Words of Life: An Enduring Legacyනියැදිය

Designer bank robber.

‘STICK ’em up. This is a hold-up!’ snarl the outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in the eponymous film. They wave their guns menacingly, and the frightened bank teller obligingly stuffs a bag full of money.

The ex-British Army soldiers obey the detailed plans of their former officer as they rob the Bank of England in The League of Gentlemen. A cunning plan to burrow through to a bank is discovered by Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Red-headed League, while caution is thrown to the wind in Ocean’s Eleven.

But none of these characters robbed as many banks as the real-life George Leonidas Leslie. Using his influence as a trained architect, he obtained blueprints of banks, visited premises, and made scale models of the properties. He would then ask to use a safe-deposit box and find opportunity to insert a special wire he called ‘the little joker’ into the locking device of the vault. Returning on another occasion, he would remove the wire, and from the indentations work out the lock’s tumblers and combination. On his death, it was discovered that between 1874 and 1884, he had organised more than 100 robberies.

Keeping money in banks in those days was a risky business. Today, security arrangements range from CCTV to digital codes, and fingerprint and iris recognition. But in biblical times, there were no banks. Often, people buried their precious possessions in the hope that no one would find them. Interestingly, Jesus told a parable about someone discovering treasure in the ground.

Obviously, Jesus wasn’t talking about coins, but about much more important things. As he went on to say in verse 21 of today’s reading, ‘For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also’.

What are the things that really matter to us?