What Are You Looking For?

“Did you find everything you were looking for?” They ask this question at the grocery store when I am checking out. I usually answer “yes” because I not only have found everything I was looking for, but a some extra things I don’t really need.

A few years ago, there were several museum showings of the Dead Sea Scrolls. We had them in Chicago, at the Field Museum and I went downtown to see them. The Dead Sea Scrolls are not actually “scrolls, they are little bits of lambskin that used to be scrolls. They were found about 50 years ago in a cave by the Dead Sea near the ruins of an ancient Jewish community called Qumran. They date to the time of Jesus and that is what makes them important.

There were a lot of people at the museum, but strangely, they were not looking at the little pieces of scroll, which have writing in Hebrew and Aramaic; instead, they were looking at the interpretations of the scrolls provided by the museum. So I wondered why people had come all that way in order to ignore what they had come to see and simply read stuff they could have found in a book?

I have a couple ideas about that: First I think that some people expected to find something new about what happened with Jesus. Maybe they were looking to find something in or around the scrolls that was new information, something new and earth-shaking.

The truth of the matter is, although the scrolls are of tremendous significance to Bible scholars and such — for instance, they provide wonderful manuscript evidence about some of the Psalms and the Book of Isaiah, and they tell us some things about the community of people who lived by the Dead Sea and copied the scrolls — there is absolutely nothing really sensational in their contents that is either going to confirm or deny what folks already know or believe.

So the irony is that people will travel great distances to be in the same room with scraps of lambskin with words written in a language they do not understand. But many of them have not really turned the pages and explored the mysteries and treasures that lie inside a big black book that is gathering dust at home.

For Christians, this Sunday is the Day of Epiphany. It celebrates the visit of the magi or “wisemen” to the baby Jesus. But the “wisemen” were really not all that wise. They saw a star in the East and then they went to the worst possible place and to the worst possible person. They believed that the star was about a new-born king of the Jews, so they went to Jerusalem, the capital city and to King Herod who was so paranoid of his position, that he murdered several members of his family. In this way, they put the new-born baby Jesus and any child close to his age at risk.

I am sure that there are folks that believe that this stuff about the magi and the star are some sort of proof that astrology and other superstitious stuff really works. Actually, the magi didn’t have a clue where to find the baby and the star does not lead them there. They find out where Jesus is by looking in the Hebrew Scriptures, now part of that largely ignored black book sitting somewhere in so many homes: “And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.’”

There’s an old song called “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places”. That is what the wisemen, the magi were doing. That is what some of the folks at the Scrolls exhibit were doing. That is what we often do. The truth can’t possibly be right in front of our face, it has to more exotic and arcane than that.

If you need to have some, here is new information: There not only is nothing in the story that indicates that the magi were wise, there also is nothing to suggest that they were kings. They were magicians of sorts. The gifts they brought — gold, frankincense, myrrh — were used in magic. We are told that they bowed down and paid homage to the child Jesus and offered him these gifts. Here are two possible explanations for what they were up to: They might be welcoming Jesus as a equal into the guild of magicians. Or, they might be making a statement. They might be showing deference to something and someone that was above and beyond their abilities and magic arts.

I think there is another reason why the magi were searching and why people came from far and wide to see the Dead Sea Scrolls: They came, because they wondered if it is all true. That is what they were looking for. This is what they really wanted to know. They hoped to see something that will convince them once and for all that this stuff about God and Jesus is true.

I’m not sure that that kind of proof exists or if it should exist. I don’t think we will find it in the places that we usually look. Actually, I don’t think that we can find it at all. Any thing that we can figure out or find out on our own is likely to be less than what we are really looking for. In the end, it could be we don’t have to look as hard or as far and wide as we think.