NOTES for Mat 13:44-58
Today's reading includes several more short parables about the Kingdom. One clearly echoes the parable of the wheat and the weeds (vv. 47–50), while two others (vv. 44, 45–46) concern a subject directly connected with life in the Kingdom: what a seeker is prepared to sacrifice for its sake.
It is remarkable that in both cases a willingness to give up everything is assumed. At first glance, Jesus is speaking here of the readiness for sacrifice that is absolutely necessary in light of the earlier parable of the sower, where fear of persecution and hardship was presented as one of the chief obstacles on the way to the Kingdom. Yet both these parables also contain another aspect, connected with the understanding of the present age as the age of the advancing Kingdom.
Indeed, if, in Jesus' words, 'a scribe instructed in the Kingdom brings out of his treasury both new and old' (v. 52), and if the fullness of the Kingdom includes not only what is new but also what is old transfigured by God's Spirit, then gaining the Kingdom can hardly be described as losing anything a person previously possessed—provided, of course, that it does not contradict the Kingdom's very nature. In that case, 'selling everything' (vv. 44, 46) means losing nothing. In the Kingdom, all that was sold will be found again, and found as it could never have become in this world, not yet transfigured.
On the other hand, nothing in the untransfigured world is imperishable, and no one can keep any of its treasures forever. Such is the logic of the Kingdom: there one can preserve only what one dares to part with as one's own property, as something belonging to oneself alone. Then what one parts with will return in the Kingdom, transfigured. In this way, all the knowledge the scribe dared to sacrifice for the Kingdom returns to him in it. This is unsurprising: according to the laws of our present, untransfigured world, everything and everyone exists on its own, apart from God and the fullness of His life. In the Kingdom, everything and everyone is permeated by that fullness; God's Kingdom lives by the life of its Head. Everything finite, if it remains on its own, is doomed to disappear; becoming part of the Kingdom, it becomes part of a fullness that does not disappear. With God, nothing is lost except evil and sin. That is why investment in the Kingdom proves the most secure: one can invest everything one has there and receive infinitely more, more than one could ever receive in this world.