Saturday, March 01, 2008

The Pearl and the Price

"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 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.” Matthew 13:44-46

These can give us some great information about the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ which Jesus often talked about. In the first mini-parable the kingdom is the treasure, in the second one the kingdom is the merchant looking for treasure.

In the first, Jesus is saying that the kingdom, upon finding, is worth giving up all of your possessions and your whole life to obtain. The second says it’s a two-way street. We are the pearl that he found, and in his passion, went away and sold everything he had to buy it. (He does not say the kingdom is the treasure in both).

My main point is of the latter parable, where we are pearls of great price, not the kingdom, as a lot of people say. I want to talk about the price – the first great sacrifice – our price. Has it ever struck you that Jesus, long before he ever went to the cross, was forgiving people of their sins? In Matthew 9:2, for example, he says: “Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven”.

In fact, Mark 1:4 says: “so John came, baptizing in the desert region and preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (and Luke 3:3). When Jesus showed up at the Jordan one day, John said of him: “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). It seems there was something in the presence of Christ on earth that meant that the forgiveness of sins was possible.

And lo, we miss this sacrifice. We get the big one, the crucifixion, which was the payment for sin, but we miss the first one. Christ forsook forever his place, the nature of his being, the pure oneness, and took on flesh to carry out this salvation plan. He was ‘knitted together’ in a human body, ‘since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity’ (Hebrews 2:14). Jesus, ‘who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness’ (Philippians 2:6-7).

Christ, the King of the Kingdom, ‘sold everything he had’ to buy us, the pearls of his great price.

In my post The End of Salvation I discussed the culmination of salvation being a marriage, or a reversal of what was wrong in Genesis when Eve was created out of Adam (for this reason… the two will become one flesh). In Summary of Salvation, I said “Becoming one (in ‘marriage’) with another who has already died and can never die again gives us freedom from death”. Christ had to come, in body, to become one with us as the only way to give us everlasting life. His arrival on the earth was an allowance for the forgiveness of sins (which causes death) to begin!

Now, this is just me speculating, because there isn’t anything to back me up here, but logically, God, who we have labeled a Trinity (3 parts) wasn’t always this way. Could it be that before anything was created, there was one God, total, whole, complete, perfect? And for this rescue of man to take place, the very being of God had to undergo some sort of split or fracture?

It would seem that because correcting the split of Adam into more than 1 being involves an eternal union of man and Christ, that there must be some degree of separation between Christ and Father. In fact, Christ spoke of His Father as a completely other being all the time. But both are God. Was there always this separation, or was there one complete being originally? If 3, we get into cause and effect; who begat who? Is there more to the God story?

My point is that the birth of Christ allowed for the forgiveness of sins. Water, symbol of flesh, was used in baptism; full immersion to indicate entry into the Body of Christ – the Body of Christ, ever think of that? The Body of Christ, in the manger, the Body of Christ. Some things to chew on…

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