4th December 2018

I’d be lost without my thesaurus. Or should I say, stumped, restricted, even handicapped. It lets me replace a mundane word like ‘tinsel’ with a spectacular word like ‘glitziness’, and helps me discover new ways to disguise important repetition. It is one of the more valuable buttons on my tool bar, and a veritable treasure-box of literary gems. Which interestingly, is precisely what the word ‘thesaurus’ means in Greek: a chest, a casket, a treasure-box; for that is how it appears in the Bible.

When the wise men arrived in Bethlehem, they located by starlight the house where Mary and Joseph were staying. And when they saw the Child, they came and knelt before him, and opened their ‘thesaurus’, which contained gold, incense and myrrh. (That’s funny in a way – since Jesus is called the Word – the fact that the wise men brought him a thesaurus!)

An even more enchanting thought is this: That Jesus himself is really a thesaurus! Says the apostle Paul in his letter to the Colossians: In Christ, God has hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. What a lovely thought for Christmas: That Jesus is a casket of light and logic and prudence and perception and insight and intelligence and good sense and good judgement. More than that, that he is a chest full of every facet of love, and every dimension of grace, and every vibration of life; a veritable treasure-box of everything worth anything. Merry Christmas!

DM 4^th December 2018