The Lamp and the
Bushel
"Is a lamp brought
in to be put under a bushel, or under a bed, and not on a stand?" (Mark
4:21)
"No one
after lighting a lamp covers it with a vessel, or puts it under a bed, but
puts it on a stand, that those who enter may see the light." (Luke 8:16)
"No one after
lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar or under a bushel, but on a stand,
that those who enter may see the light." (Luke 11:33)
"You
are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Nor do men
light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and let it give
light to all in the house. Let your light so shine before men that they
may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven."
(Matthew 5:14-16)
Here is one of the
many cases of Jesus teaching by means of a joke. He sets up a situation
that is palpably, laughably absurd. He invites his hearers to imagine a
poor dope stupid enough to light a lamp and then not know what to do with
it! Get a load of this guy! He's sitting there reading his paper in the
evening, and right in the middle of a juicy story, wouldn't you know it?,
the light bulb fizzles. So he gets up and looks in the cupboard, then in
the basement, then in the garage, but there aren't any fresh bulbs in the
house! So he groans, hops into the car and drives over to the convenience
store and searches through the boxes till he finds the right voltage. He
stands in line while everybody and his brother take forever buying lottery
tickets and whatnot. Finally he pays for the bulb and heads back home, the
evening half consumed. He gets the lampshade off, then unscrews the old
bulb, screws in the new one, manages to get the shade on straight again,
clicks the light on, kicks the shoes off his aching feet and is on the
point of sinking back into the easy chair--when one more thing occurs to
him: oh, yeah! So he runs into the kitchen, grabs a burlap bag and pulls
it over the top of the lamp! Shrouded in darkness again, he settles in.
Huh? What a stupid jerk, right?
The audience
laughs. Yeah, what a nitwit! Nobody would be that stupid, maybe one of the
Three Stooges! Heh heh; now he has them. "Yeah? Well if it's so damn
stupid, why the hell do you do pretty much the same thing?!"
Caught up short,
they stop laughing pretty quickly and ask, "What do you mean? How are we
doing that?" And Jesus proceeds to point out some less obvious but equally
silly tendency in the moral or religious life. If he strikes home, the
crowd is likely to laugh with chagrin. Touché. "Yeah, come to think of it,
I guess we do!"
The technique is
that of the court jester. He says critical things to his king, things no
one else would dare say for fear of getting a haircut starting at the
throat. But the jester speaks his words into a strange zone where they
will reverberate with laughter. The king can get away with laughing off
the criticism, but he may be an even bigger fool than the jester if he
disregards what the jester has said. And the jester can get away with it,
since the king will look pretty bad is he has him hauled off to the
dungeon, since it will get around that he can't take a joke, that the
jester must have hit a nerve. But if the jibe stings and the royal lion
starts to growl, the jester can always say "Just kidding!" And if the king
stays mad, he will be the one insisting that the quip be taken seriously,
so he will probably take the opportunity offered to laugh it off.
The use of humor to
prod and chide is much more likely to win your audience over, to make them
see the irony the humorist had caught them in. But since he's got you to
laugh at yourself, to see the essentially comical character of human life,
you may take the lesson to heart, not too mad either at the jester or at
yourself.
The reason satire
doesn't work quite the same way is that the joker is inviting/inciting the
audience to laugh at the behavior not of themselves, but of a third party.
Perhaps the satirist lampoons those in authority and thus punctures their
pretensions, makes it easier for those they rule to laugh at them and to
have contempt for them. It is much easier to keep control over those who
revere you than over those who resent you. And satire demystifies. Satire
will make the target angry, and this makes them less likely to change for
the better. So why does the satirist not take the "laugh at yourself
approach" with them? Presumably he has already, but they were not amused.
That having failed, the jester-prophet turns to others and tries to
interest them in forcing the change on the rulers who are unwilling to
make it.
But what is
the light, the oil lamp, that is being smothered under a bushel basket
when, as any fool can see, it belongs on a lampstand so people entering
the house will see their way and not stumble into things? What is it
Jesus' hearers are doing that is tantamount to such idiocy? Today we tend
to interpret the saying very broadly. In common use, it means that if you
have a talent you owe it to others to develop it so they can benefit from
it. We take it, in other words, as a parallel to another saying of Jesus:
"Much will be required from the one to whom much has been given." If you
have some music or artistic ability, some scientific genius, that stands
to benefit many others, you owe it to them to cultivate it. Talent to
perform or to serve, by its very nature, is for others. Like love, it
cannot rightly be kept to oneself. You must give your life on behalf of
many. Whether Jesus had this in mind or not hardly matters. It is a good
way of applying the saying.
In the Sermon on the
Mount, Matthew has already broadened the saying out beyond what may have
been a more narrow original scope. For Matthew, the light you must let
shine is your righteousness, your good deeds. Presumably, you have ignited
the lamp by becoming a pious, spiritual person. But you have an obligation
not to keep this to yourself. If you do, how will anyone profit by your
good example? You should encourage others to emulate your good deeds. They
will at the very least thank God for people like you, and their
consciences will prod them to pass on a bit of the goodness you showed
them. Never mind the fact that Matthew has told us elsewhere in the Sermon
that exactly this, doing our acts of righteousness before others, for
public consumption, is what we are to avoid like the plague! There he
tells you that Jesus said we are to keep our piety as much a secret as we
possibly can, praying not in public but in a closet if that's the only
place we can escape observation! In a closet is pretty much the same as
under a bushel, wouldn't you think? Maybe this is not what Jesus meant
after all.
The Second
Isaiah had commissioned his fellow Jews, returning from foreign exile, to
serve as "a light to the nations," to live in their restored homeland as a
model community. The nations would surely see how their God had restored
them to the Holy Land, how the covenant between God and his people was
unbreakable, and how a holy people would prosper. Thus Jerusalem, the city
set on a hill, would be like a lighthouse beckoning to the nations,
showing them a better way, a way out of the thick darkness of degrading
idolatry. It is not hard to imagine Jesus aiming the lamp and the bushel
saying at his fellow Galilean Jews who, living amid Gentiles, had long ago
assimilated to Greek culture and lifestyle, inviting the catcall
"Sinners!" from the pious Jews of Judea and Jerusalem to the south, who
used to upbraid them as "Galilee that hatest the Torah." Galilean Jews
should be upholding basic Jewish distinctives as a good witness to the
heathens surrounding them. When, all across the Roman world, faithful Jews
did practice the Torah, they made Judaism very attractive to Gentiles,
many of whom actually converted or at least attended synagogue as "Godfearers."
So it could work.
Jesus,
himself a Galilean Jew, had decided to live among the "sinners" like Demian among the lepers, since it was the sick who needed the physician,
not the healthy down in Judea. The light he summoned them to expose for
the good of others, then, might have been the Jewish way of life, the
scriptural way of life. As the Letter to the Romans puts it, "You call
yourself a Jew and rely upon the law and boast of your relationship to
God..., confident that you are a guide to the blind, a light to those who
are in darkness... While you preach against stealing, do you steal? You
who say that one must not commit adultery, do you commit adultery?... You
who boast in the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law? For it is
written, 'You have made the name of God a laughingstock among the
Gentiles'" (2:17-24) Here a Jew chides fellow Jews, worldly Jews, who have
betrayed their mission and with it those their mission would have
enlightened. Imagining themselves a light to the Gentiles, they have
instead hidden their light under a bushel.
In just the
same way, I imagine that when Jesus said, "The rulers of the nations lord
it over them, but it shall not be so among you. Let the greatest among you
be servant of all," he was referring to Jewish leaders in Palestine,
perhaps the Herodian rulers or even the Sanhedrin, not bishops or deacons
of a new Christian religion which did not yet exist.
Another possible
identification of the light that should be allowed to shine is the
scripture ("Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path"
Psalm 119:105). The temptation to smother it under a basket might be the
familiar tendency of religious people to stop at merely hearing the
commandments of scripture, not pressing on to keep them. "Put the
commandment into practice; don't just listen to it read, because then
you're just kidding yourselves. Look, anyone who hears the commandment and
leaves it at that is like the poor fool who looks in the mirror before he
leaves the house, to check the face he was born with. He sees himself all
right, but no sooner does he turn away than he completely forgets what he
saw and goes out looking as much a mess as he was before! He is no better
off for having glanced at the mirror, but someone who gazes deep into the
clear, revealing glass of the Law that sets us free and doesn't forget
what he saw there, but instead follows through and does something about
it, such a one will benefit from looking in the mirror" (James 1:22-25, my
paraphrase).
This passage from
the Letter of James could easily be taken for another of Jesus' ironic
comparisons: "Who would be stupid enough to behave this way? You, that's
who! You know enough not to do it literally, but you do it spiritually all
the time! How come you can't see that just as easily? Well, now you do. So
shape up!" The metaphors are pretty close: in one case the Law is compared
to a lamp to prevent you from loosing your footing. In the other the Law
is like a mirror to show you what is wrong so you can correct it in time.
In the first scenario you perversely stash the lamp under a basket, and in
the second, you do see what the mirror reveals, but you can't remember
long enough to fix the problem it revealed. Equally absurd! Equally
self-defeating. Both efforts equally wasted.
As Freud would tell
us, those who act in such peculiar ways are not really aware of what they
are doing. Consciously they realize they need to see something about
themselves, about their lives. But something prevents them from seeing
what should be evident (and no doubt is evident to others). What is that
something? It is that which, like the fictional vampire, shuns both the
light and the mirror lest it be exposed and destroyed. Perhaps Jesus was
urging his contemporaries to live up to the high religious calling that
was their birthright and their obligation not only to their ancestors and
their God, but to those who needed the light they could provide. Perhaps
he was suggesting they, as individuals, stop kidding themselves about a
piety that was too superficial, a band-aid covering a gangrenous wound. In
either case, his technique was to get his hearers to laugh at themselves
and the absurdity of their situation. He knew people can't manage to get
too angry while you're tickling them.
Copyright©2009 by Robert
M Price
Spirit of
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