A Pharisee in the Henhouse

I heard a pastor ask the other day: “Did you all bring your Bibles?  Let’s lift them up high.”  A couple of people held up cell phones, and I saw one Kindle.  But I got the feeling that somehow those didn’t count.  So I got to thinking about this object so many of us Christians esteem so highly.  What is it about this bundle of pages (especially the crispy, super-thin kind) with inky squiggles on them that has become such an icon (in the Greek Orthodox sense) that it seems to serve as an indicator of spiritual maturity when carried (in just the proper way of course)?  Jesus, after all, had to go to the synagogue to read from the Holy Writings.  He couldn’t take the family Torah down off the shelf and carry it just so and then preach from it.  And then Paul the apostle – who after all wrote much of what we Christians call the New Testament and consider to be scripture, and who was a Pharisee and therefore knew much of the Torah, the Law and the Prophets – did he carry around his own copy?  Write all that on parchment or even papyrus and you’d need a cart to push it around in.  Of course the Pharisees had devised a method to obey the command in Deuteronomy to “Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.”  They created little leather-bound pouches into which they put a small portion of (hand-written) scripture which they then tied around their heads so they hung on their foreheads or around their arms.  But they missed the essential part of the command – the “hearts and minds” part.  Jesus condemned them for wearing large pouches to attract attention to themselves: “Everything they do is for show. On their arms they wear extra wide prayer boxes with Scripture verses inside…”  Of course we go them one better – we use seventeenth-century technology and print the entire scripture on paper which is then leather-bound for ease of carrying – and use, if used.  

I can see the shepherd David sitting out by the sheepfold in the dead of night composing poems as he peruses his copy of the Law and the Prophets which he has conveniently brought along in his sheep-drawn cart.  Just how was he able to say he had “hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you…”?  Could it be he heard it from his father Jesse?  If Gutenberg had lived four centuries before David, would this young lad have treasured his copy of the Bible?  I believe he absolutely would have.  Of course, in the dead of night, on a hill outside of Bethlehem, reeking of sheep, it would have been so much easier to read the words on his Kindle.

Do we – strike that – do I take God’s word to heart?  Do I, as David did, “meditate on it day and night”?  The picture is of a cow chewing the cud, which is food regurgitated, not freshly bitten off grass.  Meditating is then bringing back to mind that which you’ve hidden in your heart.  And you can only hide (memorize?) that which you read, or hear, constantly.  There is nothing in all the scripture that dictates what technology we must use to learn God’s word, only that we must learn it.

So join with me – learn God’s word from your iPad, or smart phone, or Kindle, or laptop.  The Pharisees among us may not consider you to be as “spiritually” endowed as they are, but you’ll certainly appear more technically astute.  (In my own defense, I carry my laptop in a leather-bound case.)