And Jesus said to them, “Therefore 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.”
Matthew 13:52, NRSV
What is a scribe, anyway? In the New Testament they often get lumped in with the Pharisees and then together, both groups are caricatured as opponents of Jesus. But that's not really fair, with all due respect to Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Apparently, just like there are good priests and bad priests, good lawyers and bad lawyers, good presidents and bad presidents, so also there are good scribes and bad scribes. Jesus refers here to kingdom scribes, those who are in service to the Church or the Jesus’ movement or whatever we may call it. Presumably they are among the good ones.
They are scribes like Baruch, who made the book of Jeremiah possible by writing it all down and passing along the wisdom of Jeremiah. They are scribes like Ezra, who helped (as Walter Brueggemann puts it) “to reconstitute the community of Judaism” after the exiles came home and gathered at the Water Gate in Jerusalem. There at the original Water Gate (not to be confused with the Washington Hotel made famous in the early 1970s) the Levites helped the people to understand the Torah, reading from the scroll with interpretation to give the sense, so that the people understood the reading. (See Nehemiah 8:7-8) [1]
This is what scribes do: they help the people to attend to the text and to listen for a Word of the Lord. This is never immediate, nor obvious. It takes time and it takes intentionality. As one of our prayers in The Book of Common Prayer puts it, we “read, mark, learn... [so that we might] inwardly digest” which then allows us to become what we eat: a word about the Word before we ever open our mouths to speak. We read, mark, learn and inwardly digest these words of Scripture as “kingdom scribes” because we trust that there is a not just a history lesson there, but a living Word of the Lord addressed to us in this time and place.
Developing eyes that see and ears that hear, however, requires a deep dive, and no small amount of imagination. It means that we can’t keep coming and doing it the same old way or preaching the same old sermons, because always we are trying to discern what is new and what is old. That is our tradition: not mere repetition of the past as if curators of a museum, but discernment of what needs to be kept alive as well as making space for the new thing God is doing. Kingdom scribes are like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.
I've been reflecting (and even ruminating) on this a lot lately. I don't think it's just the work of the ordained. I think it is communal work as we reflect on what the past year or so has been like, and what we have learned. And that may will take some time. Nevertheless, we begin where we are.
Some people want to go back to what is old - to what they call "normal." That is not possible. Others seem ready to embrace all that is new, to deconstruct what was in order to birth a brand new reality. There may be other Biblical texts to back up this approach, but I tend to personally be built more for reformation than revolution. And so this text resonates with me. And so I ask again: what that is old will continue to serve us? What that is new needs to emerge? And how do we work together to value both old and new, as we look to the dawn of a new day?
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