One of the beauties of this normal Jewish way of teaching, namely by telling little stories, is that the stories have multiple levels of meaning. You could make a good case from this famous parable from Matthew that what Jesus was getting at was a justification of the complaints that were made about him, namely, that he spent too much time with poor people upsetting the so called social order and therefore upsetting a lot of other people in the society. But I would like to take a cue from this first reading from Isaian and use that as a heuristic device to get to yet another meaning of this parable.

Isaiah is famous for the depiction of God as mysterious. "Truly you are a hidden God, O God of Israel" is one of the great Isaian themes and we get it here too. "My thoughts are not your thoughts nor my ways your ways, says the Lord."

Certainly the procedure that we see in this little parable from Matthew seems pretty alien. Downright weird. They are unlikely readings for the beginning of the academic year, because we are in the business, of course, of making sense of things. Of discovering, uncovering, meanings. Yet here we're confronted by something that says that the ultimate way, the final reality of the world, the cosmos, us.... is not penetrable. It is mysterious, which is just a Greek word for "hidden". We have to be really careful because mystery does not mean, at least in the Jewish and Christian understanding of things, something spooky. That is simply remote and impossible to understand. Rather it means that there is so much meaning that there is no way we can get our heads or our lives around it. That is what, I think, I would like to address: the mysteriousness of God and consequently the mysteriousness of ourselves. Because if we are the creatures of God, if we exist in God, then somehow part of that mysteriousness must be part of us as well. One philosopher argued that, by saying that we can't jump out of our own heads to look at ourselves and understand who we are fully. And so, in a very real sense, we are mysterious to ourselves as well.

And God, if God exists and God is real, cannot be reduced to some item on my intellectual agenda, something for a learned article or a dissertation, something I can talk about exhaustively in a classroom. God is always larger, not just than our hearts but our heads as well.

So in that sense we are confronted with the mysteriousness of God and of ourselves... the hiddenness. But there's another aspect that comes out of the tradition that complicates this whole business of mystery and that's this... From the Jewish tradition we learn that the primary human fault is a fundamental lie people told to themselves.... you shall be as God. And then being found out to be liars by God and by other people. Remember Adam saying... the woman you gave me made me do this. Everybody's in trouble. What I'm getting at is the reflex of what we call "the fall": a sort of self-absorption whereby we are closed from each other and to the world. What I’m proposing is because that is the case we are really not particularly open to the notion of mystery. Even of ourselves, of God, of the world.

This is hugely important especially to us who work in academics. I was talking to a well known, highly published academic just a couple of days ago and she said to me... "You know. That's the besetting sin of the guild of academia:" Self-absorption" and this for all kinds of reasons. I mean those of us who have done a Ph.D., know we have spent endless hours all by ourselves, focussing on something littler and littler about which about few other people in the whole universe are even remotely interested. And yet we have to somehow justify our existence to ourselves. So as self-absorption is in play, then all kinds of other things can happen. That self-absorption can become, very easily, a means of power. And power understood in the normal way, as the capacity to work violence on other people. Because that is in fact the way power is typically understood by me and by the world I live in. I can make somebody else do what I want them to do. It's extremely important for those of us who stand at the beginning of an academic year to reflect on this. Because, as one of my colleagues put it last week when I was talking to him, if academia means anything it means that those of us who are teaching feel some kind of claim made on us. Not by the salary committee, or promotion and tenure, or the administration, but in the very search of the good, the true and the beautiful. That is a claim that is made on us. Yet, so often we reverse that and look at ourselves as the custodians, if not actually the absolute arbiters of the good, the true and the beautiful. And doing that, of course, the students suffer. They are victims rather than our collaborators, co-workers in the search for truth.

So what is the "cash value", as William James would say, of all this? A salutary humility of what we are about, and a genuine, and not just a rhetorical, but a real reverence not only for the material we are looking at but for each other. For our students. For our colleagues. Having taught for over 30 years, competition rather than collaboration seems to be the working model of much of what goes on in academia, in the schools. And competition is more often than not the spelling out of this self-absorption, both in personal and institutional form. So it's even more important that we think about this humility before each other, our subject matter, or God, this in order to try to achieve a sort of openness and availability to each other. And not just on the first day of the school year. Because a routine is going to start. The meeting agendas are going to start flooding our mailboxes. We're going to worry about whether the bookstore has what I want. And what I can afford to pay for my books. What the Ceeps hours are. That I can't stand my roommate. All these little pedestrian details of life, they always threaten to overwhelm us, to derail us from what is supposed to be our essential job, to somehow encounter the mystery of the world, of God, of ourselves, of each other.

So, I hope for myself and for you and I pray for myself and you, that we not be submerged under all the trivia that constitute so much of our existences; that we be founded an keeping in mind that God's ways are not our ways; that we have insulated ourselves against God's way for all kinds of reasons; that knowing that we can counteract, to the narrowness of our own visions, our hearts and our minds.