The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
February 27, 2011
Vol. 14 no. 09
In the old days, even to watch TV you had to be Biblically literate to get the jokes. I remember watching the Jack Paar Show when a young comedian, Bill Cosby, came on to do a short standup routine. Cosby presented himself as Noah receiving the original directions from God before the Flood. It was a classic piece as Noah (Cosby) responds skeptically to the suggestion that now was a good time to build an ark with no body of water around. His most remembered line was a question to God on the dimensions of the Ark, “What’s a cubit?” When Noah was calling the whole enterprise into question, God had a question for Noah, “How long can you tread water?”
Sorry, we’re not doing Noah today, we’re measuring cubits. Even the Biblical authors didn’t seem to know what kind of a unit a cubit is. For Noah, it is apparently length, often identified with the length of one’s arm from elbow to fingertip, about 15 inches. So it’s a big Ark: 300 x 50 x 30 cubits – do the math.
However, cubits change and in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount when he is talking about our chronic human anxiety in which we always want to fix things. Being anxious about all sorts of matters will not add one cubit to one’s span of life. What’s a cubit here? A minute, a day, a year?
In terms of spiritual maladies, Jesus had no hesitation to put anxiety on top. It can eat us up inwardly and since it seldom has a real basis, anxiety seems to defy our self-cures. On one hand, it’s a matter of proper perspective, for we are loved as much if not more by God than birds and flowers, and God takes care of them. Every one of your cubits is safe.
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan