I Have Seen the Sun Break Through

Spiritual Sunday

I’ve written a couple of times about Jesus’s “pearl of great price,” found in today’s Gospel reading (Matthew 13:44-46). It provides the climactic image for a Hilda Doolittle poem and a pivotal allusion for a fine William Cowper meditation upon truth. (See the links at the end of today’s post for the essays.) Today I turn to an R. S. Thomas poem, which compares it to the sun breaking through clouds.

Jesus’s metaphors for the process of spiritual exploration include a field containing buried treasure as well as the pearl:

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.

Thomas, a Welsh Anglican priest with a passion for nature, continues Jesus’s search for metaphors:

The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

Comparing the sunlight to the pearl and the field is a nice touch, and Williams brings in another light image with Moses’s burning bush. The epiphanic moment when God spoke directly to Moses adds a directive to Jesus’s image: God, after all, directed his servant to lead his people out of bondage to the promised land, while Williams hears the call to focus on eternity.

It doesn’t matter how transitory the moment seems. Before the moment, we are hurrying toward some receding future ir longing for some imagined past. What appears as a turning aside comes to clarify our purpose in life.

Previous posts on the pearl of great price
–The Pearl of Great Price Within
–The Only Lasting Treasure, Truth