I am working on two sermons this week, one on the Emmaus road story, the other juxtaposing (or sort of) Matt 13: 44-46 (buried treasure and valuable pearls) with 2 Cor 4:7 - 8 (treasure in clay pots).  These are familiar stories, and therein lies the danger, I come at them with a whole heap of preconceptions, and notably some mental images that are thirty to forty years old.

'The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which a person found and hid again and out of joy goes and sells everything he or she has and buys that field' (Word Biblical Commentary translation, p395.)

'The kingdom of heaven is like a pirate's treasure chest, filled with gold and jewels, half-buried in the middle of a field,where a jolly man, clad in mid-twentieth century attire, is walking.  Spotting the treasure chest, he goes to investigate.  Realising what he has found, he looks around to check no one else has spotted it, hastily buries it and rushes off to buy the field which is, conveniently for him, for sale.' (Catriona's mind)

Recognising that this mental picture was dominating my thinking, I began to ask questions of my mental image:

How did the treasure chest get there?

Surely it belonged to the pirate (!) or land owner, not the finder

Was the field actually available for purchase?

How come the owner of the land was oblivious to the existence of the treasure?

What was the jolly man doing in the field anyway?  Was there a public footpath (as per my childhood image) or not?

In asking myself these questions, I knew they were not relevant to understanding the parable, which was about the worth of the treasure not the ethics of its acquisition, but they did remind me how blindly I often read familiar passages.

Deconstructing mental image is one thing, filling the void is another.  And actually, although I know that a first century story cannot have implied a pirate's treasure chest, I'm not sure there is anything fundamentally wrong in imagining it as such, so long as that mental image does not preclude me from seeing more that is 'hidden' in the story.

'The kingdom of heaven is like...' Well, what image might work in our context?