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Responding to the Kingdom
Matt 13: 44 – 52
Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 11 Jul, 2004

THERE IS a cost to obtaining the Kingdom of God, a price too high for some to feel like paying. And there is a price to refusing the Kingdom, and that is far too high a price.

  Some of us understand what it means to be sick. You may have faced surgery. I’ve had surgery four times — if you count having my wisdom teeth out under general anaesthetic.
  No one really likes surgery. There is always a risk, even if it’s a minor job. I remember how shocked we all were when the Pastor at Liverpool Baptist went into hospital for minor surgery and died. Everyone expected him to be in overnight or perhaps for a couple of days. But he reacted badly to anaesthetic, and never woke up.

  The last significant surgery I had was to have my gallbladder out. Today, most people have it done with a laparoscope. They just make two tiny cuts, one to push a kind of telescope into, and one to pull the bits out through. It’s really clever. You hafe no idea how major your surgery really was — until the first time you try to lift something heavy after you’ve had your op!

  Before I had the surgery, I was pretty busy, and I didn’t get to making an appointment straight away to see the surgeon. When I went to the doctor, and she heard that I still had my gallbladder, she smacked me on the knee and said, “You don’t want to know about what can go wrong if you have complications!”
  Neph can tell us. He had a gallbladder that got out of hand, got infected when he didn’t know about it. It wasn’t a small operation for you, was it, Neph?
  I remember how painful it was after I had my two little cuts. I can’t imagine how painful it is when they have to open you right up!

  But the price is worth it. Imagine dying from an impacted gallstone. It happens. It used to happen often in the past, when they didn’t know how to operate inside the abdomen.
  It’s worth the pain, the distress, the time to recover. The price is high: the alternative is unthinkable.

  Jesus told two parables about the cost of the Kingdom, and followed it up with one about the cost of not receiving the Kingdom of God.

  Next week we will complete this short series on parables with a look at the two lost sons, often known as the parable of the prodigal son. What is it like to return and receive what our heavenly Father wants us to receive? But that is for next week. First, three parables about the Kingdom and the costs associated.

  After Jesus told the parable of the soils, the sower one we met last week, he told several parables with a farming theme. One was about how good and bad seed can grow side by side. The farmer bought good seed and planted it, but an enemy oversowed the field with weeds, and the farm workers had to tend both until they grew, so that they could reap the crop and pull up the weeds for burning; otherwise they might pull up good plants.
  Then there was another about how a tiny mustard seed grows into a large bush, or how a tiny bit of yeast raises a bin full of flour. We need to know that the Kingdom of God is not always clearly seen, that what begins looking little and insignificant grows and grows into something splendid. We also need to know that it does not grow without struggle and conflict and attacks from its enemy. Sometimes we find that even what seemed to be of value is nothing but weeds, and what looked worthless is what really comes out for God in the final analysis.

  This is the background for what Jesus is teaching in today’s set of parables.

  He talks about the farm labourer.
  Just imagine. You are a labourer. You go every day to your task. There are no tractors, no combine harvesters. You dig with a plough drawn by oxen, and it is your weight and your strength which pushes it into the ground and keeps it on course.
  It is hard, back–breaking work. You will be too old, too broken, by the time you are about 45. You will retire as an invalid and die before you are 55. That was roughly how life was in those days.
  You want the best for your wife. She might outlive you. She is only young. The children are not very old. You want to leave something for them, but they’ll be lucky to get the shack you all live in.
  Then, one day, everything changes. You are digging in a paddock. The hoe hits something hard, maybe a lump of rock. You can’t leave a rock there, or else it might break the plough. So you begin digging around it. But it isn’t a rock. It’s a box, hard olive wood, or carved stone. When you have dug far enough, you can see where the lid is, and you open it. Inside you see all kinds of treasures. Money, jewellery, valuable household decorations. They look old — perhaps something hidden back when the Babylonians came and took Daniel and many thousands of other Israelites away into captivity.
  What are you going to do?
  What would you do?

  But here’s another story.
  Here’s another example of what the Kingdom of God is like.
  This man is not a lowly labourer. He’s a rich man. He knows how to make money. He is a jeweller, a buyer and seller of precious jewels. If you want gold, he’s the man. If you want emerald, or chrysoprase, or garnet, he’s the expert. If you want pearls, go to him.
  And he understands the market.
  There are rumours. He has heard of an extremely valuable pearl. It is held by a rich man in Persia or Afghanistan, or China. He doesn’t know exactly where.
  But a jewel merchant had to be a traveller in those days. You didn’t buy jewels on e-bay, or at an auction house. You went yourself and bought what you wanted.
  For years, this man has searched. He wants that pearl. He follows clues. He hears rumours in the bazaars. Other merchants tell him what they tried, how they failed. But he knows that his competitors are also telling him lies sometimes, just to throw him off the scent.
  Then, one day, he is in a strange town, and someone approaches him. “I may be able to get you something you want.” he says.
  The merchant is fascinated. Maybe this is it!
  There are many negotiations, many furtive meetings in wine bars. And then the big meeting takes place. The mysterious owner has a cloth bag, and in it is the biggest, most nearly perfect pearl ever seen. “How much will you give me for it:?” the owner asks.
  What are you going to do? What would you do?

  How do you view the Kingdom of God? Is it a good thing?

  Paul told the Romans,

Therefore, I plead with you, brothers, recognising God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your rational act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to approve what God’s will is by testing it — his good, pleasing and perfect will.

  It is easy to think that God will rob you if you get too close to him. This is the same kind of lie that the snake told Eve in the Garden: “God knows that you will be like him, and he doesn’t want you to have that!”

  Think of what you are scared of losing if you go for the Kingdom of God above all else.

•   If you are married, you are probably afraid that your husband or wife won’t go with you. You are scared that you will be abandoned, left to fend for yourself.
•   If you have money, you may fear that your money will go for the sake of the Kingdom.
•   Younger people may fear the conflict between the demand of the Kingdom for sexual purity and their hormonal impulses.
•   Many are afraid that commitment to Jesus and his rule will cost them friends, social standing, even employment.
•   Even the poor worry that what little they have will become less. How can you give when you have little to give?
•   Others think that becoming a true follower of Jesus is intellectual suicide.

  And Jesus makes it very clear that there is a cost to discipleship, that the Kingdom of God may be free, but it is far from cheap.

  What does the labourer do when he finds the treasure? He doesn’t hope someone will give it to him, or pray that it will somehow become his. He gathers all his possessions together, sells the lot, and buys the paddock where he found it. To gain the great treasure, he has to let go of everything else.
  And what about the jewel merchant?
  The Greek of this passage makes it quite clear that we are not talking of his selling all his stock to gain that pearl. He sells everything he owns. He sells his gold, his diamonds, his pearls. He sells his house and his chariot and his horses. He sells his laptop abacus and his papyrus supply. Everything he owns is cleaned out to achieve his goal, of gaining the most precious thing he knows about.

  It doesn’t matter if you stumble across the treasures of the Kingdom of God while you were going about your ordinary business, and it doesn’t matter if you find it after spending half your life searching for the truth. The next step is the same: you go in boots and all, or you don’t go in at all!

  And, if you choose not to go in at all, that’s where the third parable comes in. You get sorted out and thrown back like an inedible fish, because you have chosen not to gain the truly important things of life.

  I said before that the Kingdom is free, but it is far from cheap.

  One man who not only said that, but lived by it, was the German pastor theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. When Hitler came to power, he ran away. He hated what he saw, the creeping racism, the violence, all justified with little lies in the name of personal freedoms and the needs of the State.
  He went to the US. He was safe there.
  But then he grasped the truth about Jesus, as we read in Hebrews 12:

2Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

  Bonhoeffer returned to Nazi Germany and joined the Resistance. He was involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler. He said that a Christian has to protect the people who can’t protect themselves; if the law doesn’t provide that protection, then there comes a time for direct action.
  He was arrested and held in prison. A few days before the Allied armies arrived, he was hanged.
  From his prison cell he wrote letters and articles, later collected as Letters and Papers from Prison. He said that too many Christians talk about free grace when they really mean that they think grace is cheap.
  He knew, from his own experience, that the Kingdom of God might cost a person his life.
  But, as Jesus said,

29If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. (Matt 5)

  There is a cost to obtaining the Kingdom of God, a price too high for some to feel like paying. And there is a price to refusing the Kingdom — far too high a price!
  The Bible is very explicit about rewards and punishments. It does not seek to frighten you into deciding what you will do with Jesus. Fear is a very poor basis for making a decision. As God says,

Come now, let us reason together. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as wool.

  God wants us to look at the facts, to see that there is a price to pay, and to decide which price we accept.
  Jesus paid the price to open the way; we pay a price to access that way. The price is simple to calculate: it is everything you are and everything you have.
  As the Bible says,

You are not your own: you are bought with a price.

  Forty–two years ago last Thursday, on a cold Sunday evening, I gave myself to Jesus as the Lord of my life. I had no idea of what that would mean, but I knew it had to be done.

  One April morning about two years later, I was feeling miserable. I knew my life was not heading in the direction that it should go in. I felt desperate and I asked God — for the first time — “What do you want me to do with my life?” And, for the first time that I can recall, he answered me: “Full time service.”
  I’ve told the story of how horrifying this was for a 17–year–old with a speech impediment. All I could think of was Missionary administration in a grass hut filled with biting creatures, a place too small, too dangerous, for any girls to go into. I was terrified. I was scared of the biting animals, too.
  God asked me to accept his will without knowing what the cost would be. He didn’t want me to give him my willingness to face snakes or a girl–free environment. He wanted me to give myself.

  22 years ago, God called me to act on that 1964 call.

  Once again, I was scared of the cost. The call to action came out of conflict at home, and I knew full well that Chris was only half joking when she said she would divorce me if I did any more study.
  I had to face her and be prepared to follow that call wherever it might lead me. And it is that call which, above all, keeps me going when I know what a failure I am and how little progress we all make.
  But the treasure is still in front of us. As Paul says,

Hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured out in our hearts by the Spirit which he has given us.

  Gaining the Kingdom of God takes more than choosing to be good. It takes more than being a church–goer or loyal to some Christian ideal. It takes more than anything you can imagine, because it takes everything you have.
  But, in return, it gives you everything, including life itself — and escape from the coming wrath of God. Better act now!