without being damaged by the weeds. In this way He wants to explain why it is that good and bad people live alongside each other with no apparent interference from God as we might expect, or at least hope to see. Another image our Lord draws from nature is the mustard seed which begins life as something extremely tiny, but gradually and almost imperceptibly grows into a large bush, capable of giving a home to birds making their nests there. Then He gave another short but familiar image of the woman mixing yeast into flour, gradually transforming the whole mixture into dough ready to be baked into bread. By these images He wanted to show how the kingdom of God on earth works from small beginnings and gradually grows in strength and presence until something great comes to pass.
Today’s parables, which follow on from last Sunday’s, are, I think, slightly differently conceived. Our Lord here chooses examples, not now from the natural world, but from human nature and human activity in order to illustrate for our understanding some point about the kingdom of heaven. The first two are particularly striking. The hidden treasure and the magnificent rare pearl are two things which many men would give their eye teeth to own. Our Lord deliberately focuses on the human desire to own something of great value and even to sacrifice a great deal in order to obtain it to explain the way we should try to grow in our desire for heaven. Think of anything in which you are really interested, then think how much time and effort you are prepared to expend in order to satisfy that desire, and then consider how it would be if you were to apply the same time and effort into getting into heaven! If you would be prepared to plough all your property into acquiring a field with hidden treasure, or a truly magnificent, rare pearl or jewel, or a priceless work of art, then apply that desire, that energy, to doing what it takes to getting into heaven, and that should give us an idea of where our priorities in this life should really lie.
Our Lord shows just how thoroughly He understands the inner workings of human nature. In both these imaginary cases, the man who buys the field and the merchant who buys the pearl have learned something that they do not want anyone else to recognise, lest that somebody else get there first! That is why the treasure must remain covered up and hidden under the field until such time as the man who found it is sure that he legally owns the field and can then safely dig it up openly and bring out the treasure – all now his! And that is why the merchant who is smitten with the pearl of great value cannot wait to sell all his other property just so that he can invest it all in this one pearl. He will presumably be quite happy to sell many, probably valuable things he owns, just in order to own one relatively small thing, yet of enormous value not only in itself, but to him personally. Part of the appeal of the pearl lies in the fact that the merchant has invested a great deal of time and effort into searching for just such a precious object, one that is as rare as it is beautiful. Heaven, says our Lord, is like that. We must devote a great deal of our time and effort into finding out more about the things of heaven, just as the merchant finds out about the science of pearls – where to look for them, and how much to pay for them. So too we must look for the things of heaven and not for the things of earth.
The third parable today is different from these two. But then we should perhaps recall that our Lord did not necessarily tell them all at the same time or in the same order as the Evangelist does. What matters is what they mean. This third parable is about a large fisherman’s net and what it catches. This is the kind of net that Peter and Andrew, and James and John who were fishermen, used on the Sea of Galilee. A large net thrown wide into the sea, was designed to bring in both an indiscriminate range of different fish, and a large number of them for commercial reasons. The net would stay out until such time as the fishermen were satisfied, by reason of the weight of the net, that they had caught enough. Then they would pull the nets behind them and head for shore where they would sort out and count all the fish to sell them to the fishmongers of Bethsaida or Capharnaum or wherever they chose to sell their catch. But they would have no idea exactly what they had in their great net until they had brought it ashore. We can imagine what this was like from several of the Gospel accounts where our Lord interacts with the Galilean fishermen, usually involving miraculous and large catches of fish. They would have to sort the fish out because a fishmonger would hardly be prepared to accept just a load of raw fish without knowing what kind they were. And some of them would be inedible, so that they would be throw away as useless. This is what our Lord uses as the image of the end of times. As with the parable of the wheat and the weeds last week, this parable of the fish in the great net is really about God’s patience. We often wonder, why doesn’t God stop wicked people, now? Immediately! Because we would, if we could, wouldn’t we? But God does not throw away the bad any more than the fisherman throws away the bad until the fisherman, or God, has got to the right place and time to do it. The fisherman cannot do this on the lake, and God will not do it while there is still time for a sinner to repent. And if God seems exasperating for letting wicked people get away with so much for so long, then think that we should also be grateful to God that He doesn’t act quickly against us either! May we use well every day of our life to repent and renew our lives in Him!
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