Today’s Gospel July 31, 2011 - Loaves and Fishes

13 ᾿Ακούσας δὲ ὁ ᾿Ιησοῦς ἀνεχώρησεν ἐκεῖθεν ἐν πλοίῳ εἰς ἔρημον τόπον κατ᾿ ἰδίαν· καἰ ἀκούσαντες οἱ ὄχλοι ἠκολούθησαν αὐτῷ πεζῇ ἀπὸ τῶν πόλεων. 14 Καὶ ἐξελθὼν ὁ ᾿Ιησοῦς εἶδε πολὺν ὄχλον, καὶ ἐσπλαγχνίσθη ἐπ᾿ αὐτοῖς καὶ ἐθεράπευσε τοὺς ἀρρώστους αὐτῶν. 15 ὀψίας δὲ γενομένης προσῆλθον αὐτῷ οἱ μαθηταὶ αὐτοῦ λέγοντες· ἔρημός ἐστιν ὁ τόπος καὶ ἡ ὥρα ἤδη παρῆλθεν· ἀπόλυσον τοὺς ὄχλους, ἵνα ἀπελθόντες εἰς τὰς κώμας ἀγοράσωσιν ἑαυτοῖς βρώματα. 16 ὁ δὲ ᾿Ιησοῦς εἶπεν αὐτοῖς· οὐ χρείαν ἔχουσιν ἀπελθεῖν· δότε αὐτοῖς ὑμεῖς φαγεῖν. 17 οἱ δὲ λέγουσιν αὐτῷ· οὐκ ἔχομεν ὧδε εἰ μὴ πέντε ἄρτους καὶ δύο ἰχθύας. 18 ὁ δὲ εἶπε· φέρετέ μοι αὐτοὺς ὧδε. 19 καὶ κελεύσας τοὺς ὄχλους ἀνακλιθῆναι ἐπὶ τοὺς χόρτους, λαβὼν τοὺς πέντε ἄρτους καὶ τοὺς δύο ἰχθύας, ἀναβλέψας εἰς τὸν οὐρανὸν εὐλόγησε, καὶ κλάσας ἔδωκε τοῖς μαθηταῖς τοὺς ἄρτους, οἱ δὲ μαθηταὶ τοῖς ὄχλοις. 20 καὶ ἔφαγον πάντες καὶ ἐχορτάσθησαν, καὶ ἦραν τὸ περισσεῦον τῶν κλασμάτων δώδεκα κοφίνους πλήρεις. 21 οἱ δὲ ἐσθίοντες ἦσαν ἄνδρες ὡσεὶ πεντακισχίλιοι χωρὶς γυναικῶν καὶ παιδίων. Matthew 14:13-21

I heard an interesting sermon on this text last year, from a young associate pastor, with an interesting interpretation.  We often think of the miracle as some sort of Magic, where Jesus transformed a paltry amount of bread and fish into a feast for a multitude of those listening to Him speak.  But it’s not magic and we miss the point if we think of it so.  The real miracle was the fact that there was enough for all to eat and then some.  If we assume that each and every one of the multitude had on his person something to eat for a journey into the desert, perhaps they contributed to the food available from their own larders.  Perhaps the miracle is that Jesus transformed ordinary people from their own selfish ends to people willing to share with others. How else can we explain how five loaves and two fishes become twelve baskets of scraps, when the multitude numbered five thousand without counting (χωρὶς) women and children and all are filled?  I don’t know about the reader, but when I was a child I tended to eat as much as I could when delicious food was passed to me.  I still seem to abide that habit, and that is part of the reason I have the physical form I have today.  The real miracle that the Christ performs is the transformation of lives, from selfish gimme-gimme types to loving, caring sharers -- from Egoism to Altruism.  Jesus’ message is a message of Love, we all know that, and we all have heard that repeated over and over.  But I wonder if we really understand that sharing is loving.  When we share with our friends and family our sharing is by its very nature an act of love.  Do we not say I love you by giving of a gift, do we not say I love you by sharing our bounty with others?  When a man courts a woman, he takes her out to dinner; when a woman expresses her love to a man, she cooks him dinner.

We ought not give food to hungry out of pity, but rather out of love, love for those who hunger as our fellow human beings.  Pity is an egoistic response to the misery of others, because we feel pity out of fear that we may be in the same condition (Hobbes). We feel the same conditions may befall us and so we pity those who are in misery.  Yet, as altruists our pity is transformed, or at least ought to be transformed, into love - true love (ἀγάπη), not the love that comes from desire. We have in many of our English versions of Scripture made that word Charity (χάρις, favor).  But charity has become something akin to pity, or I should say: the motive for charity has in our modern society become pity.  Love has nothing of pity in it.  The multitude did not share with each other out of pity, but out of love.  The one who pities puts himself/herself above the one pitied.  The one who loves puts himself/herself on a level plane with the beloved.  What we ought to take away from today’s Gospel lesson, is that we ought to be loving, caring, sharing persons, and not selfish egoists and egotists, but lovers to all mankind.  We ought not take from the lesson a sense that Jesus performed Magic on the loaves and fishes.  We ought not expect Jesus to do magic for us and give us our fill - the life we desire; but rather through the message of Jesus allow our lives to be transformed from selfishness to love.

The Apokatastasis or Restoration.

My Scandinavian ancestors have a much more subtle version of the message of salvation than we Americans.  We think in personal terms, while the Swedes think in terms of a restoration of the world to God (apokatastasis).  Some Americans think they are too close to nature worshippers than they ought to be, but I tend to differ.  If Nature is God's creation, and for the religious it surely is, then salvation belongs to her (Nature) also.  Consider this hymn made popular by the Billy Graham Crusade:

O store Gud, när jag den värld beskådar,                

Som du har skapat med ditt allmaktsord,

Hur där din visdom leder livets trådar,

Och alla väsen mättas vid ditt bord.

Då brister själen ut i lovsångsljud:

O store Gud! O store Gud!

Då brister själen ut i lovsångsljud:

O store Gud! O store Gud!

We Americans  have translated this wonderful Swedish hymn of Carl Boberg with words both too personal and too emotional to capture the wonder and awe we ought to have of a mighty God, who from nothing but a word, has given us the gift of creation.  Aristotle says that Philosophy begins with wonder, and so ought our religion.  We ought to wonder at the mighty acts of God, and even wonder at the creation God has wrought by thought (λόγος) alone.  That's right God's word is reason and thought. By God's very reason God has created.  God said "let there be..." and it was.   God is the great architect, but that is not to diminish the personal.  God has given by grace a salvation.  However, ought we not to think also of the salvation of the whole.  Perhaps through our disobedience we have separated ourselves from God and have been expelled from Eden, but is not Eden always there?  Is not salvation, in one sense at least, a restoration of each and every one of us to the veritable Eden that is God's creation?  We cannot under our own devices restore ourselves, but ought we to continue in our state of disobedience to destroy God's creation the veritable Garden which God foresaw?  And ought we not to praise God for it--burst forth in songs of praise for a mighty God?

For those who cannot understand Swedish,here is a slightly better translation:

O mighty God, when I survey in wonder

the World that formed when once the word you said,

The strands of life all woven close together,

The whole creation at your table fed,

Then souls break forth in songs of praise to you,

O mighty God! O mighty God!

Then souls break forth in songs of praise to you,

O mighty God! O mighty God!

The emphasis ought to be on God.  There is too much emphasis on "MY" in American thinking, not enough on God.  The song is about the wonder and beauty of God's creation a sort of Pantheism in the fundamentalist's way of thinking.  Too bad, they as all Protestants today want to put the emphasis on "ME" and not on God even though they do lip service to the latter.  That's the trouble with American Religion. Americans want 'me' and 'my' not 'thee' and 'thine'.  They want the personal and not the cosmic-the particular and not the universal.  Their God is awful small.  Like the elementary concept of the calculus, an infinitesimal--so small it vanishes into nothing!  In terms of the vastness of space we are nearly nothing, not even a speck on a planet hidden in a backwater of a insignificant galaxy amongst a vast number of galaxies.

Consider also the great Swedish hymn Härlig är jorden:

Americans have made it "Fairest Lord Jesus" and should jump to the second verse "Fair are the Meadows, fairer still the Woodlands". The emphasis is on a creator God who has brought salvation to us and all his creation and we ought to reverence that creation by praising the creator God.  Glorious is the Earth, and we ought not forget that fact by treating her (Earth, Nature) badly.  The environmentalist has much to say here, and we ought to listen.  We are merely Pilgrims on a journey through this world, we ought to make our pilgrimage with song and delight and reverence what the earth gives not only in sustenance, but also her beauty.  Salvation has come, not just our personal salvation, but the salvation of all God's creatures an apokatastasis, or return to the creator what was and for all time is His and not ours to do with what we wish.  If one returns what one has borrowed, ought one not return it in a  good condition worthy of the owner, if we are only pilgrims, we are borrowers of Nature and we ought to allow her to return to God in good condition.

Härlig är jorden, härlig är Guds himmel
Skön är själarnas pilgrimsgång
Genom de fagra riken på jorden
Gå vi till paradis med sång

Tidevarv komma, tidevarv försvinna
Släkten följa släktens gång
Aldrig förstummas tonen från himlen
I själens glada pilgrimssång

Änglar den sjöngo först för markens herdar
Skönt från själ till själ det ljöd
Människa gläd dig, Frälsarn är kommen
Frid över jorden Herren bjöd

Glorious is the earth, glorious is God's heaven.

Beautiful is the souls' pilgrim-journey,

through those fair countries on earth,

go we to paradise with song 

Ages come, ages go

families follow, families' go,

never stem the mute tone from heaven

in the soul's glad pilgrim-song 

Angels sang it first for the earth’s shepherds,

Beautiful from soul to soul it sounded.

People, become joyous, Salvation has come,

peace over the earth the Lord has invited. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWCAi3fRGZI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIpU2bhgKnw&feature=related

The Common Good – Cooperation versus Competition

In today’s world we seem to have adopted the competition model for nearly all our social inter-relations.  We honor the competitive athlete, the competitive salesman and the competitive student.  Men and women even compete for the affections of each other.  Men compete for the prettiest woman on their arm, while women compete with clothes and makeup, so that they become that prettiest one on the handsomest man’s arm.  What happens here is that love, a cooperative activity, becomes transformed into such a competition, that one can scarcely think, in these competitive personal relationships, there is any love at all.  While competition certainly has its place especially in sport, but in the family and the extensions of the family, tribe, city and nation, competition is destructive of the very purpose and historical impetus to these institutions. 

In a family or marriage where the members compete for dominance, chaos and troubles naturally follow.  A competitive marriage is a failed marriage.  If the members of a family compete with one another for the affections of a parent and the parents compete for the affections of their children, the family is split and troubled, because at bottom a family is a cooperative.  Likewise with the tribe and the city, and by extension the nation, competition can, if excessive, become destructive of its very purpose.

Guilds, Unions as well as academic, business and trade associations have as their model and their raison d’être the cooperation between members.  While our nation began as separate colonies of the British Empire becoming independent states, we did not become a true nation until we adopted a constitution “to form a more perfect union….”  Cooperation, ought to be our model and not competition.  We begin our Constitution with “We the people…”, emphasis on ‘we’ as a indicator of cooperation.   After all, we aspire to be the beacon of democracy and the city set on the hill whose lamp of liberty and whose bell “proclaims Liberty throughout the land.”  But Liberty does not entail necessarily competition.  We are an association of free people who through a cooperative effort form a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”  Since we have become in recent times much wiser than we once were, we now rightfully include women in our notion of ‘all men’.   Recognizing the nurturing and caring nature of the female, we now have become no longer male dominant, but equal. We ought to become a cooperative among mankind.  The common good cannot be served without cooperation as our social and political model, this cooperation and the cooperative effort to realize our “more perfect union” is our very raison d’être.

The Common Good – Opportunity

The purpose of government has been in recent times a contentious philosophic issue which divides our society.  So in order to see what government is and ought to be, we should investigate the purpose of government beyond the first and foremost duty government has namely the protection of its citizenry.  As the social contract developed in prehistory, men and women banded together as families and tribes to prevent loneliness and protection from the elements and rival tribes who might do them harm.  As populations became larger and civilization began, the tribes formed themselves into city states to promote commerce and opportunities to enhance the lives of the tribal members.  Tribal members became citizens and the next step in the development of civilized societies was to form nations, so that the enhancements one city could not provide might be provided by another.  As societies inevitably became larger, governments and laws were established to create orderly commerce and protect the citizens from conflicts both internal and external.  Commerce was not merely economic as we have come to know it today, but all those forms of social intercourse which a society maintains, Art, Education and Culture were included so that the talents of the citizens could be actualized, and the already formed social interrelations might be maintained.

So, by this, the primary purpose of government is to protect its citizens, but immediately thereafter to provide opportunities for its citizens to enhance their talents through social relationships and actualize their talents through Education and Art.  If we forget the duty government has to fulfill the artistic and educational needs of its citizens either individually or collectively, we fail its citizens in their attempt to enhance themselves and respond to the higher callings each citizen has to become something beyond his/her present self. 

Aristotle tells us in the opening sentence of his Metaphysics that all mankind desires to know something, and we should note that for some knowing becomes perpetual and the process of coming to know is, in some sense, self-perpetuating.  So that the citizens might enjoy themselves in the commerce of their ordinary lives, some have become talented in Sculpture, Painting, Music and Theater. Governments, as part of the social contract with their citizens, take on a duty to promote these forms of intercourse and the talents of those who engage in them.  Without these enjoyments the society becomes stale,  perhaps dead.  History has shown that liberal societies have always enjoyed a renaissance through the increase in Art and Education (knowledge acquisition) and without such remain in a dark age, feudal perhaps futile state.

So to conclude this post without becoming too verbose, one should realized that the second purpose of government is to promote the talents of its citizens by providing opportunities to those citizens.  The duty of any government is to liberate its citizens from the slavery of loneliness, selfishness and mastery by others (either internal or external).  In short the liberal society creates opportunity for the members of that society to enhance themselves by removing the chains of poverty (not merely economic poverty) and free its citizens to be all that they can be both individually and collectively.  

The Common Good

In Book 3 of his Politics Aristotle writes:

φανερὸν τοίνυν ὡς ὅσαι μὲν πολιτεῖαι τὸ κοινῇ συμφέρον σκοποῦσιν, αὗται μὲν ὀρθαὶ τυγχάνουσιν οὖσαι κατὰ τὸ ἁπλῶς δίκαιον, ὅσαι δὲ τὸ σφέτερον μόνον τῶν ἀρχόντων, [20] ἡμαρτημέναι πᾶσαι καὶ  παρεκβάσεις τῶν ὀρθῶν πολιτειῶν: δεσποτικαὶ γάρ, ἡ δὲ πόλις κοινωνία τῶν ἐλευθέρων ἐστίν. (Politics 1279a18-22)

"It is clear then that those constitutions that aim at the common advantage are in effect rightly framed in accordance with absolute justice, while those that aim at the rulers' own advantage only are faulty, [20] and are all of them deviations from the right constitutions; for they have an element of despotism, whereas a city is a partnership of free men." (H. Rackham trans. LCL)

συμφέρον can be translated as “good”, “advantage”, “contribution”, “benefit” or “expedient” coming from the verb συμφέρω, to bring together, contribute.

Sometimes the common good is defined in Utilitarian terms as "the greatest possible good for the greatest possible number of individuals" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_good).  Here the concept becomes tricky and muddled, because it is easily confused with the will of the majority.  The reader should note that what is of common benefit (advantage) to members of a political society, may not in fact be what is beneficial to the majority, because in some sense the minority is left out of the equation.  The greatest possible number of individuals is, of course, all sentient beings who have membership in such a society.   The will of the majority may not aim at promoting the welfare of all.

Our US constitution states in the preamble: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

 It is worthwhile to see that promoting the general welfare may be, in some sense, promoting the common good.  But in more recent political philosophic discussions we have sacrificed the general welfare for the welfare of the advantaged and promoted a safety net to allow the disadvantaged at least a subsistence participation in the benefits of our nation.  We tend to see today the government as the enemy of the individual and not the promoter of the common good or general welfare of all individual members of our political society.  But it is clear that the general welfare of our society involves the infra-structure (not necessarily physical infra-structure) of our country and the abilities that such infra-structure can provide.  Yet we have been anxious to promote smaller government and less taxation, we have sacrificed our infra-structure to inevitable decay.  The majority of the people may desire less taxation, and less intrusion into their lives by government, but the common good and general welfare can only be promoted by a government with some income to do its task of promoting such common good (benefit).  As our wealthiest institutions become more powerful, a stronger (not weaker)  government becomes necessary to protect the individual from abuse by the same powerful institutions and promote the common good.

We ought to think of the common good as what is beneficial to all and not merely to the majority, what serves all the people and promotes their liberties, and not just the a majority of persons swayed by the demagoguery of a few who would not wish to contribute out of their wealth anything to the general welfare of the society.  We cannot allow our democracy to become an oligarchy.  I often hear the claim that we are a Republic and not a Democracy, which is true, but if ‘Republic’ comes to mean ‘Oligarchy’, we have simply lost our way in promoting the common interests not of the majority, but of the all.  (to be continued…)

Who I Am

I must give credit for my inspirations, this poem is inspired by Hazel:

http://hazel-oakwillowash.blogspot.com/2011/07/i-am-one_9266.html

and Plotinus, Ennead V, 1 and 3

Who Am I

I am the breeze that rustles the leaves,

I am the wind that waves o’er the grain.

I am the sun that enlightens day,

I am the dark that quiets the night.

I am the dress that a flower wears,

I am the leaf that shadows the ground.

I am the heart that measures the time,

I am the soul that feels its passage.

I am the moth that flutters and flits,

I am the bird that soars in the sky.

I am the fish that swims in the sea,

I am the worm that crawls in the ground.

Oh Plotinus, you knew me before

I ever was awakened to be,

I am who was and always will be,

Ever, also the one, mind, and soul.

Three Hypostases in my own self

I was engendered always by Love,

and to her again I shall return,

for I am he who is all in all.

I am now twixt was and will be,

I am truth seeking satisfaction.

I am sense seeking a joyful bliss,

I am knowledge in search of something.

I am subject of experience,

I am object of those who know love.

I am I, the one who now writes,

I am the he who has also thought.

Who am I, if you now might inquire?

I the one of whom Menander wrote,

when he first came to know me, saying:

“The mind is a god in each of us.”

                                               

July 25, 2011

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Facts

Although Joe Friday never really said it, “Just the facts ma’am” has become iconic ever since Dragnet appeared on Television in the Fifties.  So much so has our popular culture been enamored with the concept that ‘fact’ has, in many cases, become synonymous with ‘truth’.  This is an error which makes many think that ‘theory’ means ‘speculation’ and ‘fact’ means ‘verifiable truth’.  Our modern culture suffers from this confusion, and a lack of proper understanding of what the word ‘fact’ means.   The Philosopher, on the other hand, desires our speech to make sense, and therefore seeks clarity of thought. To further the discussion I offer these definitions:

A fact is an elemental datum of experience, or what is the case.

A fact is expressed by a proposition.

A proposition is expressed by a sentence.

A theory is a set of propositions which give us a scientific picture of reality.

A theory is expressed by a logically consistent set of sentences which adequately and accurately elaborate a theory. 

These definitions put together give us a linguistic-logical hierarchy and will help us understand the difference between ‘fact’ and ‘truth’.  A sentence is true if and only if it properly and accurately expresses a proposition.  A proposition is true if and only if it properly and accurately expresses a fact.  A fact is neither true nor false, it merely is.  The reader should note that our definition of ‘fact’ allows for both realist and idealist interpretations of data of experience.  A datum of experience could be merely an idea (percept, sense datum) in a person’s consciousness (idealism), or an experience of an object/event in the external (independent of consciousness) world (realism). 

The Realist holds to a correspondence theory of truth, whereby a proposition is true just in case it corresponds to an actual object/event in the world independent of a person’s experience (consciousness).  The Idealist holds to a coherence theory of truth, whereby a proposition is true just in case it is coheres (is consistent and fits) with all other known data of a person’s experience.

Theories are valid or invalid.  Theories are validated either by induction or deduction. A deductive argument validates a theory when the conclusion follows logically (with certainty) from premises known to be true, as in a Mathematical Proof.  An inductive argument validates a theory, by gathering evidence for the theory and assigning a probability to the expression of the theory.  Here the argument gives probable truth, but lacks absolute certainty of a deductive argument.  The deductive argument derives a conclusion by logic alone from premises known to be true.  The inductive argument starts with a hypothesis and gathers evidence to confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis.  Since it would be inconceivable to gather all possible evidence, the inductive argument can only give a probability measure of the hypothesis (a probable truth value), but if the probability measure is sufficiently high and we have gathered a large enough body of evidence, we generally consider the hypothesis or theory true.

So the next time the reader encounters someone who says that Evolution is merely (only) a theory, the reader should do as I do and respond: “True, but so is Gravity, and I am not about to leap off a ten story building to disconfirm the hypothesis that all objects fall towards the center of the earth.”

Today’s Gospel -July 24, 2011- Six Parables

31 ῎Αλλην παραβολὴν παρέθηκεν αὐτοῖς λέγων· ὁμοία ἐστὶν ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν κόκκῳ σινάπεως, ὃν λαβὼν ἄνθρωπος ἔσπειρεν ἐν τῷ ἀγρῷ αὐτοῦ· 32 ὃ μικρότερον μέν ἐστι πάντων τῶν σπερμάτων, ὅταν δὲ αὐξηθῇ, μεῖζον πάντων τῶν λαχάνων ἐστὶ καὶ γίνεται δένδρον, ὥστε ἐλθεῖν τὰ πετεινὰ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ καὶ κατασκηνοῦν ἐν τοῖς κλάδοις αὐτοῦ. 33 ῎Αλλην παραβολὴν ἐλάλησεν αὐτοῖς· ὁμοία ἐστὶν ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν ζύμῃ, ἣν λαβοῦσα γυνὴ ἐνέκρυψεν εἰς ἀλεύρου σάτα τρία, ἕως οὗ ἐζυμώθη ὅλον.

…

44 Πάλιν ὁμοία ἐστὶν ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν θησαυρῷ κεκρυμμένῳ ἐν τῷ ἀγρῷ, ὃν εὑρὼν ἄνθρωπος ἔκρυψε, καὶ ἀπὸ τῆς χαρᾶς αὐτοῦ ὑπάγει καὶ πάντα ὅσα ἔχει πωλεῖ καὶ ἀγοράζει τὸν ἀγρὸν ἐκεῖνον. 45 Πάλιν ὁμοία ἐστὶν ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν ἀνθρώπῳ ἐμπόρῳ ζητοῦντι καλοὺς μαργαρίτας· 46 ὃς εὑρὼν ἕνα πολύτιμον μαργαρίτην ἀπελθὼν πέπρακε πάντα ὅσα εἶχε καὶ ἠγόρασεν αὐτόν. 47 Πάλιν ὁμοία ἐστὶν ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν σαγήνῃ βληθείσῃ εἰς τὴν θάλασσαν καὶ ἐκ παντὸς γένους συναγαγούσῃ· 48 ἥν, ὅτε ἐπληρώθη, ἀναβιβάσαντες αὐτὴν ἐπὶ τὀν αἰγιαλὸν καὶ καθίσαντες συνέλεξαν τὰ καλὰ εἰς ἀγγεῖα, τὰ δὲ σαπρὰ ἔξω ἔβαλον. 49 οὕτως ἔσται ἐν τῇ συντελείᾳ τοῦ αἰῶνος. ἐξελεύσονται οἱ ἄγγελοι καὶ ἀφοριοῦσι τοὺς πονηροὺς ἐκ μέσου τῶν δικαίων, 50 καὶ βαλοῦσιν αὐτοὺς εἰς τὴν κάμινον τοῦ πυρός· ἐκεῖ ἔσται ὁ κλαυθμὸς καὶ ὁ βρυγμὸς τῶν ὀδόντων. 51 Λέγει αὐτοῖς ὁ ᾿Ιησοῦς· συνήκατε ταῦτα πάντα; λέγουσιν αὐτῷ, ναί, Κύριε. 52 ὁ δὲ εἶπεν αὐτοῖς· διὰ τοῦτο πᾶς γραμματεὺς μαθητευθεὶς εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν τῶν οὐρανῶν ὅμοιός ἐστιν ἀνθρώπῳ οἰκοδεσπότῃ, ὅστις ἐκβάλλει ἐκ τοῦ θησαυροῦ αὐτοῦ καινὰ καὶ παλαιά. Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

By my count there are six parables or analogies to the Kingdom of Heaven in today’s Gospel.  1) Mustard Seed, 2) leaven or yeast, 3) treasure hidden in a field, 4) merchant seeking pearls 5) the fisherman’s net, and 6) the scribe like a house-master.  In my church attending days, I have heard sermons explicating the meaning of the first five, but I cannot recall a sermon explicating the sixth.  Therefore it behooves us to examine this analogy to the Kingdom of Heaven.  The Greek word for a scribe -  γραμματεὺς -  means to the classical mind a secretary or a clerk.  But our scribe we are told is no mere secretary, or clerk, but an educated (learned, μαθητευθεὶς) scribe, one might think of an executive assistant in today’s world. But the scribe here described is learned in the Kingdom of Heaven (εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν τῶν οὐρανῶν). We are told he is like a house-master (οἰκοδεσπότῃ, householder, KJV).  I think in this regard as the head servant to a noble house, who acted as butler and kept the household servants in order, instructing the servants as to their duties and scheduling them.  All the while he is taking from his storage something new and something old. 

What makes this analogy work is the connotations of the Greek words.  If we read the scribe as grammarian educated in Theological matters taking out of his thesaurus (ἐκ τοῦ θησαυροῦ αὐτοῦ) something of the old language and something of the new (καινὰ καὶ παλαιά), making the meaning of the Kingdom clear to those for whom the scribe is house-master.  By this the exegesis of the scripture becomes all important.  Although it is likely that the readers of Matthew’s gospel were of a Semitic culture, the educated Greek who read this gospel would naturally imagine the picture thus painted.  The grammarian and rhetorician was an important part of Hellenistic culture, from Alexandria to Athens, perhaps to Rome itself.  The rhetoricians had a powerful influence on intellectual trends in Hellenistic times from the Stoics to early Christians.  Perhaps Matthew is using this imagery to gain understanding amongst those Hellenistic (Greek speaking) members of the Jewish community.

 

So what does this analogy all mean?  The easy interpretation is that the clergy instructing the laity on Theological matters bring something old and something new from their storehouse of Theological knowledge, and in this consists the Kingdom of Heaven.  But I tend to think there is something more here. Perhaps the Kingdom of God is the whole sphere of Theology, and the scribe is the Theological author, who must take from his store of what is available to him something of the Historical and something of the Modern in his development of a Systematic Theology.  Rather than think of it in terms of the church and it’s clergy perhaps one might think of it in terms of the Theologian and the academic Theological enterprise.  The Kingdom of God by this becomes the whole of the Theological Milieu. Perhaps the parable is an analogy of the whole of Christianity, Jesus being the scribe, the house-master instructing the other servants (disciples and followers) into the nature of the Kingdom, bringing both the Old and the New out of his thesaurus (Word).