By Harry T. Cook

Matthew 11: 25-30

For time out of mind Episcopalians heard the following words from page 68 of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer every Sunday: Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart; and with all thy soul; and with all thy mind and with all thy strength. This is the first and great commandment

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Church people do all right with most of the so-called Great Commandment - mostly its bidding to love God with all the heart and soul. It's easy to love an invisible and unknowable deity with one's heart, because we all know that the word "heart" in its scriptural context has nothing to do with that pulsating organ in our thoracic cavities, rather with an undefined emotion; and because we all know that the word "soul" has no objective referent whatsoever and can therefore mean anything you want.

As for loving God with all one's "strength" it must be said that turning up for the church's Saturday work bee probably doesn't qualify. The word "strength" in the New Testament text suggests moral fiber and ability. The problem Christianity has ever had is with the other part of the Great Commandment, i.e., loving God with the mind. The word we translated "mind" is the Greek dianoia - a combination of the particle dia, which can mean "through" or "across." Noia is from a word that can mean "mind" or "thought-process" or "understanding" So the commandment might be saying, "Love God through your powers of understanding across a broad range of thought."

Yet so much religion is claimed to be a right-brained function, an emotion-filled, emotion-driven piety in which how one feels is considered far more important than what one thinks. Or if one thinks. There was for a time a fad going around the church called "African Bible Study," which I took to be a slur on Africans. What you did was to choose a passage of scripture, take it out of context, have everyone in the circle (it always has to be a circle, no elitist, informed leadership at any dais permitted) . . . have everyone in the circle read it aloud several times, and then everyone got to say how it made him or her feel. End of study. Time for coffee and cake. Try that method with Darwin's The Origin of Species or Gray's Anatomy, the 10-pound book not the TV show. It won't work. Because it doesn't matter how you feel about evolutionary biology or the make-up of the human body, it matters what you know. So enter Matthew's Jesus in today's gospel passage to inform his heavenly father that he is grateful that these things had been hidden from the wise and intelligent and, instead, revealed to babes. A better translation of "babes" is "unskilled and simple." Yes, heaven forefend that people who have taken the trouble to become educated and knowledgeable should be able to discern these things. What things? Sorry, but we have to put this verse in context. That would be unpopular if not verboten in a good many bible study classes. But we will do it, nevertheless.

So brace yourself.

These things to which the text refers are several of Jesus' so-called deeds of power which Matthew depicted a few verses earlier in the instant chapter. Matthew says the deeds were done in cities where their import was not understood, much less appreciated. But we can tell the babes, the "unskilled and simple" about them at their rural remove, and surely they will believe. Believe what? And to what end? One of my perverse leisure-time recreations is to look at what we call the "church channels" on our TV. At almost any hour of the day and night, you can see startlingly attractive anchor-man type evangelists vending their theological wares, telling their vast audiences arrayed in vast auditoria that all they have to do is to believe and they will be saved. Hallelujah. Amen. Pass the collection plate. Love the Lord your God with all your hutzpa. This sermon is a brief for recovering the intellectual aspect of being religious, of being Christian. The eclipse of the intellectual life of Christianity has allowed the emergence of a Know-Nothing wing and a lunatic-fringe whose constituencies are undeterred from their simplistic interpretation of the historic literature of our movement, undeterred from drawing a circle that shuts out people who believe differently than they, whose life choices are different from their own. That's exactly what happened in Jerusalem last weekend as dissident Anglicans decided to become schismatic. They defend that stand by taking the bible literally rather than seriously over you-know-what. Verily, emotion unperturbed by cool reason is, like a little knowledge, a dangerous thing. This deconstruction began almost 1700 years ago as Christianity became an adjunct of the Roman Empire, as libraries were left to molder and often replaced by churches and basilicas, and when the collective wisdom of the ancient Greeks was no longer regarded as important. It would be a millennium and more until, during the Renaissance, that wisdom was recovered - only to be discarded once again by some of the Protestant reformers who decided that there was only one book that mattered. Sola scriptura. They ended up swapping a human pope for a paper pope. One step forward and two back. As for today's gospel text, who would not prefer to be numbered among the wise and intelligent rather than among the babes or the unskilled and simple? The former standing does not come by revelation but through consistent, inductive study, which enterprise ought not to be exclusively the clergy's - though there are plenty of clergy whose work suggests that they are happy among the unskilled and simple and therefore exempted from scholarship. The church confuses learning with therapy. It is in therapy that the concern is about how one feels. In the learning process, the concern is what one knows and thinks. It is about engaging life with one's powers of thought and understanding -or more plainly speaking: from the neck up.

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© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.