Treasure Hunt

“The kingdom of heaven is like medieval war booty stashed in a field by a greedy sword-band stealing back from a raid. A millennium or so later some hapless bozo with a metal detector stumbles across it and scores to the tune of upwards of mid-six figures American.”

Or, as Jesus put it (filtered through the stately phrasing of the old King James, which seems unusually appropriate here): “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field” - Matthew 13.44. Jesus’ pocket-parable and the recent experience of Terry Herbert of Staffordshire, England (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/world/europe/25treasure.html) bear striking similarities. The stash in Jesus’ story was a credible premise: the war-wrecked history of Palestine left the land studded with do-it-yourself 401-K’s squirreled away when hapless citizens had to bug-out in the face of shifting battle lines. Many never made it back to dig up their booty. In the same way, Dark Ages England formed a patchwork of warring kingdomettes where robber barons with monickers like Penda and Wulfhere and Aethelred the Unready shot squads of soldiers back and forth over one another’s borders in smash-and-grab blitzkriegs to get what could be gotten. If the retreat went bad the pirates might be forced to cache their prizes, perhaps dying in the subsequent skirmish and taking their secrets with them.

Also, the hero of Jesus’ story would be a poor man, a worker in the field but not the owner of it, probably a day-laborer hiring out his time to raise someone else’s crops when suddenly he feels and hears the ploughshare plink against fired clay instead of soft soil and knows this is his day to buy a lottery ticket. Similarly, Herbert has no job and lives off welfare. He was tilling someone else’s land with his metal detector when the beeper told him he’d hit something big.

Finally, Jesus’ guy figures out a way to cash in, even though it meant cashing out. Herbert faced different legalities but had the same goal: hanging onto at least some of what he’d found. He alerted the proper authorities because, in addition to market value, this particular find also offers vast riches to historical research. All the same, the British crown plans to auction off the items and by law Herbert gets half.

And such, says Jesus, is the kingdom of heaven. Meaning exactly . . . what?

That voluntary poverty purchases eternal redemption? That Heaven hides out hoping we’ll blunder by and buy in? That if I go without now I’ll be gunnel-deep in worldly goods in the life to come?

No, not any of that, I don’t think.

The key lies in that phrase that according to Matthew 4.17 defines the message of Jesus: “the kingdom of heaven.” Or “of the heavens.” Dallas Willard argues persuasively that the Greek text of the first Gospel puts it in the plural thirty-two times and that we best understand it as meaning something like “atmosphere” or “space.” “The kingdom of the heavens,” then, simply means everything around us, each square inch of which God packs with his presence, overflowing it without being identified with it. To enter this kingdom, then, simply means surrendering control over my own little fiefdom and swearing fealty to God.

When C. S. Lewis’ fictional interplanetary pilgrim Elwin Ransom finds himself on a planet where sin has never contested God’s undiluted occupation, he discovers that he is left “not to solitude but to a more formidable kind of privacy.” As he will later tell his friends on Earth, “There seemed to be no room.” Lewis continues:

But later on he discovered that it was intolerable only at certain moments - at just those moments . . . when a man asserts his independence and feels that now at last he’s his own. When you felt like that, then the very air seemed too crowded to breathe; a complete fulness seemed to be excluding you from a place which, nevertheless, you were unable to leave. But when you gave in to the thing, gave yourself up to it, there was no burden to be borne. It became not a load but a medium, a sort of splendour as of eatable, drinkeable, breathable gold, which fed and carried you and not only poured into you but out from you as well. Taken the wrong way, it suffocated; taken the right way, it made terrestrial life seem, by comparison, a vacuum. (Perelandra, chapter 6)

We “enter” the kingdom when we sell all that we have - our independence, our right to ourselves - and give into the weight of glory, the pressure of the treasure that seems like an obstruction to our ploughing when in fact it is the point. We shift from asphyxia to being a source of breath to others, from aching emptiness to prodigal fullness. We cooperate with the truth that stuffs all of reality full of Himself. And then - what?

Frederick Buechner, in a novel entitled, appropriately enough, Treasure Hunt, tells us, I think. This is the fourth book that tells the story of the venerable Leo Bebb. Bebb is an equivocal hero, a semi-shyster Southern evangelist who is at least as much Balaam as John the Baptist, probably more Simon Magus than Simon Peter. For all that the story’s narrator, Bebb’s son-in-law Antonio Parr, finds himself fascinated with and drawn to the old rogue. At one point he muses,

Dear Bebb. What was there about him? It is hard to say exactly. He never had that much time for me, not even when he must have known I most needed him. He was always in a hurry, always so intent on the next thing he had to do . . . that you felt he wasn’t entirely with you even when he was. He was by no means the wisest person I’ve ever known or the most eloquent or the most warm-hearted and heaven knows he had his shadow side like the rest of us. Not even counting his five years in the pen, or his smog-bound finances, or the ambiguous nature of his various evangelical entrerprises, you had the feeling that during his life and for all I know during innumerable other lives thrown in he had moved through dark and painful places that had left tht one gimpy eye of his needing to flutter closed every once in a while to shut out the dark an painful memory of them. And yet, what was there about him that made me miss him more than any man? Even at his lowest and bluest, there was a life in him that rubbed off on you, that’s all. You might feel better or you might feel worse when Bebb was around, but in any case you felt more. There was more of you to feel with.

“There was a life in him, that’s all.” And that life made more of the lives that it encountered. At the end of John 6 the crowd stalks off in a snit because Jesus won’t guarantee a public option on school lunches. The Lord then rises to the summit (or plummets to the pit) of incarnation as he turns to the twelve and asks, “You do not want to go away also, do you?” Peter replies in an Antonio Parr vein: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” In essence the former fisherman seems to say, “Jesus, I agree with the gang: you could have been king last night but you busted up your own coronation party. You had ‘em back this morning for the price of a single miracle. Instead you go rambling on about cannibalism and drinking blood, none of which is kosher as you well know, and completely blow our market share. I have half a mind to hand in my portfolio with the rest of ‘em and go back to gutting redfish for a living. But there’s a life in you that rubs off on me, that’s all. I might feel better or I might feel worse (right now it’s worse) when you’re around, but in any case I feel more. There’s more of me to feel with, and I can’t give that up.”

“More of you to feel with.” That’s pretty much it. Yeah, yeah - Heaven instead of Hell when we die, sure, that’s part of the deal, but it’s a part that only makes sense if we grasp the present reality. Will I always feel good in Heaven? Define good; but I know I’ll always feel more, because there will be more and more and more of me to feel with and what I will feel will be the presence of God.

And, like Leo Bebb, that’s what the kingdom gives us the opportunity to become for others. That’s the treasure hid in the field that we find when we think we’re doing something else. Somehow being saved, though it ought to make us steadily better, doesn’t seem to make us perfect. John of the Cross was a snob, Spurgeon hated Catholics, and Athanasius once punched a guy out at a business meeting. Somehow God refuses to cauterize all our flaws lest we mistake grace for perfection. But in the end it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because if we sell out to buy the treasure, if we bargain away self to absorb Christ in exchange, we find our bellies welling up with living water. There’s a life in us, that’s all, and as a result those who draw near end up being more than they were before, and they ultimately discover that only Jesus explains it.

An old tale of the desert abbas has it that three young men went annually to visit St. Anthony and hear his insights on their spiritual walk. Two peppered the old monk with questions but the third sat silent. After this had gone on for many years, Anthony finally said to the youth, “You often come to see me, but you never ask me anything.” The lad replied, “Abba, it is enough to see you.” Commenting on this tale, Henri Nouwen remarks that “by the time people feel that just seeing us is ministry, words . . . will no longer be necessary.”

Even so, Lord Jesus, come!

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