When I was a kid, long before computers, one of my dad’s favorite hobbies, especially after heart disease ended his golf “career”, was accounting. He owned a multinational manufacturing company, and thought I know he employed bookkeepers, accountants and financial officers to do this for him; he liked to keep books himself. So he did on large, long sheets of impossibly fine lined ledger paper. He loved it. It always made my eyes role back in my head and my insides go numb when he dragged the stuff out. He did it often. You would never catch me dead doing that. In the thirty-plus years since his death it is one of my strongest memories of him.
Despite the strong association, you won’t ever catch me dead doing that. What can catch me doing is reading about things religious or philosophy or psychology. I need to read in these areas for a living but I also read them in my spare time too, like for a hobby. Humm… not unlike keeping books for your own company in your free time.… Same geek, different outfit.
This week geekdom for me seems to have reached a level unimagined by my dad who never even saw a computer to my knowledge: The Codex Sinaiticus is available online.
According to the website: “Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world. Handwritten well over 1600 years ago, the manuscript contains the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. Its heavily corrected text is of outstanding importance for the history of the Bible and the manuscript – the oldest substantial book to survive Antiquity – is of supreme importance for the history of the book.”
I entered the site, it’s quite intuitive. I got chills; it is truly amazing to be looking at this manuscript—not at a copy—so foundational to the faith. I poked about a bit and came to Galatians, “Bear the griefs of one another, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (6:2). Isn’t that what Christ is doing in these moments as I marvel not only at this document, but also at how, in doing so I am like my dad. Somehow across time and space, continents and technology Christ leads me tenderly to a place in memory and in heart where this piece of my father, dead for so long, lives within me. Such is the power of the resurrection. In turn, I will know the grace of sitting with others as they grieve and holding theirs on tender hope that time and space, continents and technology, memory and heart will fulfill the law of Christ within them as well. Amen.
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