• What is the pearl of great price?
• Why did the merchant sell everything?
• What a pearl was worth to Rome
• Who are the widows indeed today?
• Where a church keeps its pearl

What is the pearl of great price?

The pearl of great price is the kingdom of heaven, and the verse says something stranger than we usually hear. Christ does not say the kingdom is like a pearl. He says the kingdom of heaven is like to a merchant seeking good pearls. The comparison is to the whole scene: a man who knows pearls, a search, a find, and a sale.

That matters, because most of us were taught this parable as a price list. The pearl of great price is heaven, heaven costs everything, so pay up. Read the verse again and the merchant is not paying a fee at a gate. He is a professional who has handled good pearls all his working life, and one morning he finds the pearl of great price.

The Latin makes the turn plain. He goes out seeking bonas margaritas, good pearls, plural. He finds una pretiosa margarita, one precious pearl. A lifetime of many good things narrows, inside a single sentence, to one thing worth all of them, and that narrowing is the pearl of great price.

Christ honours the search for the pearl of great price. He could have told of a man who tripped over a pearl in the road. He chose a seeker. If you have spent years going from church to church, or from no church to some church and back again, picking up what was offered and setting it down, this verse does not call you restless. It calls you a merchant who knows what a good pearl looks like, and who will know the pearl of great price when it comes.

Why did the merchant sell everything?

He sold everything for the pearl of great price because he was glad, not because he was told to. The twin parable just before it says so about the treasure in the field: for joy thereof goeth, and selleth all that he hath. Joy comes first in that sentence and the selling follows. The pearl of great price is not bought with grief.

There is a shift of tense in the Douay worth hearing slowly. The man with the treasure goeth, selleth, buyeth, all in the present, happening while you listen. The merchant went his way, and sold all that he had, and bought it, all in the past. The Latin keeps the same contrast, vadit and vendit for the one, abiit and vendidit for the other.

Hold the two side by side and you have two ways people come to God. Some stumble on the pearl of great price on an ordinary Tuesday and are still selling as they hear this. Others made the trade years ago and are living on the far side of it, with the pearl of great price already theirs. Both are in the kingdom, and neither is ahead.

Here is the reading that has done real harm. It says the pearl of great price costs whatever you most fear losing, and that the fear proves it is the right price. Preachers have used this verse to tell people that God wants the very thing they cannot imagine living without, handed over in dread, as an entrance fee.

The parable of the pearl says the opposite. The merchant gives up what he has because he has found what he wants, and no one in the story is made to surrender something they love for something they dread. Test the reading by what it grows. A teaching that produces people afraid of God’s joy has misread a parable whose whole engine is joy.

What a pearl was worth to Rome

To hear the pearl of great price the way the first listeners heard it, you need to know what a single great pearl could be worth. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century, tells a story that is human before it is about jewellery.

Cleopatra, Pliny says, owned the two largest pearls in history. She wagered Mark Antony that she could spend ten million sesterces on one dinner. When the night came she took one pearl from her ear, dropped it into vinegar, and when it had dissolved she drank it. The judge of the bet, Lucius Plancus, stopped her before she could do the same to the second.

A classicist named B. L. Ullman tested the story in 1957 and found that a whole pearl takes hours to dissolve in vinegar, so it probably did not happen quite the way Pliny tells it. But the story survived because its readers believed the premise. One pearl could carry a bet of ten million sesterces.

Set that beside the merchant and the two stories face each other. The queen of Egypt owned a pearl of great price and destroyed it to win an argument over dinner. The merchant owned everything else and gave it all up to keep one. Same object, opposite hands. Christ chose the second story for the pearl of great price.

That is the question underneath the pearl of great price, and it has nothing to do with jewellery. Everyone treats something as their pearl of great price. The only question is whether we spend it to win, or give up everything else to keep it, and whether what we call our pearl of great price would really survive the sale of the rest.

Who are the widows indeed today?

Now the Epistle, chosen for a widow’s feast and badly used. Paul tells Timothy to honour widows that are widows indeed, and then defines the term himself: she that is a widow indeed, and desolate. Desolata in the Latin, left alone. Paul’s category is not a ranking. It is a woman with no one left to support her.

The word honour here includes money. A few verses later in the same chapter Paul says that elders who rule well are worthy of double honour, and gives the reason: the labourer is worthy of his reward. Just before that, he tells families who can support their own widows to do it, and let not the church be charged, so that there may be sufficient for them that are widows indeed. This is a budget, and a budget is where a church shows its pearl of great price.

So the harmful reading falls apart on its own terms. This passage has been read as a test of women: one husband, children brought up, sixty years of age, no pleasures. As if the Church were grading wives. It is the qualifying list for a support roll in one first-century congregation, written by a pastor trying to make a small fund last, and it ranks no one’s soul.

Even the line about she that liveth in pleasures is not policing anyone’s private life. It sits directly after the word desolate, and it marks the difference between a widow left with nothing and a widow living in comfort. It is a means test. The money is the point, and the money is supposed to reach the person with no one.

So who are the widows indeed in our congregations now? Paul’s own definition answers: the people who have no one. Among older people today, LGBTQ elders meet that definition more often than most. SAGE reports that LGBT older adults are twice as likely as their heterosexual peers to live alone, and half as likely to have a life partner.

Many lost partners in years when the law had no word for what they had lost. Paul’s word for that person is not a problem to be managed or a cost to be contained. It is desolata, and his instruction about her is one word long. Honour.

Where a church keeps its pearl

Put the Gospel and the Epistle side by side and they ask one question about the pearl of great price from two directions. The merchant shows what a person does on finding the pearl of great price: he sells everything else. Paul shows what a congregation does with what it has: it spends it first on the person who has no one.

A church’s budget will tell you what it believes the pearl of great price is. If the money goes to the building and the brand and nothing reaches the desolate, the parable has been heard as a story about jewellery. If an eighty-year-old who lives alone is fed, visited, driven to the doctor and named at the altar, the pearl of great price has been understood.

That is also what the pearl of great price looked like in Bridget’s life. She had a great deal to keep, and she spent the second half of her life founding a house and living a charitable life in a city far from home. On her feast the Church reads her the widow’s list and the pearl of great price, and asks us to do the same arithmetic.

One word of care, because this Epistle borrows the language of burden. Let not the church be charged is easy to hear as a complaint about the people who need help. Read it the other way round: Paul is guarding the fund so that it is there for the one who needs it most. Needing support is not being a burden. In Paul’s own vocabulary it is being owed honour.

If none of the theology is yours, the arithmetic still holds. Look at where your money and your hours actually go, and you will learn what you treat as the pearl of great price. Then look at who near you lives alone, and decide whether they are on your list.

↑ The order resumes below.