This coming Sunday is the 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time. Pearls were as highly valued in the ancient world as they are today, and were a conspicuous way of displaying wealth (1 Tim 2:9; Rev 17:4; 18:12, 16). Huge pearls are the gates in the symbolic new Jerusalem (Rev 21:21). But there is a subtle difference between this and the preceding parable.

The man, likely a hired workman, who obtains the buried treasure risks everything to possess it, but he gains wealth upon which he can live. The pearl merchant is presumably a person of some substance already having great wealth. He impoverished himself to acquire something supremely beautiful and valuable which he could admire and display but could not live off unless he sold it again.

What the two parables share in common is the issue of priorities. The fact that what the dealer had to sell included presumably other, lesser, pearls might however have led the hearers to reflect on the value of the kingdom of heaven in relation to other competing ideologies; once you have it, you need no other. Hence the emphasis on the fact that this is just one pearl, whose value eclipses all others put together.

Image credit: The Pearl of Great Price, by Domenico Fetti, 17th century |Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Bilddatenbank | Public Domain