Week 6 - Discipleship And The Kingdom Of God

“Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” (Matthew 6:33)

From the moment He was baptised to the day of His ascension, Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God. Almost all His parables and miracles are related to this message of the kingdom of God.

In the parable recorded in Matthew 13:44-46, Jesus likens the experience of the kingdom of God to discovering hidden fortunes:

The kingdom of heaven is like 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.

In these twin stories, Jesus uses common everyday life to point people to a deeper truth about God’s kingdom. The first parable concerns a man who stumbles across a treasure in a field he is ploughing. He is probably an agricultural day-labourer, a poor man hired by a large land owner on a day-to-day basis to work his property. It was a common practice for people in Palestine to bury their treasure in the ground for safe-keeping. (I once read in The Straits Times about a large amount of coins being found during digging in a construction site in Singapore). The treasure could have lain in the ground for centuries. The day-labourer leaves the treasure in the ground undisturbed and covers it up again (in case the owner finds out about it and refuses to sell the land). Once he has purchased the field, the treasure would belong to him in accordance to Jewish law.

The protagonist of the second story is a businessman (not a small-timer), a wholesale dealer who travels far and wide in search of fine pearls to buy off the pearl fishermen who operate in the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Pearls fetched fantastic prices in those days. Cleopatra is said to have had a pearl worth 100 million sesterces (about S$50 million). On one of his business trips, the merchant comes across an exquisite and flawless pearl that he simply must have. He is prepared to sell his entire business in order to buy it.

Both these parables illustrate one point — when a person finds something of surpassing value, he or she will spare no effort and consider no sacrifice too great to attain it. Jesus’ intention is to convince His hearers that God’s kingdom is like this — it is the most precious thing conceivable — and as such, it demands the most costly response. The parables actually call upon their hearers to do two things — firstly, to make a discovery and secondly, to make a response.

A Remarkable Discovery

In the parable of the buried treasure, the labourer stumbles across the treasure quite by chance. He’s not looking for treasure, but in the course of his ploughing, finds it. In the second parable, the merchant is actively searching for beautiful pearls and in the process, chances upon the finest pearl he has ever seen.

The kingdom of God is like this, Jesus says. For some people, the discovery of the kingdom will be an unexpected joy, something they are not even looking for but come across almost by accident. For others, it will be part of a serious quest for things of ultimate value.

Whichever is the case, two things are important to note. Firstly, is that the kingdom of God is something we find; it is not something we earn or deserve. It is pure grace — something God does and we discover — not something we create by our own effort. Secondly, it is not only finding the kingdom that counts but also recognising its full significance and value. If the labourer and the merchant had not perceived the great value of what they had found, their discovery would have been to no effect.

All Christians would claim to have found in Jesus the reality of God’s kingdom, and would understand this discovery as being “altogether by grace.” But I wonder whether, having found this kingdom, we all truly recognise its great worth and immense significance.

A Remarkable Response

In both stories, the finders of the hidden treasure respond in two ways: they sell all that they possess and they buy the treasure they have found. Jesus’ basic concern was that His disciples disinvested themselves from the existing order of things in the world and reinvested themselves in the service of God’s kingdom.

The kingdom of God is Jesus’ manifesto for His disciples, the blueprint for building His kingdom and the strategy for redeeming the world. Christians must allow their lives, values, priorities, relationships and commitments to be fundamentally shaped by the demands of God’s kingdom and not by the standards of this world. We are to deploy all that we are and all that we possess in the service of God’s work of renewing and changing the world in the name of Christ. To “seek first his kingdom,” passion and priority are involved.

That is the call of discipleship.