The merchant is searching for “fine pearls”, plural. The last two signs of the Kingdom are the merchant and the net. The parable does not say what happened to the treasure next, but I hope that it was shared and put to good use. The parable of the talents shows us what to do with money that we have not earned for its original owner never benefited from it, and it was enjoyed instead by a stranger. In the parable of the treasure, the person who discovers the abandoned hoard reburies it so that he can go and secure ownership of it. In that instance, burying money is not the right answer. Now we need to recall and compare the parable of the talents (Matthew 25.14-30). In this parable, one person finds treasure that another person had hidden. The more coin hoards that archaeologists discover, the fewer people have survived a time of war or unrest in earlier years and have been able to return and recover their treasure. If the danger passed, they would come back for it. In Bible times - or any times when war and danger threatened - people used to bury their money and other valuables in the ground. In deciding what the treasure means, it helps to know about coin hoards in archaeology. Paul and Peter even refer to wealth as “filthy lucre” (1 Timothy 3.3, 8 1 Peter 5.2, Authorised Version). Here, seeing “treasure” as a sign of God’s Kingdom can be difficult when other Bible texts deny that wealth is a sign of God’s favour. To understand the meaning of yeast when it is used in the Bible to signify something, we have to think about bread-making, and about human nature.Īugustine encourages us to look at different examples of a sign to help explain the one that is puzzling us.
Bad yeast also has transformative power, but it is corrupted and corrupting. Good yeast, like the Kingdom, has power to be a blessing. Paul uses yeast with a negative meaning, too: “Clean out the old yeast so that you may be a new batch, as you really are unleavened” (Corinthians 5.7-8). Elsewhere, Jesus warns, “beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees” (Matthew 16.6). Yet, yeast is not always a sign of the Kingdom. In one way, the yeast is like the seed: it looks insignificant, but it has a life-enhancing effect, even though it works imperceptibly. He takes yeast as an example, to show how some scripture verses need us to look at the context to interpret them correctly.
#SUDOKU KINGDOM PUZZLES HOW TO#
I have been reading a book by Augustine about how to study the Bible. Yeast (the old term for it is “leaven”) is more tricky. As a sign of the Kingdom, it is relatively straightforward. For itself, it grows for other living things, it provides shelter. The seed is something insignificant, which contains within itself boundless potential. FIVE parables tell us what the Kingdom of heaven is like: namely, a seed, yeast, treasure, a merchant, and a net.
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