9 Pentecost, Cycle A Proper 12, July 23, 2023
1 Kings 3:5-12 Psalm 119:129-136
Romans 8:26-39 Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
The punchline of today's Gospel may be a clue about the author of Matthew, and perhaps a shameless promotion of the writer's craft: ".. every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”
The Gospel of Matthew involves a writer who perhaps is referring to the writing craft, called in those day, the work of a scribe. A scribe was one who was involved with language, and in particular, with text, and with reading and writing. The scribe was to be a wise reader of the many written texts and the texts found on the pages of reality, but not just read, but also bring to written word wise observations about what the wisdom scribe has read.
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An important insight of the wisdom scribe is the acknowledgement of the reality of time. The wisdom scribe is one who believes that one has to be rightly related to the reality of time. With the use of two qualifying adjectives, the wisdom scribe acknowledges the reality of time. Time means before and after; it means old and new.
People can be wrongly related to what is old and to what is new. People wrongly related to the past can be called conservatives or traditionalists or originalists. They can believe that meanings were fixed in the past and that those same fixed meanings can be transplanted into the present without any different meaning than what they meant in the past. Some people believe that the words of Holy Scripture fix both the words and their meaning forever as if the present could not contribute anything new in terms of important insights about living. People wrongly related to the present can think that relevance is only what happens in the present, and the past is to discarded like old food whose shelf life has expired.
The wisdom scribe of the Gospel of Matthew knows that it is not either old or new, but rather old and new united in the new scribal commentary about what is truly applied meaning in the current situation. This scribe did not invent this notion; he inherited from the long tradition of scribes who read the apparent "fixed words of the Torah and the sacred writings" and offered living commentary in making these old words have a current applied relevance within the life of the community. Treasures then, are both new and old as the scribe offers wisdom commentary of the wedding of the past and the present. Certainly, this was part of the rabbinical textual practice of the scribe's time.
The wisdom scribe was writing about the newness of Rabbi Jesus within the oldness of the inherited traditions of Judaism. This wisdom scribe perhaps honored the custom of venerating the name of the divine by referring to the kingdom of heaven, rather than the kingdom of the unpronounceable Holy One.
The scribe understood the apparent innovation of Rabbi Jesus to be about the realm of heaven, the kingdom of heaven. Everyone in the reading audience knew about three kingdoms. They knew about the kingdom of Israel whose climax had been reached perhaps in the reign of King David. They knew about the kingdom of the Caesar, who had followed the kingdoms of the generals of Alexander the Great, who had conquered the Persians, who had conquered the Babylonians. Each of these "foreign" kingdoms had taken control of the former kingdom of David. The third kingdom known by the reading audience of Matthew was the future kingdom of someone like David who they hoped would bring rescue and deliverance.
The scribal writer of Matthew was trying present how the new kingdom words of Jesus fit in with the existing and older kingdom thinking of the reading audience.
The scribe of Matthew's Gospel understood Jesus to be the herald of this kingdom message: "If we're going to use the metaphor of king and kingdom, then let's be sure that the tradition from ancient time acknowledges that the world is God's and therefore we always already live within the realm of God."
So, what is the problem? The problem is recognition of the kingdom of heaven. We are so involved in the pain and hurt, and the winning and the losing within the realms of human power structures that we miss the big and obvious picture.
The kingdom parables are crafted to evoke insights about the always already kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of the divine.
One insight is that we trip over the small and insignificant and miss the very causation of the great and the large. Where did the large shrub come from? The tiniest of seeds, the mustard seed. Where did the swelling and tasty bread come from? From the tiny leaven or yeast that had been hidden within the dough.
The wisdom scribe presented Jesus as saying, "everything that seems big and obvious now, derived from the small and trivial event of divine sustenance accumulating in time." Big things don't just happen and self-generate; they are the result of living and moving and having being within the sustaining realm of God. Realize it and don't forget it." When our earthly moments have come and gone, then the surviving world witnesses to our momentary smallness. But don't forget the small; the momentary accumulates into what is great and obvious.
Jesus also said that the kingdom is like a stock market no-no: It's like the delicious secret of "insider trading." It is investing in front of people who do not know the value of what they already have. Rabbi Jesus said, if you know you live in the realm of the divine, then you have incredible insider information. And that sounds unfair, but it isn't because everyone can be an insider. The knowledge is open to everyone.
The wisdom scribe of Matthew also believed that Jesus prescribed organizing one's life values around the worth of the highest value, namely knowing that one lives and moves and has being within the realm of God. Once one knows this, it devalues everything else in comparison so one sells things of lesser value to devote one's attention to acquiring the chief value of living, namely, knowing one's living and being within the realm of the divine.
Finally, the wisdom scribe understood Jesus to promote wisdom living as the continuous retroactive sorting of what has gone before and assigning and applying new values now. Being a wisdom scribe means continual reassessment of what has happened so that one can craft new and fresh actions of love and justice in the present. The wisdom scribes can look at biblical cultures which were permissive and supporting of slavery, subjugation of women, and other tacit practices of ancient cultures, and the wisdom scribe can sort these things out as truly being bad for our time in how we have newly come to understand what love and justice means in truly being kind and welcoming to people. The wisdom scribe is to always be re-appraising the past so that new and creative justice and love can happen in our lives today.
Today, you and I are invited to be wisdom scribes. No, we don't have to be writers; but if we allow our minds to be written with the insights of what it means to live well in the realm of the divine, then perhaps we will let the words distill into the body language of our lives which will speak through actions the love and justice of Christ who invited us to know that we live and move and have our being within this exalted realm of heaven. Amen.
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