I’ve
been taking some heat recently, as I do from time to time, for the Sunday Bible
readings. Not the poetic and inspiring
spiritual readings from the Letter to the Ephesians, but the Old Testament
readings. Some of you are puzzled as to
why we have to listen to stories in church about people behaving badly, about
adultery and treachery and murder. You wonder
about readings which seem to put forward an archaic picture of an angry and
vengeful God. You ask what positive
spiritual benefit there could be in retelling such stories, and whether we
couldn’t choose more uplifting ones, or possibly just leave off the regular
reading of a lesson from the Old Testament altogether. So I’ve decided today to explain, if I can, a
little about why the Hebrew Bible is the way it is, and why I think it’s worth
reading.
First,
I want to say that it’s okay with me that you are raising these questions. It means you are engaged, and paying
attention, and care about what the church says it believes, which is as it
should be. I also want to say that I
accept full responsibility for the fact that we are reading these particular texts
in our Sunday worship. Because while I’m
pretty sure our bishop would not permit us to stop reading the Hebrew Bible
entirely, I do have some leeway in deciding which texts we choose to use. The Episcopal Church plans its reading of
scripture on the basis of something called the Revised Common Lectionary, which
is a schedule that we share with millions of other Christians in many
denominations around the world. And every
year, during the long Season after Pentecost (roughly June through November),
the Lectionary gives us a choice of two different “tracks” for the Old
Testament reading.
One
of these tracks follows the practice that prevails throughout the rest of the
church year, of cherry-picking readings from the Hebrew Bible that mirror
themes of the Gospel lesson of the day.
This makes for a coherent “package” of readings that feels quite
satisfactory. But it also reinforces a
bias that has colored the Christian reading of the Bible since the dawn of the
Gentile church. This is the view that the
Old Testament has no other purpose, and no other meaning, than to give a kind
of advance notice of Christ. We are free to take a bit from this place and from
that one, as it suits the telling of our own story, because those scriptures are
no more than preamble to our own, with no narrative structure or compositional integrity
of their own that we are bound to respect.
In
doing this we take our lead from passages like today’s Gospel reading from
John, which makes a sharp distinction between Jewish memory, and the new thing
that is Jesus Christ. It is “the Jews”
who grumble that Jesus cannot have come down like something new-made from heaven,
because he is the son of Joseph. They
know his father and mother, and can trace his ancestry like that of any other
Jew. Jesus replies that what he means is
that he is sent to carry out God’s purpose.
He has come to gather those who have heard and learned from God. He will nourish them with the imperishable
food of God’s will, and this guidance already draws them right through history with
the life of the world to come.
But if
you think about it, what Jesus is describing here is a deeply Jewish project. Its foundation is a history of distinctively Jewish hopes. The anti-Jewish polemic of the New Testament,
with its emphasis on differentiation, has made it hard for us to see an
essential continuity. Because as diverse
and incongruous a collection of writings as the Hebrew Bible is, it has an
underlying unity, which is embodied not in the text, but in the life and hope
of a people in their God. Jesus was
one of those people. His genius was a new
experience of unity with the God of Jewish revelation, life with whom he embodied to the
ultimate degree. For Christians the life, and death, and resurrection of Jesus is the decisive
event that reinterprets all that came before it. But we have to see that it is the culmination of a story that Jesus knew to be the story of himself. So
if we want to really understand Jesus as a living person, we need to learn to
read the book that taught him who he is. That
is why, every year, I choose the other lectionary track for the Sunday readings
during the season after Pentecost. That
is the one that traces the rough outline of the whole Hebrew Bible, beginning
with Genesis and ending three years later with the last book of the Hebrew
Bible, the book of the prophet Malachi.
These
readings sometimes fit awkwardly, at best, with the Gospel lesson on any given Sunday,
but they do relate powerfully to each other. Consider the readings about David of the last
few weeks. We heard about David’s moment
of glory, when he ascended to the throne of his united kingdom, which spoke of a
transcendent hope in God’s promise to his people of sovereignty and peace. But the Hebrew scribes also knew they had to tell
the whole truth about David, and so we had the story of Bathsheba, showing
David’s lack of integrity and abuse of power. This led to personal and
national tragedy, as a sign of
God’s judgment.
The mystery
of God’s way with his people includes glory and judgment, promise and warning. And somewhere in between these extremes is
compassion, as in today’s reading when we simply bear witness to the
grief-stricken cries of a father for his son.
Because whatever else David’s story is about, it is about a man, and the raw
emotional truth of human experience.
The
Bible is not God’s word about us, and it is not our word about God, and it is
not our word about ourselves, but it is all three of these things woven
inextricably together. Which is exactly
what is unique about it. It contains
almost no mythology: no descriptions of heavenly realms, or tales of the origins
and adventures of the gods. It is also
quite thin in metaphysics and philosophy.
What it is about is the unity of the God who made us, and the world in which we
live, and who sustains the life of all. It
attempts to tell the whole history of human interaction with that God. And because
it is a human story it is full of the brave and noble, the shameful and
ignorant, the inexplicable things that humans do.
But woven
throughout, and tying it all together, is this recurring theme of the
revelation of God. God keeps breaking in
to interrupt the human story, and the message of these revelations is not just “I
exist—worship me!” It is, “I care what
happens to you, and I have a purpose for you.
I am involved in your story. I do
what I do for my own reasons, but they have everything to do with your
flourishing, with your living the way human beings are really meant to
live. So trust me—and here’s what I want
you to do.”
This
repeated discovery of God’s involvement with them is why this inconsequential little
tribe of Israelites, left behind a far more detailed record of their history
than the great empires on their borders.
That is why they clung tenaciously to that memory through one conquest after
another, through all the persecutions and deportations, and efforts at forced
assimilation—because their history as a people was also the history of God’s word
to humankind. And it is more than a
story of the past—it is also God’s blueprint, sketchy though it might be, of a truly
human future.
That
refusal to let go of memory makes the Bible sort of like your crazy Great-Aunt
Millie’s attic. The out-of-fashion and
horribly uncomfortable ladies underwear is jumbled together with the Picasso
she found at a garage sale. There is a
lot in it that is peculiar, incomprehensible, even downright repugnant. But it’s funny how we moderns, in our
arrogance, assume that the compilers of the book didn’t know that. They were surely dubious about many of the
same things we are, but they did not share our confidence in the infallibility of
our own hindsight. “If we have learned
anything our ancestors didn’t know,” they seem to say, “that knowledge was
hard-won and is easily lost. So we want
to remember how we learned it, by telling the whole story.” They didn’t claim that all of it was equally
true, or equally important, only that all of it was worth remembering.
