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IS IT OKAY TO SWINDLE CIRCUIT CITY?

If you spot the Hope diamond at a yard sale, sticker-priced $15, or that Titanic ‘Heart of the Ocean’ necklace, mismarked down to seven bucks, is it appropriate to buy it? Jesus tells about a man who finds buried treasure in someone else’s field, and quietly rips off the owner.

I guess Tom was pretty much like any boy living life on the Mississippi River right after the Civil War. Nickels and dimes were few and far between, especially when you were living with your aunt. St. Petersburg was a very ordinary little village, and there just wasn’t a lot of money. But all of a sudden, the possibility of hidden treasure landed on his doorstep, and Tom and his childhood friend were faced with the possibility — in fact, the driving obsession — of having just tons of money in their pockets.

“He had never seen as much as fifty dollars in one mass before,” writes the narrator of his story, “and he was like all boys of his age and station in life, in that he imagined that all references to ‘hundreds’ and ‘thousands’ were mere fanciful forms of speech, and that no such sums really existed in the world. He had never supposed for a moment that so large a sum as a hundred dollars was to be found in actual money in anyone’s possession. If his notions of hidden treasure had been analyzed, they would have been found to consist of a handful of real dimes and a bushel of vague, splendid, ungraspable dollars.”

Well, if you remember back to your old literature classes, you remember that Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn made their way into the cave, after the death of Injun Joe, and came out with a whole booty of treasure. And by the time Aunt Polly and everyone else gaping at the gold coins finished counting it, the two boys had themselves something like $12,000.

Mark Twain finishes up the saga like this:

“The Widow Douglas put Huck’s money out at six per cent, and Judge Thatcher did the same with Tom’s at Aunt Polly’s request. Each lad had an income, now, that was simply prodigious — a dollar for every weekday in the year and half of the Sundays. It was just what the minister got — no, it was what he was promised — he generally couldn’t collect it. A dollar and a quarter a week would board, lodge, and school a boy in those old simple days — and clothe him and wash him too, for that matter.”

And as the old classics always point out, “They lived happily ever after.” With six thousand bucks to his credit, even the Widow Douglas was glad that she had “snaked [Huck Finn] in out of the wet.”

Well, friend, I would be the last person in the world to accuse one Mr. Samuel Clemens of literary theft, but the fact is that at least the germ of this gold-in-the-cave story comes right out of an even older volume, and that’s the book of Matthew, chapter 13. We kind of told the story yesterday through the eyes of Jeremiah Clampett, brother to the famous Beverly Hillbilly himself, Jed. But there’s a day of storytelling from the back seat of a boat on the Sea of Galilee, with hundreds of people sitting on the shore listening, and Jesus is able to match Mark Twain story for story, yarn for yarn. But then, after the crowds have packed up and gone home, He has another little trilogy of stories just for the inner circle, the disciples. And here’s His own buried-treasure tale, which lasts just one verse.

“The kingdom of heaven,” He says, for the fourth time that day, “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 that he had and bought that field.”

Well, that makes sense, doesn’t it? Even though we had our tongues firmly planted in our cheeks yesterday with our remake of The Beverly Hillbillies, and Jeremiah ripping off his own brother, Jed Clampett, this is a story we can all relate to. Have you ever come across an item at Circuit City that is accidentally marked down way too low? Man, it’s gotta be a mistake. And if you don’t have your credit card right on you that very moment, you hide that DVD player in the back, under some boxes, run home, get your VISA, come back, and stake your claim to the gold.

There’s one thing we have to bear in mind in studying a parable like this one — and we kind of broke that rule yesterday. Here’s the principle: when we’re studying parables in the Bible, we need to focus on the one key point the parable is trying to make, and not get sidetracked on the peripheral details that the storyteller — in this case, Jesus — is NOT trying to make.

I’ll give you a “for instance” on this . . . and then, about four weeks from now, when we study the marvelous story from Luke 16, “The Rich Man and Lazarus,” we absolutely must keep this idea in mind again. But here in Matthew 13, we could immediately get bogged down in the morality, or lack of morality, involved in finding treasure in a field, and then covering it up and swindling the rightful owner of that field. And under normal circumstances, that would be an important point of discussion. Is it right for a Christian — or any person, really — to find hidden treasure in someone else’s field, say nothing, cover the treasure back up, buy the field with a straight face, and then cash in? The old expression, caveat emptor — let the buyer beware, or in this case, the seller — comes to mind. And in yesterday’s story, the brother who suckered Jed Clampett out of his $25 million oil well felt guilty and gave him back half of the black gold. But the point we want to make here is that the morality of this man’s decision is NOT the point! Jesus isn’t talking about that! I remember a preacher once putting it this way: “You can’t get these Bible stories to ‘stand on all fours.’” So we have to ask: well, what IS Jesus talking about here?

Last week we really appreciated some of the insight from the Tyndale New Testament Commentaries, by Dr. Richard T. France. And here in Matthew 13, he affirms this same reality.

“The legal and moral justification of [the day-laborer] towards his employer . . . is not the point of the parable,” he writes. “It lies rather in both the joy which a disciple experiences in ‘finding’ the kingdom of heaven (i.e. in a relationship with Jesus who brings it), and in his willingness to give up everything else for this.”

Various Bible versions and commentators conjecture on just who this kind of person might be who is even in that field in the first place. And it’s suggested that perhaps he was a common laborer who had been hired to work in that field, and accidentally finds the treasure. In the great 19th-century book, Christ’s Object Lessons, the author suggests that perhaps this man is like a sharecropper who has rented a little plot of land from a wealthy owner.

“A man hires land to cultivate,” she writes, “and as the oxen plow the soil, buried treasure is unearthed. As the man discovers this treasure, he sees that a fortune is within his reach. Restoring the gold to its hiding place, he returns to his home and sells all that he has, in order to purchase the field containing the treasure. His family and his neighbors think that he is acting like a madman. Looking on the field, they see no value in the neglected soil. But the man knows what he is doing; and when he has a title to the field, he searches every part of it to find the treasure that he has secured.”

Now friend, even if Raiders of the Lost Ark and Romancing the Stone and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer sound like far-fetched adventure stories to you and me, bear in mind that in the time of Jesus not everyone in the world had a safety-deposit box or the opportunity to invest all their money online using Ameritrade. Thieves were everywhere, one biblical scholar points out. And every time there was a change of administrations in Jerusalem or Rome, anyone with money was afraid that their “tribute” – meaning their taxes – would go up. (That hasn’t changed a whole lot, has it?) And so it was common in the first century A.D. for people to just stick their money in the ground. They really did. And then, sometimes they died and it was still there. Or they got tossed in prison, or were forced into exile, and all they had was a map hidden in their sandal with an X marking the spot. So when Jesus told stories about finding buried treasure, people sat up straight, because they probably had dreams of doing the very same thing.

For today, let’s just sign off with this. Friend, when you find something truly valuable — like twelve grand in a cave or eternal life in the Bible — you do whatever it takes. You leave your girlfriend, Becky Thatcher, back home, and you crawl on your belly through the darkest bowels of a cave if you have to . . . in order to get to the gold. You sell what you have to, you sacrifice what you need to, you shed whatever is required. “This one thing I do,” the Apostle Paul tells us, and he was talking about a jackpot worth a whole lot more than $12,000, believe me.