Do you know where the phrase “buy the farm” comes from? It is actually rather recent in its usage. It started perhaps during WWI but certainly by WWII, having been recorded only in the 1950’s. Professor Jonathan Lighter has compiled the origin in the Random House Dictionary of American Slang. It actually is an Air Force term based on some older Royal Air Force phrases, “Buy the plot” or simply “Buy it”. Obviously, it refers to a pilot whose plane crashes.
Generally, when a plane goes down the pilot tries to maneuver it away from urban areas in order to minimize collateral damage. Normally, the plane will go down in a rural area and hit someone’s farmland. Ordinarily, the farmer whose land was effected by the crash sues the government for damages, claiming that it was his most productive land that was damaged. Because of the jet fuel, the land is now permanently fallow. Therefore, the farmer sues the government for a sum far greater than the remaining mortgage so that, one could say the pilot pays for the farm with his life.
That is kind of what happens in the gospel lesson for today. A man finds something of value hidden in a field. He hides it again and then sells everything that he has in order to buy the field. That way the treasure hidden in the field belongs to him. Certainly, there is no dying that happens in the lesson, there is no damage done to the property and there is no law suit but there is a transaction that takes place and there is something of value that is given up in exchange for the field.
Before we got any farther, let’s get a little background. This teaching of Jesus follows right after the “parable of the sower”, the “parable of the tares” ,or as we might say in more modern language the “parable of the weeds”, along with the “parable of the mustard seed” and the “parable of the yeast”. We’ve heard these teachings in the last couple weeks so I won’t reread them or delve into them.
However, Jesus gives this instruction to the people and then Matthew gives to us the famous line from his gospel. “so was fulfilled what was spoken through the prophet . . . “ And then he loosely quotes Psalm 78:2, “I will open my mouth in parables. I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world.”
The next few verses of the Psalm are instructive for us. The Psalmist writes:
What we have heard and known, what our fathers have told us. We will not hide them from their children; we will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, His power and the wonders he has done. He decreed statutes for Jacob and established the law in Israel, which He commanded our forefathers to teach their children, so the next generation would know them, even the children yet to be born, and they in turn would tell their children. Then they would put their trust in God and would not forget His deeds but would keep His commands. They would not be like their forefathers, - a stubborn and rebellious generation, whose hearts were not loyal to God, whose spirits were not faithful to Him.
That is really what this section of scripture is talking about. It is calling out to everyone, everywhere to turn to God and to trust in Him above all else. I know that we aren’t like the Israelites of old. We haven’t melted down our gold, only to make an idol out of it. We haven’t gone off and worshipped at other temples. But we struggle with our faith in our own ways. It is so easy to let other things crowd in to our lives and undermine our faith, pushing it to the back burner. Just like the seed sown along the weeds in the parable of the sower, we allow the concerns of this world to choke out our faith. We sometimes have so much going on that we don’t put the effort into the right things. It’s been true for us.
We were up against it this spring. Our lease was up and we needed to move. Our house on base was ready. We had purchased airline tickets to go to our church’s chaplain’s retreat so we only had a few days to get our household moved but the movers couldn’t handle the dates that we needed them. We checked with our landlord to see if he would allow us to extend a couple weeks. He said that he’d have to charge us a full month’s rent. That wasn’t going to work so we ended up doing a full DITY (do-it-yourself) move. Over 15,000 pounds later, all of our stuff was moved into our new house. We got on the plane, spent a great week in Jacksonville but when we returned to Kansas City, we couldn’t find our car and I spent a couple hours walking around the parking garage trying to find it.
My wife spent a month getting our house back in order while I read over three thousand pages in twelve different books for a class I was going to take this summer. We went on leave the last two weeks in May. While on leave, we found out that Linda’s dad went in to have his emergency open-heart surgery done so we raced up to Wisconsin. I got back for a couple weeks in early June, just long enough to get my head barely above water again. I wrote the twelve book reviews and spent two weeks in St. Louis for my class. Our house flooded the weekend in between the two weeks. I came back to help get Linda and Andrew in TLF (temporary living facility) while I finished up in St. Louis. After the course, I came back to a full plate of work with change of command, PCS (permanent change of station) and retirement season in full swing. We just got moved, One fellow chaplain went on vacation and another went to the chaplain’s course while Vacation Bible School started and in the midst of that, Linda and Andrew got sick. We are still dealing with our insurance claim.
That has been our spring and early summer. It’s been very easy for us in the midst of our flurry of activity to forget to pray and read our Bibles and at times we have. It has been very easy for us to wonder where God is in all of this. Why is He allowing us to go through so much adversity? How about you? I know a lot of you are going through things in your personal lives, in your work, in your marriages. It’s easy to lose perspective on what’s really important. It’s easy to wonder what God is doing.
Our problem is that our expectation is all wrong. That is what gets us into trouble. We talked about this a couple weeks ago. See, our expectation is that all things will go well in our lives. We will have little trouble. Our marriages will be wonderful. Everyone will live happily ever after. No one will ever get sick. Our stocks will do well. Our money will last our entire lifetime. We will never be in want for anything. Our problem is that our expectation is wrong.
Let’s look briefly at the parables again. What ties all of these stories together? Why has God moved Matthew to put them together in the same section of Scripture? One of the keys to understanding this section of Scripture is “hiddenness” and “smallness”.
God’s kingdom is hidden from human vision and small in the eyes of the world. You know full well that it is impossible to tell who the real Christians are. There is no medical test. You can’t X-ray someone to discover in what or whom they believe. You can’t tell by what someone looks like, where they live, what language they speak. You can’t even really tell by what a person does or doesn’t do. God’s kingdom is hidden.
In the eyes of the world, the kingdom of God is also small. After speaking these parables, Jesus goes to his hometown of Nazareth. He begins teaching the people in the synagogue. The text says that the people were amazed but then it says they asked if Jesus is the carpenter’s son (a reference to Joseph, who many theologians believe is dead by this time), the son of Mary and whose brothers and sisters still live in Nazareth. They wondered where Jesus got this teaching and the text says that they took offense at him. The Greek word here is a form of skandalizw. The people of Nazareth were scandalized because of Jesus.
Have you ever gone back to your hometown and run into some old friends of your parents? What do they always say? “I remember you when you were this high.” They may even call you by your childhood nickname that doesn’t sound so cool for a teen or adult.
I’m almost forty now. I am married, have a child, and graduated from West Point. I have a master’s degree. I am working on my doctorate. I’m an officer in the United States Air Force. I’m a defender of our nation’s security. I managed a couple multi-million dollar accounts in the Army but some of my family members still insist on calling me “Curtie boy”.
If I were to try to pastor them and had to give them some hard teaching, they would just blow me off like the people of Nazareth did Jesus. In essence, they were saying, “Who the heck does He think He is?”
Christians are often considered weak in the eyes of the world. Former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura said that Christians were weak-minded people who needed the crutch of religion to make it through life. Saturday night live often portrays Christians as geeky, out of touch, social misfits. You see, God’s kingdom is hidden from human vision and small in the eyes of the world. However, at the same time it is growing and influential (like the mustard seed and the yeast) and invaluable like the hidden treasure in the field and the pearl of great value until the time of the final judgement.
To deal with our struggles of unbelief (allowing the world to push Him out) and our sin, Jesus would later “buy the farm.” Through His death, Jesus paid the mortgage of our sin, the fullness of our penalty because of sin. He would go to the cross, suffering and dying there at the hands of those that did not believe in Him to erase the sin of their unbelief in order that all might believe. It is interesting how quickly it started.
Later, in Matthew’s Gospel he tells of the Roman centurion and the other guards standing with him who saw the miraculous signs of that day and said, “Surely He was the Son of God.” We’re not sure, exactly, but it is at least possible that these soldiers became believers in Jesus right then and there. It is possible that it was simply out of fear, especially fear of God’s judgement, for being responsible for the slaying of one whom they now realized was most definitely an innocent man
However, Jesus would not leave any doubt about who He was. For three days later, He rose from the dead, declaring to the world that He was indeed innocent. He was indeed the Son of God. He had indeed “bought the farm”, paying the full mortgage price.
Even though He “bought the farm”, He did not “buy the plot.” He was not buried in a tomb of His own. He merely took up borrowed space for a short time. Joseph of Arimathea placed the dead Jesus in his own grave. It was really only rented space. For the grave could not hold Jesus. And because of that, our graves will only be rented space as well. We too, someday, when Jesus returns will be raised to new life. Our eternal lives, with brand new bodies that will never wear out, is guaranteed because of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead
Because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, His kingdom is like a treasure hidden in a field or like a merchant who found a pearl of great value. We are wiling to part with anything or everything to obtain it or maintain our part in it. It is only God who can work in us the will to want to be part of His kingdom; however, we must apprehend it. We must make it ours. We must seize and hold it.
Richard Wurmbrand, the Lutheran pastor from Romania, in his book Tortured for Christ, tells of having everything stripped away by his communist oppressors. His wife was told that he was dead. For all he knew she was dead. He sat in a pitch black room for months listening to the words, “Christianity is wrong, Communism is good.” He said he and his fellow prisoners could only remember a few verses of scripture but they used them to encourage one another. They began preaching to one another. The guards would come in and beat them. They preached, the guards beat and everyone was happy, he explains. Even knowing full well what their fate would be, some of the guards seeing the long-suffering of these prisoners became convinced of the truth of the gospel, confessed Jesus as their savior and were locked up with their former captives.
We may never get to that stage in our country and God willing we won’t. However, when everything is stripped away, when you have nothing else in this life, You still have Jesus, who “bought the farm” for you and me. Praise God for His mercy toward us!
