The Incomparable Treasure

An excerpt from Chapter 2, The Way of the Cross,
from the book The Cost of Commitment by John White.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field.
When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy
he went and sold all he had and bought that field.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls.
When he found one of great value, he went away and
sold everything he had and bought it” (Mt 13:44-46).

No details are given in this story except for the man's emotional state. He has discovered treasure buried in a field. How did he find it? Was he employed by the owner of the field? We do not know.
We know only three things. He covered the treasure up; he was delirious with joy; he was so excited that he sold everything he possessed in order to buy the field.

Here is a picture of reckless sacrificing of all a man possesses. Yet it is clearly not so much a picture of renunciation as it is of reevaluation.

Up to this point in his life the man has doubtlessly valued his possessions highly. Like all of us, he would have clung to them and only parted with them under exceptional circumstances. He might have lent to a neighbor in distress or sold something to help a close friend or relative. But by and large his life has consisted in the abundance of the things he possessed.

It is only when he discovers buried treasure that his perspective changes. Suddenly his possessions look cheap and paltry. A joy is rising in him and an excitement that makes him sweat and tremble. There may have been regret about a cherished piece of furniture or a family heirloom. But it is only momentary. The choice he faces lies between his worthless bits and pieces and the field with buried treasure. There is nothing noble about his sacrifice. There would, on the other hand, be something incredibly stupid about not making it. Anyone but a fool would do exactly as the man did. Everyone will envy him for his good fortune and commend him not on his spiritual character, but on his common sense.

What I have called "his miserable bits and pieces" are the things of this life to which we naturally cling—money, property, cars, prestige or a good job. Jesus is not telling us that we must sacrifice all our possessions to inherit heavenly treasure, only that if we were to grasp what glories he has for us we would realize how silly we are to cling to such rubbish.

But we must be honest with ourselves. How important to us are possessions and ambitions? How real are heavenly treasures? John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress has in it what for me is an unforgettable picture. In one chapter the hero, Christian, visits the house of the Interpreter. One of the pictures he sees there portrays a man with a muckrake, groveling in filth in the hope of what pickings he may find there. Christ offers him a crown, but he is so absorbed in what he is doing that he fails to see the crown above his head. We are like that man—so absorbed with straws and rags that we fail to see the glorious crown extended to us.

There is a magnificent insanity about the parable in Matthew 13:45. It has to do with a pearl freak—a merchant whose hobby was pearls. Evidently, one day he came across a pearl to end all pearls. Imagine him with staring eyes, quickly taking in his breath, licking his dry lips, then anxiously inquiring about price, haggling and pondering the tremendous cost of the pearl. You can also imagine him returning home and looking over the rest of his pearl collection. With shaking hands he would pick them up one by one and drop them into a soft leather pouch. Not only pearls, but house, slaves and everything would go so that the one pearl might become his.

And then, bereft of everything but a big pearl, what would the fool do? You can't eat pearls. In my mind is a picture of the crazy guy sitting in a miserable hovel—his glowing eyes feasting on his pearl and his fingers gently caressing it. Crazy? Perhaps he is the one sane person among us.

It all depends on whether the pearl was worth it. We see at once that treasure in heaven would be worth it. Why then are we so quick to opt for earthly treasure and so slow to be interested in the heavenly? Perhaps it is because we do not believe in heavenly realities. They represent a celestial cliché in our minds, but no more.
Only true faith will make us step along the way of the cross. And if we are to step lightheartedly, there will have to be the kind of faith which has become profound conviction that the joys are real and tangible, the next life is very important, and Jesus really is preparing a place on high.

The way of the cross is a magnificent obsession with a heavenly pearl, beside which everything else in life has no value. If it were a case of buying it, we would gladly sell all we had to do so.

But we cannot buy heavenly treasure. It is not for sale. The point of the parable is that having caught a glimpse of the pearl, we count all else of no value and pursue the treasure.

Again and again in my life I have had to face choices. At one stage in my life it was English literature or Jesus. Though I was a medical student, I had a passion for literature. I even tried to collect first editions of Victorian novelists. I read late into the night, so late that I would be no use the next day.

Good literature was an escape for me. I was not reading it as it should be read but drugging my mind in soporific clouds of words.

But God had shown me something of his own treasures, and my heart craved them. In some dim way I perceived that my weakness for fiction interfered with my capacity to experience the joys of Christ. So I packed all the works of eighteenth and nineteenth-century novelists and poets into a great crate and gave them to a friend who was majoring in English.

I was left with a sense of relief and gratitude. I have never questioned the sanity of that decision. Today, books are crammed untidily on all my bookshelves and litter every room in my house. They no longer hinder me as they once did.

I suppose the choice I made was a sacrifice. Yet I saw it more in terms of what I longed for more—my pearl. The choices facing us may be comparatively trivial or great. The same principle holds. Once when I was on a well-earned winter holiday, an idea gripped me as I lay sunning on the beach. I had paper and pen with me, so I rolled over and began to write. A breeze was fluttering and tearing the loose pages I held down on the sand. The sun's caressing warmth turned into a headaching glare. My position was uncomfortable. It would be much more sensible to go to my hotel room if I wanted to write. But I wanted a suntan to prove I had been on a winter holiday. I could not have it both ways. It was writing or tan. I chose writing.

My choice was not virtuous. It was simply a matter of what I wanted more. There were no "oughts" about it, though my choice may say something about my values.

That choice and similar choices have left me thankful because they have begun to set me free. For to be free means to be released from being torn in two directions at once. It means to have one passion only—one pearl of great price—rather than half a dozen conflicting passions. Let me quote to you a letter written by an American Communist in Mexico City, a letter breaking his engagement with his fiancee.

We communists suffer many casualties. We are those whom they shoot, hang, lynch, tar and feather, imprison, slander, fire from our jobs and whose lives people make miserable in every way possible. Some of us are killed and imprisoned. We live in poverty. From what we earn we turn over to the Party every cent which we do not absolutely need to live.

We communists have neither time nor money to go to movies very often, nor for concerts nor for beautiful homes and new cars. They call us fanatics. We are fanatics. Our lives are dominated by one supreme factor—the struggle for world communism. We communists have a philosophy of life that money could not buy.

We have a cause to fight for, a specific goal in life. We lose our insignificant identities in the great river of humanity; and if our personal lives seem hard or if our egos seem bruised through subordination to the Party, we are amply rewarded—in the thought that all of us, even though it be in a very small way, are contributing something new and better for humanity.

There is one thing about which I am completely in earnest—the communist cause. It is my life, my business, my religion, my hobby, my sweetheart, my wife, my mistress, my meat and drink. I work at it by day and dream of it by night. Its control over me grows greater with the passage of time. Therefore I cannot have a friend, a lover or even a conversation without relating them to this power that animates and controls my life. I measure people, books, ideas and deeds according to the way they affect the communist cause and by their attitude to it. I have already been in jail for my ideas, and if need be I am ready to face death.

If the letter fails to stir you, you may already have begun to die. Like a traveler lost in a blizzard, unaware your body freezes in a snowbank, you are drifting to sleep.

But if your heart beats more quickly—be glad. You have hope of a more bracing life than the one most of us live. For Christ did not call you to suburbia and a mortgage but to a gallows and a crown of glory.

The unknown Communist in Mexico City startles us into seeing how trivial our lives are. We may not share his opinions. We may even be appalled at the abandon with which he hurls all that is dear to him into the crushing presses of a political machine. Yet we are glad to see a man who is willing to commit his all and even to die for what he believes in—however wrong he may be.

In reading the letter, you may also feel that he has been set free. Having broken from the possessions that clutter our own lives, he is consumed by a passion that despises both prudence and pleasure. For the time, at least, lusts that plague the rest of us seem to hold no attraction for him. Yet it is not the sternness of his renunciation that comes through, so much as an exhilarating sense of freedom.

His freedom has nothing to do with his political ideology. It has to do with his being human, though fallen, released from lesser passions by pursuit of greater ones. It is a freedom that may have awakened an echo in your own heart as you read his letter. For you were not created, much less redeemed, to sell your birthright as Issac did for a mess of pottage. You have been called to a still more radical commitment than his and to gamble your life on higher stakes.

“If anyone would come after me," Jesus again tells us, "he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me" (Luke 9:23).

The cross symbolizes our willingness to give up all else for the surpassing glory of following it, or to die if need be. Jesus calls us to pick it up and heave it over our backs—not to wear it on our lapels or round our necks, but to carry it over our shoulders—in the same way he carried his own cross. It may look rough and heavy as you stare at it on the ground, but you will be surprised to find how light it feels as you bear it. And it will mark you in the eyes of demons, men and angels as one who despises humiliation and who deliberately chooses the company of the One from whom the world hides its face.

For the popular Christ and the true Christ are two different Christs. The first is the watered-down Christ, remolded to please the masses. You may stand with that Christ and please as many people as he does. But the real Christ does not aim to please people so much as to love them and to glorify the Father. Jesus' truth pierced human consciences; his love frightened and alienated them, while his relentless pursuit of the Father's glory threatened the institutions they upheld. They could not tolerate his continued existence, and so they murdered him.

"Whoever serves me," Jesus once said, "must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be" (John 12:26).

To stand where he stands, to walk in his steps means necessarily running the gauntlet of the attitudes that still slumber in human hearts, attitudes which will awaken the moment we step after him. He wants us to understand this clearly before we choose. For to choose to follow him will mean saying, as Paul said, "I consider my life worth nothing to me" (Acts 20:24). We will have to place on the table career, money, affections, ambitions, plans, hobbies and our very lives, and say: "It hurts me to place these here, but I know you can replace them a hundredfold. Let them be disposed of as they may—returned to me or lost forever. Their fate will not influence my choice. I want to follow you wholly." To do this is to be released from the chains that enslave people everywhere. It is also to take up our crosses and to replace a heavy burden with a light one. It is to be set free….

Let me say one more important thing about freedom: Freedom does not consist in doing what I want to do but in doing what I was designed to do. If I do what I want to do, I wind up not liking what I do. What at first promises liberty turns out to be a more onerous slavery….

…Jesus alone gives freedom to human beings. He knows what he designed our beings for. He knows where true freedom exists for us. And he has infinite patience in teaching us, lesson by lesson, how to be free.

"Come to me," he invites us, "all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light" (Matthew 11:28-30). ■