Every few days or so, my wife Kathy and I look at our horoscopes in the morning paper. We do this mostly for laughs because these days horoscopes have become like fortune cookies. They give anodyne life advice and don’t really say anything surprising. There’s no “You will meet a tall, dark stranger”, or “Be careful of a journey over water.” More like, “Today is a good day to clean your sock drawer.”
A few weeks back we were amused, then startled, to read a horoscope for one of us that said something like, “You will have difficulty today with an older relative.” We felt puzzled, then burst out laughing. We have no older relatives. We are each now the oldest person in both of our families.
That realization was underscored last week at our yearly vacation with Kathy’s family in northern Michigan. When we first started going to this lake cottage in the 1970s, Kathy and I were the young couple on the verge of marriage. Fifty plus years later, we’re now the old-timers. That’s true in pretty much every area of our lives. I realize now I’m often dealing with folks who never used a stick shift or a rotary phone.
I begin with thoughts on time and change because I have long been intrigued by what Jesus says at the end of today’s gospel passage:
“Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.” And he 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]
This statement comes at the tail end of a string of parables about the kingdom of God, which Jesus compares to a mustard seed, yeast, a treasure in a field, a pearl of great price, and a bounteous catch of fish. Each thing Jesus describes is both precious and, in its way, surprising. And then he makes this puzzling remark: if you get what I’m saying in these parables, you’re like “the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old”. What can this possibly mean?
Help in answering this question comes in the form of a painting I’d like to look at briefly. (It’s printed on page 8 of your bulletin along with today’s Gospel.) It’s a 1640 picture by the French artist Nicolas Poussin, “Landscape with Saint John on Patmos”, and it hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. Kathy and I lived in the Chicago area for many years when I was dean of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in nearby Evanston, and the Art Institute is one of our favorite places in that wonderful city. We always spend some time there before heading up to northern Michigan.
This year I was arrested by this painting, one I had never really noticed before. I must have stood and studied it for a half-hour. You may remember that St. John received his Revelation, the final book in the Bible, on the Greek island of Patmos. Poussin’s painting depicts the evangelist at work on his Gospel and Revelation in the midst of a highly symbolic landscape. As the accompanying text explains,
In this painting, Saint John, one of the four Evangelists who wrote the Gospels of the New Testament, reclines beside his attribute, the eagle. He is here depicted as a powerful old man, presumably after retiring to the Greek island of Patmos to write his gospel and the book of Revelation at the end of his life. To suggest the vanished glory of the ancient world, Poussin carefully constructed an idealized setting for the saint, complete with an obelisk, a temple, and column fragments. Man-made and natural forms were adjusted according to principles of geometry and logic to convey the measured order of the scene.
[https://www.artic.edu/artworks/5848/landscape-with-saint-john-on-patmos]
Although I found this picture compelling on its own terms when I stood in front of it, Jesus’s statement in today’s Gospel immediately came to mind:
“Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.” And he 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]
Surrounded both by the beauty of the natural world and the markers of an older classical culture, Poussin depicts John the evangelist reaching into what is old and bringing about something absolutely new. It seems he can only give voice to his vision of the future by contemplating the artifacts of the past. In its own way this picture gives us both a theological and a personal truth. As Jesus says elsewhere in Matthew’s gospel,
Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. [Matthew 5: 17-18]
Jesus’s teachings are both new and old. Yes, they are sometimes startling, but they are also continuous with all that has gone before. Just as John the evangelist brings his new revelation out of the matrix of a world now passing away, so Jesus fulfils what has gone before him. Christians have always stressed that we consider the whole Bible, both old and new testaments, to be the word of God. That’s why we have always rejected the idea that the Gospel somehow replaces the Law. We may be saved, finally, by grace, but that doesn’t mean we can weasel out of the Ten Commandments. The new may arise from the old, but it does not replace it.
And I think something much personally deeper is going on here as well. A follower of Jesus is “like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old”. Just as Jesus does not reject what has come before him, so you and I need to see that our present arises out of our past. Our American penchant for what we call “reinventing ourselves” ignores the simple truth, often voiced by the great classicist Mary Beard: “The past is all we’ve got.” You are your history. That doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t do something new. It does mean that your life has a logic and a trajectory, and that the present “you” is a product of all that has gone before in your life.
I’m never entirely sure why we want to beat up on our collective or personal pasts in the way we do. Today we smugly assume that we in 2023 are morally better than those who lived in 1823, 1523, or 23 BC. In the same way, we often dwell on our own personal pasts, and flagellate ourselves for things we did then that we naively think we wouldn’t do again today if we only had the chance. In today’s Gospel I hear Jesus telling us, in the language of the street, to “get over ourselves”. Who we are now is pretty much who we were then. The question is not, “how can I reinvent myself?” The question is, how can I take out of my treasure that which is new and that which is old? How can I weave a fabric of my life that makes peace with the past, looks with hope to the future, and lives with purpose and joy in the present?
A longtime priest friend of mine always ends every conversation with the words, “Be gentle with yourself.” He knows from experience. We continually beat ourselves up over the past—things we’ve done, things we should have done, mistakes we’ve made, feelings we’ve hurt. Be gentle with yourself. You think you’re smarter now than you were then, but chances are if you faced the same people or situations today you’d do exactly what you did years ago. The past may not quite be all we’ve got, but it’s a part of us that we cannot simply deny or try to forget. Make your peace with your past. Bring out of your treasure that which is new and that which is old.
As in almost all sermons, you find the preacher here talking to himself. I’m now in what the novelist Richard Ford calls “the Permanent Period”—“an end to perpetual becoming”[The Lay of the Land, p.54]-- the time in life when you are pretty much who you’re going to be and things are what they are. In his parables this morning, Jesus reminds us of the preciousness of what is on offer to us in his life and teachings: they are like a mustard seed, yeast rising in bread, a treasure in a field, a pearl of great price, a bounteous catch of fish. If we get over ourselves and settle into the way we and the world are, things will really be OK.
Look to the example of St. John on the island of Patmos. Make use of the gifts of your past to build the future you long for. Be like the householder who brings out of your treasure what is new and what is old. And, above all else, be gentle with yourself. Amen.
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