Interpretation and the Claims of the Text: Resourcing New Testament Theology

Chapter 4: “The World Was My Oyster But I Used the Wrong Fork” (Oscar Wilde)

43 Chapter 4 “The World Was My Oyster But I Used the Wrong Fork” (Oscar Wilde)* The Parable of the Pearl Reopened Amy-Jill Levine The parable of the Pearl of Great Price (Matt 13:45-46) is typically read only as an allegory—the merchant is the faithful Christian, or the Christ; the pearl is eternal life, or the Christ, or the Christian life with its travails as well as rewards. The result of such readings threatens to turn the kingdom to which the merchant and pearl are compared into a commodity or an obsession. For some readers, the kingdom, like the pearl, can be “bought,” usually through sacrifice; this makes the kingdom a commodity. Others concentrate on the seeking and make the pearl, and so the kingdom, an obsession. A more healthy way of reading the parable begins by de-allegorizing both the merchant and the pearl, persists by recognizing the exaggerated absurdity of the merchant’s actions, and addresses how the parable raises questions of surprise, identity, and ultimate concern. “The kingdom of heaven is like a man, a merchant, seeking fine pearls; on finding one pearl of extremely great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it” (Matt 13:45-46). * For Charles H. Talbert, who cares enough about history to locate biblical passages in their own contexts and enough about the Bible and the church to address what those passages might mean today. 44 Amy-Jill Levine Biblical readers, serious folks that most of us are, typically domesticate the parables. Seeking closure for a genre that generally functions to surprise, challenge, shake up, or indict, and looking for a single meaning for a genre that is open to multiple interpretations, we determine and so delimit what the parable means. For example, noting that the Matthean Jesus addresses this parable as well as the immediately preceding parable of the Treasure in the Field/parable of the Lucky and Potentially Dishonest Man only to his disciples (13:36), we conclude that the merchant is the “metaphorical model for the disciple of Jesus”1 and the pearl is the gospel, the good news of the kingdom,2 or Jesus himself.3 The merchant is not only making an investment in the good news, he is sacrificing everything he has in order to obtain it. Thus his action is “radical”4 (a term almost requisite for New Testament interpretation today). For pastors who spend more time in pulpits than at lecterns, the interpretation is still based on allegory, but the focus tends to be christological. For these readers, “The man who is searching for the pearls is, of course, Jesus himself. He is the sower who went out to sow. He is the one who scattered the sons of the kingdom throughout the world, as he tells us. He is the one who planted the mustard seed in the field.”5 Or, “Christ is the Pearl of Great Value and we are the merchant seeking for happiness, for security, for fame, for eternity. And when we find Jesus it costs us everything.”6 Or again, “perhaps I am the Pearl of Great Price,” a point reinforced by the fact that the “pearl is born in great suffering and pain, when a foreign speck of sand enters the environment of the shell” and this image “is used as a picture of SIN coming into the environment of our world and like an annoying, irritating foreign substance causes harm.”7 In yet another variant, we are told: The pearl here is the Church. We are strangers here on this earth, but God is transforming us into the image of His Son. We, as His Church, have been purchased with the blood of Christ. There is great pain involved in producing the pearl, as Christ went through great pain to produce the Church.8 All of these interpretations are viable: the text, especially detached from its literary and historical contexts, opens to multiple views. All of these interpretations are also obvious and thus by no means require a parable . Such readings produce no challenge and create no surprise; rather, they confirm various standard, Christian views. Resisting the immediate move to allegory—a resistance perhaps suggested by the failure of the allegorical readings to agree—we might investigate what the merchant and the The Parable of the Pearl ReOpened 45 pearl suggest in terms, respectively, of social...