Hung on a Nail

While it wasn’t my first inclination on reading this sign, I feel a need to unpack what it is saying to me. Too often I am apt to pooh-pooh an idea or a metaphor without looking more closely into the meaning within.

It is a saying first of all that relates to a first world problem. We are part of the minority in this world who actually have keys to worry about…who have houses [yes, more than one often] who have cars, who have valuables that we feel the need to protect. So the person doing the hanging is prosperous with the goods of the world, if not by their own standards, by the standards of the majority of people living today.

So what else do we hang on nails? Car keys! I’m sure we have all heard at some time in our life, the story told of someone going to the nail where they always hang the car keys, only to find that they aren’t there, follow by frantic searching which fails to unearth the keys. Sometimes this story ends with the person saying a prayer asking for the return of the keys, and presto-changed, there they are!

There is nothing bad about hanging a key on a nail. In fact it is a good thing to do, because then you know when to find it should you need it and it is safely out of the way the rest of the time. If you go to the nail to get the key and it is gone, you do have a problem! But in this case I read ‘the key to heaven’ not as a literal key but a a metaphor for Jesus.

I’m not sure that it is even a good metaphor for my understanding Jesus. He was someone who was in the midst of life, who fed the multitudes, who argued with the religious leaders of his time, who hung out with the poor and the outcasts, who pushed the envelope at every opportunity. He was not a man who one hung on a nail, out of the way and out of trouble, until needed. And of course what if he was needed and he wasn’t on the nail?? What if someone else had gotten there first and taken him down to use??

However nowhere in the Bible does Jesus say he is the key to Heaven. The closest verse I can find is when he is speaking to Peter and the writer of the Matthew 16:19 has him say: ‘I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.’ Sounds like there is more than one key that was given to Peter. So the connection between Jesus and the Key to Heaven is the result of someone’s theology, not tradition from the time of the gospel writers.

I guess if we decide to put those keys on a nail rather than using them for the purpose they were intended then the responsibility for the result of that decision, the poverty, the hate, the disenfranchisement of people, rests on all of us, who have chosen to hang them on a nail and not participate in the messiness of life.

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