The Lost Ark and Holy Grail!

You are probably tired
of hearing me yammer on
about the differences
between Jesus’ parables
and Matthew’s delivery of them.
I wouldn’t blame you for that,
but really, if we keep our eye
on those differences
we will see something
akin to Indiana Jones
finding the Lost Ark.

We already know
we are surrounded by Raiders
who would steal those passages
and misuse them for their own purposes.
So stick with me here
because we are getting close.

If I were to ask you
what Jesus’ primary teaching was
I might get answers like:
love, or
love your neighbor as yourself,
or love God,
or turn the other cheek
and stuff like that.
Those wouldn’t be terrible answers
but they would be wrong ones.

Jesus’ primary teaching, summed up in a phrase, is:
“Thy kingdom come
on Earth
as it is in Heaven.”

Why else would Jesus keeps telling us
what the kingdom of heaven is like
if it wasn’t so that we can build it
on Earth
as it is in heaven?

In today’s reading alone,
we are given five similes
for what the Kingdom of heaven is like:
a mustard seed that grows big
yeast that leavens
hidden treasure that creates abundance
a merchant who knows what the greatest value is
the net that holds us all.

But the most interesting one for our purposes,
is the last one,
which isn’t about the Kingdom of Heaven at all.
It is about the “scribes
for the Kingdom of heaven”
who are like…
a painter
a wood worker
a poet
who is able work a treasure
to bring from it
both the old
and the new.

Think about a fine table top
worked and loved
until it is as smooth
as a baby’s bottom,
and oiled and shined
until the natural
waving, undulating beauty
of the wood’s grain
is paired with splendid inlaid stone and resin.
The old and the new
rising up from the treasure
that was once an aged tree.

The scribe trained in the Kingdom of Heaven
is like such a woodworker,
and from out of a parable
or a story
or a fractious set of laws
that scribe massages it
until up bubbles wisdom
both old
and new.

It has been said over the centuries
that Matthew
considered himself
a scribe trained in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Each of the Gospel writers
had some special grain of wisdom
they were trying to work to the surface
so it would seep through
with particular power and beauty.

Mark’s was paradox-wisdom
aimed at his utterly gentile audience.

Luke’s was a kind of class warfare
aimed at the common folks who
had memories of the social margins
from whence they came
or soon could return.

Matthew’s was Jesus
as the fulfillment of scripture
aimed at the Jewish
or the mixed Jewish and Gentile
communities around him.

The scribes are characters in the background
of the Gospel stories
and are important
but rarely catch our attention.
They are kind of like background soundtracks
that alert us when romance
is about to bloom
or danger is yawning
or a disaster is about to happen.
We hear it
and respond to it
but our focus is really on the visual motions
taking place before our eyes.
Scribes are like that.

For example, do you remember the important role
scribes played in Matthew’s telling
of the miraculous birth of Jesus?
I am guessing not, unless
you were made to memorize bible stories
word for word when you were a kid.

It is after the Magi have left King Herod
and he turns around and asks
the scribes
where the messiah is supposed to be born?
Bethlehem of course, they tell him.

See what I mean — background characters.

But what is important about scribes
is that they are the ones who interpret scripture.
In a culture in which very few people were literate
the ones who could read
and write,
especially if in multiple languages,
held a lot of power.
They had the privilege
of revealing
what the meaning
of scripture was.

So Herod, who felt threatened
by the Magi’s claim that the King of the Jews
was about to be born,
called in the scribes
and grilled them about the meaning
of the messianic scripture.
Is an alternate king
really going to be born,
and if so, where?

Matthew fancies himself
a scribe trained in the Kingdom of Heaven.
He is able to intepret
the meaning of scripture.
He can tell us, he is claiming,
when and where
scripture is fulfilled.
I want to share with you
this little tidbit of information
I came across
while preparing for today.
It was a black hole
I fell into,
which happens from time to time.
I just start reading
about some obscure thing related to scripture
and before I know it
two or three hours have passed.
So whether it is germane or not,
you get a serving
of what I found out.

Scribes wrote or copied
sacred scripture, of course.
That was, in fact, their primary job.
There were scribes in every culture and religion,
writing down administrative details and laws
or copying sacred texts.
It was the printing press,
more or less, that put them out of business.

The Jewish scribes, I found out,
had some special rules
they had to follow
while writing down Torah
and the other books of the Bible.

First, only clean animal skins
could be used to write on.

Also, the ink had to be from a batch made
with a special recipe.

Then every column written
could have no less than 48,
and no more than 60, lines.

I love this next one, because I do it too:
the scribe had to say each word out loud
as they were writing it.

Now think about how many times the word
G-O-D is written in scripture.
Picture the thousands of times
that word appears.
Well, every time, before they wrote it,
they had to wash their pen,
and then wash their entire body,
and wash their hands seven times.

If three consecutive pages contained mistakes,
even small ones,
the whole manuscript had to be redone.

“Process of copying the Old Testament by Jewish Scribes,”
Scott Manning, Philadelphia

There were apparently a bunch of other
obsessive rules
that scribes had to follow
when copying sacred texts,
but my point is that it was a profession
with rigorous training
and both high esteem
and considerable social power.

I had an unexpected call
from a good clergy-friend of mine
who recently had a big retirement thing.

But when I discovered that he is now,

almost immediately, spending his summer
as a supply priest for a chapel
on an island in Lake Michigan,
I said, “Hey, you’re supposed to be retired.”
To which he said,
”You know being a priest isn’t a job anyway.
We don’t do anything like work.”

Indeed, the Book of Ecclesiasticus
says this about scribes:
“The wisdom of the scribe depends on the opportunity of leisure;
and he who has little business
may become wise” (Sirach 38:24)
So whether the scribe was born into privilege
or became privileged once a scribe,
in an agrarian economy
in which most people do back-breaking work
for a few measly pittances,
being a scribe looked soft.

Matthew considered himself
a scribe trained in the Kingdom of Heaven.
He was taking the stories
and sayings
and quotations of Jesus
he received from whatever his sources
and writing them down
while at the same time
interpreting them.
He writes down a parable or saying
and then he writes down
what he thinks it means —
and sometimes he ascribes to Jesus
his interpretation
of what it means.

I am telling you all of this
in case you thought my previous
critiques of Matthew
allegorizing Jesus
was a rejection of Matthew.
Not at all —
Matthew is an ally of ours.
Rather, it is to say
that Matthew’s interpretation
is just one man’s opinion.
He may have been a scribe in his day
but in our day
we are all scribes —
at least those of us who can read and write
and look up stuff with Google
or Duck Duck Go.
For all intents and purposes,
especially because of the genocidal war
that separated Matthew from Jesus,
his scribal interpretations
are not any closer to the living Jesus
than yours or mine might be.
Which means
we cannot lean on him
or Mark or Luke or John
as the final word.
We have our own work to do.

But that brings us
to the Lost Ark
or the Holy Grail
which we can almost reach out
and touch.

“Thy kingdom come
on Earth
as it is in Heaven.”

The Kingdom of Heaven is like
a mustard seed that grows big
yeast that leavens
hidden treasure that creates abundance
a merchant who knows what the greatest value is
the net that holds us all.

These are all clues
to what we should be looking for
and what we should be doing
to build the Kingdom
on Earth
as it is in Heaven.
You are a scribe.
Take this sacred text
and interpret its meaning.
We are standing right in front
of the Holy Grail
and all we need do
is figure out these clues
about how to build the kingdom
on Earth
as it is in heaven.

I am not exaggerating.
This is our sacred wisdom
and figuring it out
and doing it
is our job —
it is our task
and our sacred responsibility
from which
none of us ever gets to retire.