Parable of the Pearl of Great Price

The Message Matthew 13:45-50

“God's kingdom is like a jewel merchant on the hunt for excellent pearls. Finding one that is flawless, he
immediately sells everything and buys it.
"Or, God's kingdom is like a fishnet cast into the sea, catching all kinds of fish. When it is full, it is hauled onto
the beach. The good fish are picked out and put in a tub; those unfit to eat are thrown away. That's how it will
be when the curtain comes down on history. The angels will come and cull the bad fish and throw them in the
garbage. There will be a lot of desperate complaining, but it won't do any good."

The gift of Jesus remains for you today just as it was left so many years ago. Our Father loves you with a great
love and has sacrificed himself in order to win you back. You are the great pearl and the priceless treasure.
You are worth any price to him to win you back; and he has paid for you with his own blood in Jesus- won’t
you take up his gift and live forever?

There is a man who lives atop a grand and glorious mountain. The mountain towers above the earth and
is so high that its peak can be seen from all points of the world below.
The man is a great artisan who has made all of the valleys, rivers, forests, cities, and countryside that
stretch to the horizon below. He has filled the trees and the air with mechanical flying creatures and the grass
and holes and caves in the ground with creepers and crawlers and all manner of beasties. As his crowning
achievement he dedicated his final work to the fashioning of mechanical men that he would set free to populate
the cities and villages of his world.
It was his proudest moment when his first ‘man,’ as he called it after his own name, was finally
completed and took its first steps. The man began to turn these ‘men’ into the world by twos, allowing them to
choose their own way as soon as they crossed his doorstep. Some went straight out into the cities; for it was to
these that the man had given ingenuity and cleverness and the lion’s share of his own great imagination. Others
found the peace and solitude of the countryside and the contemplation of the mountain ranges that stretched
across his world; for it was to these that he had implanted his deep and abiding sense of wonder and curiosity.
And still others found the deepest jungles and forests in order to slate their desire for adventure and conquest; it
was to these that had been given his indomitable spirit. Wherever they went, each of the man’s creatures, his
men, went into the world knowing and loving the man atop the mountain. And all left him solemnly and with
tears in their hearts at their being set apart from him.
The man watched from his mountaintop castle all that proceeded and developed below and he was most
interested and pleased in the ways and wanderings of his most prized creation, mankind. One day, however, as
in these stories one day must always come, a fatal flaw entered his beautifully ordered and structured world.
The first of his creatures, the first man, began to pick at the protective covering of his innermost workings. He
succeeded in removing it and began to tamper with the mass array of intricate gears and works. As he fumbled
ignorantly with his own machinery a single pin was worked loose from his main clockwork housing and went
unnoticed by that first man. That single pin was sufficient to interfere with the otherwise very logical and loyal
heart of the first of his mechanical men. And as the pin clogged his gears internally the first man began to ‘clog’
gears emotionally throughout the entire race of men. He started to like his new independence, as he thought of
it, to live and act in this new and undetermined way. He enjoyed the power he wielded over the others of his
kind and gloried in his being set apart from them. Needless to say, the first man succeeded in infecting the
perfection of creation and upsetting the harmony it was always intended to possess.
All the while the discord spread among his creation the man atop the mountain smiled knowingly to
himself. He alone knew what his mechanical dummies could never know. He knew that the confusion begun
with the pin was as inevitable as the next steps of his very great plan would be. Looking out upon the wonder of
his own ingenuity the man smiled, but at the edges of his smile there was a deep sadness for what must come
next. His race of men was dying and he alone had the power to save them. He alone knew of their peril, they
were too stupid to even know of the danger that they faced.
 The man implemented the plan he had always held in reserve against this day. Deep within himself he
carried a seed. It was the essence of his own unique and all powerful self and it burned brightly within his chest.
Standing at the gate to the path leading into the world the man plunged his hand deep within his own heart and
removed the seed containing the spark of his very life. Holding it in his hand he whispered to it the instructions
that only he could command it to heed and planted it into the soil of the ground that lay at the threshold between
the man’s creation and his domain. Out of this soil sprung a new man, formed in appearance to the exact
specifications of the race of men living below in the world, but thriving with life given from his Father, and
intent upon obeying the every command that he had been given. In this manner was the Father to enter his own
clockwork creation and in this manner was he planning upon saving it.
The Son of the Man proceeded down into the world and walked among her earliest inhabitants. He
observed them in their villages and entered her greatest cities. He lived and ate with them and began to teach
them that which they had forgotten and neglected. One by one the men of the world harkened to the voice of the
Son of the Man and turned to him, hoping that he would somehow deliver them from the chaos that had infected
their gears. The Son of the Man was gaining such a following that the first man eventually heard of it even in
the far reaches of the world where he had set his residence with those most akin to him in thought and deed. The
first man was angered at the intrusion of peace upon the clogging discord he had so effectively wrought. He
could not allow his power to be diminished in this way and decided to confront the new man.
The two men met in the old city that stood closest to the base of the great mountain and squared off
against each other, face to face and toe to toe. The first man looked stonily into the eyes of the new man and the
new man steadfastly returned his gaze. The first man struck at the new man and the new man steadfastly stood
his ground. The first man lashed out against the chest and arms of the new man with the knotted whip he carried
and the new man steadfastly withstood its pain and humiliation. When the first man was finished with his
assault the new man did an astounding thing. He did not retaliate and he did not condemn, for those actions
were not in his orders. He instead, like his Father before him, plunged his hand into his own chest and removed
a pin like the one that had so long ago gone missing in the machinery of the first man. He held it out to the first
man as a peace offering and then to the watching crowds which had assembled around them. And then, to their
astonishment, he crumpled to the ground, motionless and out of order without the single pin that held all of his
works together. The crowd watched in stunned silence as his body slowly dissolved back into the soil from
whence it came.
The pin lay on the ground where it had fallen, glistening in the sun but untouched by the first man and
those in the crowds until one lone man stepped forward and picked it up.
“This was given to us,” he said quietly. “It is for our benefit he has left this, how can we ignore such a
gift?” And the man took the pin and inserted it into his own chest, mirroring what he had seen the Son of the
Man do first and instantly he too vanished from their sight. The crowd was astonished and afraid at his
disappearance and wondered even more at the appearance of a new pin where the first had been.
“It’s a trick,” shouted the first man, and he brushed his way through the crowd, pulling and clawing and
tearing at any who withstood him. “It will destroy you just as it has destroyed the Son of the Man and the one
foolish enough to follow him.” They heard him shouting his venom as he made his way slowly back to his own
land and many in the crowd turned to follow him and to return to their own homes.
Of those who remained many chose to pick up the pin and suffer the pain of replacing what they had so
long ago lost. Each in turn vanished from sight and as they did a new and glistening pin reappeared. But there
remained in the old city those who did not turn away from the Son of the Man’s gift nor avail themselves of that
gift. They stood there for a very long time, waiting for either party to return, and when neither did, they slowly
sat in the dust and watched the pin lose its shine.
And where, you might ask, do the men who choose to take the pin vanish to? They that follow the Son
of the Man in deed in the world follow him in their ‘death’ to their new home atop the mountain. There, the
Father, as he will forever be called, waits for them at his gate with arms held wide to embrace each one as they
cross his threshold. It is here that the Father’s plan reaches its final fulfillment and here that his handiwork as
creator has its fullest expression. For, as each man is released from his Father’s embrace, the pin each man has
willingly inserted into himself bursts asunder and releases the life of the Son into his entire framework. In an
instant men are transformed from machines made of gears and pulleys into beings of flesh and warmth and
thought and love. They who were once puppets and fabrications are now alive and breathe the air of life in the
garden of the man of the mountain. With a sweep of his arms the man welcomes each new and living member
of his family into his home and declares them all at home forever and ever.
It has been told, at mealtimes when the Father tells his children his favorite stories, that one day the
world itself will be remade just as mankind has been. One day, as we know all stories must have, the machinery
will stop once and for all and the entire world will be made new with the life that it now possesses through the
Son. The Son and the Father smile when the children ask “When?” Because they alone know the when and the
how; it is enough for the children to know that the day will come.

Again… The gift of Jesus remains for you today just as it was left so many years ago. Our Father loves you with
a great love and has sacrificed himself in order to win you back. You are the great pearl and the priceless
treasure. You are worth any price to him to win you back; and he has paid for you with his own blood in Jesus-
won’t you take up his gift and live forever?

NASB Matthew 13:44

The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy
over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.