Jesus told this parable as the fifth in a run of kingdom parables recorded in Matthew 13, following the sower, the wheat and the tares, the mustard seed, and the leaven. It stands beside its twin, the parable of the pearl of great price, and together the two parables turn from the nature of the kingdom to its worth, and to the response its worth requires.
"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field."1
The Treasure Found in the Field
The man in the parable is not identified as the owner of the ground. He works it, or passes across it, and the treasure comes to him by discovery rather than by search. Burying valuables in the ground was an ordinary precaution in the ancient world during war, invasion, or any season when a household could not trust that its goods would remain its own. If the one who buried the treasure died, or was carried off, or simply never returned, the treasure stayed exactly where it had been placed, sometimes for generations, until a plow or a spade brought it up again. That is the situation the parable assumes: something valuable, forgotten by whoever hid it, lying in the ground of a field that belongs, at the moment of discovery, to someone else entirely.
Having found it, the man conceals it again. That is not dishonesty in the story's own terms. It is the ordinary caution of a man who has found something he does not yet own and means to secure a claim to it properly. Under long standing practice, a man who purchases a piece of ground acquires what is in the ground along with it, so the lawful way to make the treasure his own is to buy the field itself. He does not attempt to remove the treasure and leave the field behind. He goes and buys the whole field, treasure included, and everything that follows in the verse depends on that decision.
The Joy That Comes Before the Sacrifice
"For joy thereof" is the hinge of the sentence, and it falls before the selling rather than after it.2 The man does not calculate his losses first and resign himself to them afterward. He rejoices, and the sale follows from the joy rather than the joy following the sale. Once a man has actually seen what the treasure is worth, giving up everything else to obtain it stops looking like a sacrifice and begins to look like an obvious exchange.
The same order appears in the author of Hebrews, writing of Christ himself: "who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God."3 The joy is set before the endurance, not discovered afterward as a consolation for it. What is true of the cross itself is true in smaller measure of every sacrifice made for the kingdom. The joy is not a reward tacked on at the end of the transaction. It is what makes the transaction possible from the beginning.
Selling All to Buy the Field
"Goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field."4 The sentence allows no partial reading. He does not sell most of what he owns and keep something in reserve. He sells all of it, and the field is bought outright, with nothing held back and nothing negotiated. Jesus states the same requirement without a parable elsewhere: "So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple."5 The demand in the parable is not an exaggeration for effect. It is the ordinary shape of what following Christ costs, told here in the form of a story rather than a command.
Paul describes his own accounting in the same terms. Whatever had counted as gain to him before he knew Christ, he now counts as loss: "But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ."6 The man in the parable and the apostle writing to the Philippians have made the same trade, described in nearly the same terms, and both call it gain rather than loss.
Jesus makes the same point directly in the Sermon on the Mount. "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."7 Two kinds of storage are set against each other, one that decays and one that does not, and the location of a man's treasure determines the location of his heart rather than the reverse. Paul gives the same instruction to the Colossians, and adds a word that fits this parable exactly: "If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory."8 The treasure in the parable was hid in a field until a man found it. The life Paul describes is hid with Christ in God until Christ himself appears, and in both cases what is presently hidden is not thereby less real or less valuable. It is simply not yet seen by anyone who has not gone looking, or had it uncovered before him.
The Treasure Itself
The parable never says what the treasure is, only what finding it is worth. The rest of Scripture supplies the answer more directly than the parable does. The psalmist writes, "The LORD is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup: thou maintainest my lot,"9 and Jeremiah, in the middle of a lament, says the same thing of the same object: "The LORD is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him."10 In both cases the treasure a man finally values above every other possession turns out to be God himself, held as an inheritance rather than observed from a distance.
That is why the man's joy in the parable is not strange and his sacrifice is not, in the end, a loss. He has not exchanged something valuable for something merely valuable. He has exchanged everything he owned, none of which he could have kept in any case, for the one possession Jesus elsewhere describes as treasure "where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal."11 The kingdom of heaven, found unexpectedly in the middle of an ordinary field, is worth more than the sum of everything a man had before he found it, and the man in the story is the only person in it who sees this clearly enough to act on it without delay. No one else in the parable is named. No neighbor, no family member, no rival buyer appears to complicate the transaction. The story is deliberately narrow, because the decision it describes is one every man must finally make for himself, on the strength of what he alone has seen in the field.
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