Jesus’ paired parables of the hidden treasure and the precious pearl in Matthew 13:44–46 endlessly intrigue me. Each is fewer than 35 words. Jesus in the first parable compares the kingdom of heaven to a treasure hidden in a field. When, by a stroke of luck, a man stumbles over it, he gleefully sells everything he has to buy the field. He doesn’t sell everything because he has to: He sells it all in his joy. For Jesus, the joy that surges up this man’s spine is what the kingdom of God feels like.
But the parable is not just a story of dumb luck—that would be scandalous enough. It is also a story of questionable ethics. In first-century Israel, turmoil was so common that people stopped storing their most valuable possessions inside their homes: too easy for marauders, occupying soldiers, or corrupt tax collectors. Instead, ordinary citizens buried their treasure in their fields so only they could find it. This practice was common enough that rabbinic sources specified that someone who found a treasure could not take it. That was the equivalent of theft.
The man in this parable is careful not to remove the treasure from the field. Instead, he exploits a loophole. He buys the entire field but fails to disclose the fabulous treasure hidden within it. To the original audience, it would have felt like Jesus was comparing the kingdom of God to a shady deal. That was exactly the point. You will know you have tasted the grace of the kingdom of God when your salvation feels so free you feel like you are cheating.
But while the kingdom Jesus proclaims is scandalously free, it also costs the man everything. Imagine the look on his unsuspecting neighbors’ faces as they watch him gleefully toss to the wind everything he had spent his life clawing after. He doesn’t agonize over each item or muster up heroic self-denial. He effortlessly walks away from it all—overjoyed. He is liberated from everything that once enslaved him. His joy made his actions both bewildering and attractive to his neighbors.
A famous passage in Homer’s The Odyssey has Odysseus preparing to sail past the infamous Sirens, creatures who could sing such beautiful songs that sailors who heard them, enchanted by their spell, ended up dashing their ships upon the rocks. Odysseus, fighting the lure, instructs his sailors to tie him to the mast of his ship as they stuff their ears with wax: No matter how he shouts, commands, or threatens, they are not to untie him. This was the only way he could resist the allure.
But another version of that story involves Jason and the Argonauts. In it, Jason, instead of tying himself to the mast of his ship, brings on board the legendary musician Orpheus—the only person on earth who could sing a song sweeter than that of the Sirens. Jason knew that when Orpheus sang, no one would bother to listen to the Sirens. The secret to life in the inverted kingdom of God is not heroic self-denial or radical restraint. It is hearing a better song. It is being enchanted by a more beautiful melody. No one has ever looked at a man tied to a mast and said, “Now that’s the kind of life I want to live.” But a life that has been set free to dance to a more beautiful melody? This is the life the scandalous grace of the kingdom creates.
The second parable is like the first but reversed. Instead of the kingdom of heaven being like a treasure a man finds in a field, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of a pearl. In the first, the kingdom of heaven is the object of value found by the dumb luck of a clueless subject. In the second, the kingdom of heaven is the subject searching for an object of great worth. The kingdom is the shrewd merchant in search of a pearl with tremendous value overlooked by those who don’t know any better. This time it is the kingdom of heaven who, in his joy, gives away all he has to get his pearl.
If you and I are those who receive the fabulous treasure of salvation by grace alone, then Jesus Christ is the wise merchant who leaves the comforts of heaven and, in his joy, spends everything he has, even his very life, to purchase for himself the discarded pearl that is of infinite worth to him. Despite the obvious muck and mire of our sin, Jesus appraises the pearl to be of far greater worth than anyone could have imagined. He alone sees truly. So this dual parable ends by fixing our eyes on him who “for the joy set before him … endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb. 12:2).
Paired together like this, this dual parable presents us with a joy that far exceeds our wildest imaginings. In stumbling into Jesus Christ by grace alone, we have stumbled across the treasure who has made a long and harrowing journey from a far-off country, searching for us. We have only to drop everything that we have anxiously held on to, and then turn empty-handed to receive the gift of his love.
The true shock is that this searching person turns out to be a person of utmost importance and infinite worth—the eternal Son of God. If the praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards, what would it feel like to be treasured by the Treasure of Heaven himself? A tremor of joy that surges up the spine might be a faint and distant echo of that feeling.
Those three words—in his joy—contain the power to unleash lives of attractive Christian nonconformity today. In a culture rife with resentment, division, grievance, and violence, God calls Christians to be joyfully different from the world. Not angrily different, not fearfully different, not self-righteously different. Joyfully different. Only the joy unleashed by uncut grace is strong enough to defy powers and principalities and the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
Excerpted from Abraham Cho’s forthcoming book Defiant Joy: A Vision for Christian Witness to a World of Anxiety, Loneliness and Outrage (Brazos Press, January 2027). Cho is a Redeemer City to City vice president.
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