Buried

John Deason was twenty-nine years old on Feb. 5, 1869.  Like most days, I guess, John reckoned it was another day, another dollar.  About fifteen kilometers northwest of Dunolly, near the mining town of Moliagul (which mean as much to me as Blue Earth and Frost, Minnesota mean to most of the world), Deason and his partner, Richard Oates were poking around in the soil - puddling, it was called - when Deason stuck his pick in the ground and hit something solid.  Assuming it was a rock, he moved his tool a bit and hit the same thing resulting in the same sound.  As Deason cleared away that debris from around the stringybark tree, he found quartz and within that quartz was the largest gold nugget ever found in the world to that point.  Deason, in his recollection of the day almost fifty years later, didn't seem that amazed and even after all the quartz had been cleared and the nugget had been split into three pieces because of its immense size, his response was quite unemotional: "When my mate came over I said, 'What do you think, Dick, is it worth 5,000 pounds?'  Oates responded, "Nah, maybe 2,000."  (Finding the Welcome Stranger Nugget - Public Domain)


After Deason and his wife sat by the fire for ten hours freeing the gold from the quartz, over two hundred pounds of gold were lifted from the nugget.  Deason sold his prized treasure for over 9,000 pounds.


He found the gold about one inch under the surface.


Can you imagine stumbling over something like that?  Something that would change your life so immensely?  Something that you weren't even really looking for, but when it showed up you knew that life couldn't possibly remain the same?


King Josiah of Judah encountered that feeling.  Josiah took the throne at the age of eight, the youngest of the monarchs.  For the first seventeen years of his reign, it was probably business as usually even though Josiah's description, biblically speaking, was "He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord and followed completely the ways of his father David (David wasn't really his father, but as patriarchs go, he was similar in faithfulness), not turning aside to the right or to the left."  (2 Kings 22:2)


Then, one morning during the eighteenth year, when Josiah was the ripe old age of twenty-six, he asked Hilkiah, the high priest, to make some reparations in the temple.  Hilkiah, after arranging the schedule for the workers, happened upon a book which seemed to give him little pause; Hilkiah gave it to Shaphan the temple secretary to read it (strangely enough the high priest not only could not read the holy book, but it seemed that he had never seen it before). 


Just under the surface of the temple was the greatest treasure to the ancient Israelites - the Book of the Law.  How to live, how to dream, how to treat each other and how to live in God's presence.  It was the story of God's interaction with them over the years, and after decades and decades of neglect, after centuries of continued ambulation down the path of idolatry (even the scriptures talk about the idols in the temple itself!) the Book is found and it is read in the presence of the king who tears his robes at the thought of this immense treasure being unknowingly located beneath his feet within distance of his own heartbeat.


What religion were the priests carrying out?  Were they mixing the local deities with their own brand of understanding of faithfulness?  Were they more concerned with carrying on the tradition than they were with bringing the people closer to God?  Had they forgotten how to read the holy scriptures and left it buried just out of reach, the greatest treasure of all?  Or, had they buried it intentionally because change can often bring about pain?


Is this not what Jesus fought against?  Did he not unearth the scriptures, point to the layers and layers of sedimentary law, scrape away the stultifying stratification and petrification of the love of God and reorient the people to look up to the heavens and see the God of the universe shivering with anticipation for a life with him?  The same priests and scribes and Pharisees and teachers of the law attempted to quiet the Word of Life, to bury that which had come to be the Treasure of Humankind and when they couldn't shut him up, the crucified him.  They placed him inside the stone tomb; they pushed the rock in front of the opening and buried him.


This time, though, God would not be denied.  It wouldn't be many decades or centuries but three days later when God himself scraped open the grave and announced to the world that the book of the law had been fulfilled and replaced with the book of the Gospel.  The Good News spilled into all the cracks of the entirety of life and the treasure that was brought to humanity could not be replaced.  If only we would dig a little deeper at Easter time, to scrape past the surface dirt of our daily lives to disinter the pearl of great price.  If we could just look past our own selfishness and desires, believe that Christ died to take our sins and place them in the tomb he had just left, I think we'd find a new sense of freedom and a regard for the beauty of life that we have never seen.


Perhaps this is the Easter when we poke about and find once again that the tomb is empty and the power of Christ has been released into the world. 


Happy digging.