By: Cherry Haisten

Lectio divina is usually defined as “sacred reading.” In its traditional form it is a reflective method of reading scripture. Today it is experiencing something of a renaissance in which many new variations of the old form are flourishing. It can be done individually or in a group. Part of the Western Christian contemplative tradition, lectio divina is sacred not because of the inherent holiness of the text but because of the attitude the student/disciple brings to the task and because the task involves a deepening relationship with God. Anything can be a text—Christian scriptures, Hebrew scriptures, the Koran, the Baghavad-Gita, any literature, especially poetry. Nature can be a text. Our own lives or specific incidents in our lives can be texts. All of creation is a revelation of God if we have the eyes to see, the ears to hear, and the heart to love and understand. Moreover, God created us in God’s image. The life of each one of us flared up from some tiny spark of the divine. But we spend much of our time out of touch with the divine within. Lectio divina, if we take the time for it, can help us to get in touch with the divine within and with the deep knowing that comes from that source. If incidents from our own lives can be a text, then how might lectio divina be used to examine that text and plumb its depths? The four steps of traditional lectio are simply:

1. Lectio – reading or hearing the text, listening to it with the ear of the heart

2. Meditatio – pondering the text in your heart

3. Oratio – responding to the text

4. Contemplatio – resting in God

The medieval scholastic way of proceeding in lectio was to follow the steps in a linear progression. The more ancient way of doing lectio was to listen to a text with an open heart and a willingness to be led, and then to follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Thus the order of the steps might not be a simple one, two, three, four. Rather one might listen and then be drawn immediately into resting in God. Another time one might listen, react or become outraged or upset, and go directly to oratio, responding emotionally to God. One might listen and ponder without having much response at all and then go back to listening, reading the text again and again, reflecting until some insight comes or until time runs out. There is no absolute right or wrong. The fourfold process of lectio can be adapted as a format for theological reflection, the process whereby an individual engages scripture, tradition, reason, experience, and perhaps other influences to examine prayerfully the content of her/his life. This content might be one very brief conversation or any range of more complex encounters with people, the natural world, or God. Because this system is flexible and dynamic, it can be used any time, any place, and thus it lends itself to theological reflection, which a “convicted” Christian should be continually engaged in. For the sake of simplicity, I will take the steps of lectio in order as a method of theological reflection.

Step 1 Lectio: The first step involves “reading a text.” Thus you must have a text to “read,” as you might read a letter of tracks in the sand. If you are reflecting on an incident from your life, you have a choice of how to proceed. You might simply go over in your mind the basic outline of what happened giving yourself time to remember the details of the incident. If it is helpful to you to externalize the content, then take a few minutes to write down a narrative account. Take your time in this step, as in every step, but don’t take so much time that you don’t get to the rest of the steps. Once you have generated the text, either in your mind or on paper, think or read through it slowly to allow yourself to enter into the experience again. Approach this task as gently as possible without expectations.

Step 2 Meditatio: When you are finished reading through the text, close your eyes and sit with what you have read. If you haven’t taken the time before Step 1 to breathe deeply, relax, and enter the present moment, now would be a good time to do that. All the while keep the text in your mind and heart. Give yourself as much time as you care to give, allowing any responses to the text to surface. Notice what your responses are. Pay attention to your body. If a particular word or phrase brings tears or a twist in your gut, note it and let it be. Just note whatever responses or reactions you have to your text. For now, just notice. Don’t do anything with them. After a few minutes, you may want to go back to lectio and read the text again. That’s fine. In this step of lectio, associations and meanings may appear. If you are reminded of anything— another experience in your life, a passage from scripture, a favorite poem or novel, some advice from a wise mentor—bring those into your meditation for what they have to reveal, but don’t feel pressured to integrate or synthesize everything. One traditional way of doing lectio is, during meditatio, to choose one word or phrase that grabs you in some way, or is given to you, and allow it to reveal its riches to you without worrying about making sense of the whole experience. In lectio we are tapping into a deeper way of knowing, a more interior intuitive knowing– beneath the mind or cognitive awareness– at the level of the heart. The connections may not become clear right away. You may repeat the steps as many times as you want to or have time for, and you may journal about any of this part if you feel called to, but avoid compulsively recording everything.*

Step 3 Oratio: The third step of lectio comes from the Latin word meaning to pray. This step literally involves prayer, but prayer that may take an endless variety of forms, not limited to the usual intercessions or petitions. When Job shook his fist at God and demanded answers, he was engaging in oratio. When you cry out in frustration at an injustice, that is oratio. When you burst into praise at the beauty of a sunset or utter a spontaneous thank-you for the gift of a glorious day, that is oratio. When you plead with God to help you with an insoluble problem or to deliver you from despair, that is oratio. If you get up and dance with joy or sing or paint, that may be oratio. Oratio is simply your response to the text, addressed to God.

Step 4 Contemplatio: Finally, accept the reality of what you have been given to face and understand—to the best of your ability or to the limits of what God has revealed to you thus far. Have faith that all will be well, and rest in God. You may take as long for this part as you have time for. In traditional lectio, contemplatio was not taken for granted, but rather considered a gift of God. When you get up from this process, with God’s help you may have the strength to do what needs to be done, the wisdom or discernment to let go of much you cannot do anything about, and most importantly you will be more centered in your own relationship with God and your own being and perhaps with others. With time and practice, it may be possible to continue resting in God even as you act in the world. At the end of your prayer you may challenge yourself to risk taking one step in faith outside the edge of your comfort zone or out of your usual patterns of handling your life’s issues. Or you may discern that now is not the time for action but for self-care of another sort. Or there may be many other possibilities depending on your own life circumstances and the movement of the Holy Spirit within them.

Blessings on using this process.

* Meditatio is the step that Ignatius’s followers focused on. A good way to engage a text, it came to be known as mental prayer ordiscursive meditation. However, its emphasis can be primarily rational, analytical, imaginative or intellectually creative. When it is replaced in the context of the rest of lectio it becomes a richer and fuller experience engaging more of our whole selves. Lectio divina is part of the Christian apophatic heritage, which emphasizes emptying the mind of intellectual or visual images, embracing our human unknowing, and “waiting on God.” The most kataphatic part of lectio divina is meditatio. In the Ignatian exercises, meditatio is developed to a kataphatic extreme, i.e. it uses intellectual or visual images fully. The thrust of lectio divina is at the opposite end of the continuum.

By The Rev. Dr. Carolyn J. Sharp, Yale Divinity School

Introduction
The Holy Scriptures present us with a powerful and lively Word of hope. On this beautiful spring afternoon, when showers coax the trees into budding and flowers are pushing up through the dark wet soil, we know that our God is a God of hope. In this season when our Jewish brothers and sisters have celebrated the Passover festival of God’s marvelous deliverance of Israel only three weeks ago and Christians are rejoicing in the Easter news of Christ’s resurrection, we know well that the Old and New Testaments alike offer us words of promise about God’s love for God’s people and for the world.

The Hebrew Scriptures invite us into a rich and wild variety of ways in which we can understand God’s promises. Biblical witness is offered through powerful stories such as that of Abraham lifting the knife to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah or Jacob wrestling until dawn with an angel at the Jabbok River. The Bible speaks of God’s promises through songs of trust and praise, through wisdom meditations on the incomparable sovereignty and inscrutable ways of our Creator, and through visions—who could forget Ezekiel’s dramatic vision of the heavenly chariot of God with its wheels whose rims were full of eyes all around, powered by four living creatures dashing back and forth like flashes of lightning? Ancient story and song, proverbs and prophetic oracles: all these are holy means by which the Word of God seizes our imaginations and convicts us of the power of God’s grace.

But we so often refuse to listen. We resist. We allow ourselves to be distracted, to be lured away from Scripture, to forget its astounding promises. We allow ourselves to become smug in the knowledge that we go to church or synagogue, or we seek to be “good people,” so that’s enough – we don’t have to engage the God who is spoken through Scripture’s pages. The Bible is hard to understand, after all. I’m not being ironic here: it truly is sometimes very difficult to “get” what the Bible is doing, and the Hebrew Scriptures sometimes can seem so very foreign to the ways in which we live and make meaning in our lives.

But God already knows us, to our core. As Psalm 139 has it, “O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.” Yes, even from as far away as 3,000 years ago, from as far away as ancient Israel when the Scriptures were composed: God knows us, to the depths of our being. God knows that we are easily distracted from pursuit of that which is holy. God knows we tend to settle for idols, whether we are feverishly bent on acquiring money or prestige, or we think that political change will be the salvation of the world . . . or perhaps we are a little too fond of the idea that we ourselves are godly and faithful.

God knows! And so God has given us an extraordinarily precious gift in the Hebrew Scriptures. That gift is the gift of biblical irony.

This afternoon, I will explore with you some of the ways in which irony in Scripture challenges our idolatries, powerfully refuting our inadequate perspectives and inviting us into deeper wisdom. My goal this afternoon is to convince you of the vital importance of ironic biblical texts for the spiritual formation of Christian believers in the contemporary world. We will look briefly at the story of Balaam, the prophesying of Amos, and the skepticism of Ecclesiastes.

1.  Balaam: the irony of prophetic vision
First, the story of Balaam, a Mesopotamian seer who tries to curse Israel at the behest of King Balak of Moab in the Book of Numbers. Try as he might, Balaam is unable to curse Israel and in fact inadvertently blesses Israel each time he opens his mouth. Some scholars have argued that that the Balaam story is all about celebrating God’s sovereignty. Dr. Brueggemann says, “The [Balaam story] asserts the immense force of YHWH’s sovereignty that will finally prevail in the face of every resistance. . . . It is asserted that all of the force of YHWH’s sovereignty is a blessing for Israel. . . .The text . . . picks up on the Genesis theme that not only is Israel blessed, but through Israel other peoples are blessed as well.” Quite right! I want to build on Dr. Brueggemann’s insight to urge us to consider a darker and more ironic layer of meaning in this story, a layer that brilliantly shows Israel’s wrongheadedness and thereby underlines God’s sovereignty all the more.

It is fascinating that the figure of Balaam has aroused hyperbolic praise and hyperbolic condemnation in the history of reception of this story. Number 31, Deuteronomy 23, Joshua 24, Nehemiah 13, 2 Peter, Jude, and Revelation all condemn Balaam for intending to curse Israel, for practicing divination, or for sexual immorality; in a fragmentary Dead Sea scroll text, 4Q339, Balaam’s name appears in a list of false prophets; apparently Philo of Alexandria thought of Balaam as a magician (which is bad). But citations of him in 3 other Dead Sea scrolls (Testimonia, the Damascus Document, and the War Scroll) seem to confirm the truth of his prophecies, and the Jewish historian Josephus said he was the greatest of the prophets of his day. Some early Christian writers, such as Origen and Clement of Alexandria, were clearly conflicted, calling Balaam both a true prophet and an illegitimate sorcerer, I think reflecting the strongly divided reception of Balaam before them. I think this strongly bifurcated reception of Balaam  is due to the fact that he is being presented only ironically as good, and readers for centuries have been able to sense, if only dimly, the brutal ironizing going on in this text. My colleague John Collins writes of the Balaam story, “The blessing of Israel seems all the more sure because it is put on the lips of a pagan prophet. Balaam is acknowledged as a man of God—indeed, he acknowledges YHWH as his God, although he is not an Israelite. The Hebrew Bible seldom appeals to the testimony of Gentiles in this way.” ^[i] Seldom indeed, and perhaps that isn’t the main point here either! A crucial thing to understand about the way in which ironic texts signify is that you have the said and the unsaid. The “said” is what is ostensibly presented as true; the ironic meaning, then, is some kind of converse of that, an unspoken, “truer” truth that stands in complex relationship to the said.

I’d like to present for you a way of understanding Balaam and his oracles that depends on us reading the character of Balaam, the character of his blessings, and indeed the entire story as deeply ironic. Interpreters usually content themselves with noticing how amusing and satirical it is that Balaam’s donkey is more perceptive than the seer himself.  All true, but there are more shriekingly obvious clues to ironic intention in the story. The first: overstatements in the story, particularly in Balaam’s self-representation. Second: significant ambiguity at crucial moments in the text.  Third: hyperbole — drastic overstatement — in the blessings that are heaped upon Israel. And fourth: dramatic irony seen in the cluelessness of the Israelites in the plains below as the drama with Balaam is unfolding up in the hills overlooking the Israelite camp.

On the first and second points: To read Balaam in the traditional way as unconditionally obedient to God, as faithful in his prophesying of blessing for Israel, is to misunderstand the drastic way in which the reliability of Balaam’s voice is undermined by the text and to misread the rhetorical function of the oracles of blessing. The judgment and claims of Balaam are rendered highly suspect through overstatement. Overstatements or overreactions that seem incongruous in context include this Mesopotamian seer’s immediate and brash identification of the God of Israel as “the Lord my God,” even using the special name of the Lord, the Tetragrammaton, in his confession (Num 22:18). Even though Balaam is a diviner for hire — the envoys of Moab have journeyed to him with “the fees for divination in their hand” (22:7),  Balaam bursts forth with, “Although Balak were to give me his house full of silver and gold, I could not go beyond the command of the Lord my God, to do less or more” (22:18). Please. He is totally for hire, and is he this perceptive about the power of the God of Israel? No, he isn’t, and the point that Balaam is not that perceptive is made very clearly in the story of Balaam and his donkey which comes up next. He has no clue that the angel of the Lord is blocking his way, when even the donkey can see it! This irony is so great that lots of commentators have noticed it; but there are many other ironies in the story that have drawn less attention.

On the second point: there are significant textual ambiguities at crucial moments. For example, we find in Balaam’s oracles a description of God as One who is like “the horns/strength of the wild ox” to Israel (23:22, 24:8). We can try to track down that phrase in other instances in the Hebrew Bible, but ultimately we are left with a profound ambiguity, because the ox could be defending Israel from its enemies or using its horns to gore Israel itself, which is precisely what happens in Numbers 25 when Phinehas, the zealous priest, impales the copulating Israelite man and Midianite woman in the act of intercourse in their tent. Another famous ambiguity is Balaam’s characterization of himself as “the man whose eye is šetum,” an elusive Hebrew term that can connote either “open” or “shut” (24:3, 15), so here we have a seer who is either discerning or, pointedly, not discerning. He can see, but he also can’t see.

On the third signal of irony here: the hyperbolic nature of the blessings Balaam heaps upon Israel also signal an ironic trap, one into which many commentators walk. Shubert Spero characterizes Balaam’s oracles of blessing as “some of the most lofty prophetic utterances about Israel to be found in the Torah.” Similarly, Dennis Olson in Harper’s Bible Commentary notes, earnestly, “Through Balaam, God blesses Israel with accolades and promises unsurpassed in the entire Pentateuch.”   Unsurpassed in the entire Pentateuch, indeed! Hyperbole is a classic signal of irony across many, many cultures. It warns the alert reader to remain wary, an interpretive instinct that is surely rewarded when Balaam’s inability to curse Israel, inadvertently transmuted into excessive blessing, finally degenerates into indiscriminate cursing of Moab, Edom, Amalek, the hapless Kenites and Eber (24:17-24).^[ii]

And on the fourth point: the governing irony of the whole story can be perceived in thunderous narrative silence concerning a central character: the Israelites themselves, who throughout the machinations of the Moabites and Balaam ironically “remain oblivious to the drama taking place outside their camp.” ^[iii] Wayne Booth and other analysts of irony identify as a clear marker of irony the ignorance of one or more characters regarding important information known by other characters or by the audience. The irony becomes clear after Balaam and Balak go home, their contest over: the abundantly blessed Israelite males promptly engage in illicit sex and apostasy with Moabite women, bringing down upon themselves the wrath of God via a plague that kills 24,000 Israelites (Numbers 25). God is sovereign, as Brueggemann argues, and it is incongruous to have a Mesopotamian seer blessing Israel, as Collins notes; indeed. And more than that: irony is richly and dangerously afoot throughout this whole story, satirizing the notion that Israel’s blessedness somehow will protect them. They need protection from their own apostasy, not from enemies.^[iv]

The main point of the story is the unfaithfulness of the hyperbolically blessed Israel. Israel has a hugely important mission to embrace its own holiness, its separateness, and thereby to be a means of blessing and light to all the nations of the world; the most urgent danger is not enemies but that Israel will forget its covenant with God. The Balaam cycle is crucial in the overall literary and theological message of the Book of Numbers, because it shows us with scathing irony the reason for the death of the old generation in Numbers, and it prepares the way rhetorically for the great sermon of Deuteronomy, which exhorts every Israelite in every future generation to do better than those ancestors did. People of faith who read the Balaam story today would do well to remember how extravagantly blessed we are by God and how crucially important it is that we remain mindful that we are God’s people.

2.  Amos: the ironizing of cherished traditions
Next we consider the artistically brilliant ironic reversals that are effected in the rhetoric of Amos, the paradigmatic social justice prophet.

Amos opens with consummate irony, building rhetorical momentum in a diatribe against foreign nations only to drive home an indictment of Judah and Israel (Amos 1–2) in what Robert Alter has called a “rhetoric of entrapment.” The Lord  roars from Zion, and the audience of Amos is thrilled, sure that their God will come roaring down to put their enemies to flight.“For three transgressions and for four, I will not revoke the punishment!,” the God of Amos thunders. The Israelite and Judean audiences cheer as the wrath of their God is directed at their enemies: God will send a punishing fire first on Damascus, then on the Philistines, then Tyre, then Edom, then the hated Ammonites and despised Moab . . . and then, “For three transgressions of Judah, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment, because they have rejected the law of the Lord and have not kept his statutes!” What??! “So I will send a fire on Judah, and it shall devour the strongholds of Jerusalem.” The audience is shocked. The smiles slowly fade from their faces . . . and the Lord  roars on, “For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals.” Judah and Israel are doomed. The audience has fallen silent and is ready, now, to hear the word of this Lord whom they cannot domesticate with their religious traditions and their long history of deliverance.

Amos continues ironizing the audience’s expectations all the way through the book. Amos alternately lulls and confuses his audience with deceptively simple rhetorical questions (“Does a lion roar in the forest when it has no prey?,” 3:4; “Does disaster befall a city if the Lord has not done it?,” 3:6) that ultimately serve to ensnare and terrify the hearers.^[v] Amos proffers a pseudo-clerical call to worship with biting sarcasm (“Come to Bethel—and transgress, to Gilgal and multiply transgressions” 4:4),^[vi] and he skewers his audience with a proleptic ironic lament over a “dead” Israel whose doom is in fact still approaching (5:1-3). The Day of the Lord will be itself a day of unexpected reversals that ironize its audience’s hopes for redemption (5:18-20).^[vii]

The various punishments God has sent on God’s people per Amos 4 (famine, drought, blight, mildew, locust, pestilence, war), are named in almost the same order in Solomon’s prayer in 1 Kings 8:35ff (drought, famine, pestilence, blight, mildew, locust, war).^[viii] Amos is drawing upon his audience’s knowledge of Deuteronomistic tradition here. But where the Deuteronomists insisted on the efficacy of repentance, Amos revoices the tradition ironically to make the point that the time for repentance is long gone.^[ix]

Amos offers three doxologies of praise to God the Creator in a grouping in which the ironic intensity increases as the real purpose of the doxologies—heightening the imminence and inescapability of doom—becomes ever clearer (4:13, 5:8-9, 9:5-6).[x] With these doxologies, Amos’s implied audience is put in the untenable position of needing to acknowledge the praiseworthy destructive power of a Creator Who advances precisely in order to destroy them. Biblical scholars Francis Andersen & David Noel Freedman note that these hymns “celebrate God’s limitless, terrifying power . . . . The most ominous threat of all is that every act of creation can be canceled, the work reversed and undone.”^[xi]

Indeed, Amos is a book of reversals and ironic undoing! Central to Amos’s prophetic strategy is a focus on the Exodus traditions as a primary cultural site for Amos’s attack on the false confidence of his audience. Amos subverts Exodus traditions with brutal irony, undermining his implied audience’s sense of Israel’s election. His allusion to the deliverance from Egypt serves as forensic evidence to be mustered for Israel’s greater accountability for sin: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities” (3:2). Israel alone is accountable in this unique way—accountable to a God whose power to destroy has been made abundantly clear. The foundational event that constituted Israel as the Lord’s own people has become a cause not for rejoicing but for sheer terror.^[xii]     

Amos extends his ironizing of the Exodus proper to include the time of the wilderness wandering. In Amos 8:11-12, the Lord says, “I will send a famine on the land, not a famine of bread or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. They shall wander from sea to sea and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.” The people will wander to and fro in search of the sustenance that they need—not food nor water, but the word of the Lord. Hans Walter Wolff points out that the verb used for this wandering about in 8:12, šūṭ, comes up also to describe the wandering of the ancient Israelites seeking for manna in the wilderness of Sinai (Num 11:8).^[xiii] In that first wilderness journey, they found the word of the Lord, inscribed on stone tablets. In these latter days, they have disregarded that word too often, so they will be left to wander. The redemption enjoyed in that first Exodus is over for good.

In his most devastating ironic twist, Amos finally refers to the Exodus itself as just one of a variety of saving acts the Lord has performed on behalf of various peoples (“Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Arameans from Kir?,” 9:7). This unthinkable statement is Amos’s coup de grâce: even that first Exodus meant little. The Exodus, the essential hallmark of identity for ancient Israel and the very foundation of her story of redemption, is to be understood as just another common event in the history of the nations of the earth. The Lord delivers all and judges all: divine deliverance implies no special status on the part of the rescued, Israel’s ancient traditions to the contrary notwithstanding.

The ways in which Amos alludes to the ancient deliverance from Egypt are brilliantly crafted to further the larger purpose of the Book of Amos: namely, to strike into the hearts of his audience a fear so compelling that they will be forced to repent, to “seek God and live” (“seek Me and live,” 5:4; “seek the Lord and live,” 5:6; cp. “seek good and not evil, that you may live,” 5:14). The prophetic task of Amos has been to divide the hearers against themselves and absolutely terrify them, to persuade them to choose a newly faithful identity over against its own history of misguided trust in tradition. There is only one hope, a hope whispered by Amos in chapter 5 and taught through the parables of Jesus of Nazareth: seek God and live.^[xiv]

3.  Ecclesiastes: skepticism as a path through and beyond irony
Finally, I want to think with you about Ecclesiastes, a book of the Bible influenced by ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian pessimistic literature and by Hellenistic philosophy as well.^{a href=”#[xv]“>[xv]} One reason some scholars want to suggest a date even as late as the Hellenistic period, starting in the 3rd century B.C., is because of striking resemblances between Qohelet’s philosophical posture and certain Greek philosophies (especially Epicureanism and early Stoicism), especially as regards the existential dilemma experienced by Qohelet and his suggestion in response that one should just enjoy the blessings you have while you can, knowing it could all be taken away in an instant.^[xvi] Particularly of interest to Joseph Blenkinsopp is the emphasis in Ecclesiastes 3 on there being an appropriate time for every action, something that has resonances in Stoic ethics.^{a href=”#[xvii]“>[xvii]} Qohelet looks to human experience as the primary source of wisdom, the God of Qohelet certainly exists but is both distant and capricious, and the chief benefit in life was to enjoy ‘joy’ whenever one could, while living life by means of the exercise of a highly pragmatic wisdom, or prudence.

Major themes in Ecclesiastes:
The most important refrain in the book, of course, is the famous “vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” This word translated “vanity” is based on the literal meaning of “vapor” or “mist” in Hebrew. It connotes some aspect of vapor: transience, insubstantiality, futility, emptiness, nothingness, absurdity.

Because we are short on time, I will simply cite other themes for you; if you have never read the book of Ecclesiastes, I encourage you to try it, because it’s absolutely brilliant skeptical literature. I have found that people who are pragmatic-to-negative about what we see in the world around us – injustice, unfairness, hypocrisy, absurdity—are usually very glad this witness is in the Bible. So, Ecclesiastes is very rich and very wise, yet he sees, in his life experience, that “there is nothing new under the sun,” all of the lovely things in the world are vanity, and the wise die just as fools do. He sees people working very hard indeed, laboring without rest all of their miserable lives, only to lose that for which they have worked. Toil is ultimately fruitless, and the unworthiness of those who get your stuff when you die really grates on Ecclesiastes’ nerves. Wickedness and oppression go unpunished and the innocent have no one to vindicate or help. The most Ecclesiastes can say, ultimately, is that one must seize the moment when one is enjoying the good things in life. Happiness is better than misery. Joy is good, even if it is unreliable and can be snatched away at any moment.

As James Crenshaw says in a wonderfully apt phrase, in the book of Ecclesiastes, “moral impotence reigns.”^[xviii] Yes. But the question is, does the speaker Ecclesiastes, with his deeply pessimistic perception of the world and his boundless frustration regarding life works, actually represent the voice of the narrator, or not? In a piece of literature as sophisticated and complex as this, should we not be careful to distinguish between characters or personae, on the one hand, and the actual perspective of the biblical author, on the other?

I think the point of the whole book is said right out in 12:13: “Fear God and keep His commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone.” Now, the consensus view in scholarship is that those are the words of an orthodox “editor” at the end of book who could not bear the brutal skepticism of the speaker, Ecclesiastes. My own view is that the persona or character of Qohelet is being presented ironically, as a foil that manages to demonstrate (in the negative) what you become if you don’t cherish the Torah.

A number of scholars, including myself, see in the Book of Qohelet an intentional and obvious construction of a persona Qohelet — that is, the creation of a literary character with his own distinct voice. This is a mainstream and not terribly radical idea; interpreters who might not otherwise agree with each other can agree on this. Michael Fox, for example, a liberal Jewish scholar on Qohelet, argues that there is the constructed voice of “Qohelet” and then what he calls the “frame narrator” of the book, who openly and explicitly reflects on the content of the book and on the person or persona of Qohelet; and Tremper Longman, a conservative evangelical Christian scholar, says something similar in his commentary. Since the book of Ecclesiastes itself speaks in the voice of Qohelet and then has observations about Qohelet in the third person in chapter 12, the idea of “nested viewpoints,” as Fox puts it, is pretty obvious to the alert reader and is nothing that would shake the beliefs of even the most conservative of readers in terms of their religious tradition’s appropriation of Ecclesiastes. That distinction of voices is right there in the text.

Where folks differ is on the relationship of the frame narrator’s voice to that of the persona of  “Ecclesiastes.” Fox thinks the frame narrator essentially, in most things, agrees with Ecclesiastes. By contrast, I am convinced that the frame narrator is ironizing what Ecclesiastes had to say. I think the persona of the bitter and skeptical sage was constructed as an ironic foil for the frame narrator’s true beliefs, which are quite different from those of Qohelet. We are supposed to realize, as we read along through the overstatements, contradictions, and depressing claims that suffuse the discourse of the sage: he is not a reliable speaker and his viewpoint ultimately is inadequate. Time does not permit me to go into the details of the argument,[xix] but I would observe that there are certainly examples in world literature of speakers — protagonists and narrators — being ironized, being misguided or flawed in ways that are not perceptible to themselves. For one example, there’s a Yiddish story in which a kind of schlemiel who has borne all kinds of indignities and abuse during his life dies and goes to heaven, where he is celebrated for his stalwart and humble character, his integrity, &c. &c.; but it becomes clear in a devastating moment at the end that, far from being a humble hero, he was just too dim-witted to realize what was going on during his life.

I will close with a fantastic example of the kind of ironizing that the Book of Ecclesiastes is performing, Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias.” Think about this analogy: the reader is the “I” in the first word of the poem, and the traveler from an antique land is the narrator of the book of Ecclesiastes. This traveler is describing the ruins of a vast statue of someone who was once “king of kings,” or who claimed he was and had the statue built at any rate. Look at the motto on the pedestal: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” And the irony is absolutely crushing, right? because what we look on now are the ruins of the statue and of the king himself, his reputation and his might. We see two legs of stone with no trunk; we see a “shatter’d visage” half sunk in the sand. “Nothing beside remains” around the “colossal wreck.” There is no kingdom, there are no armies, there is no more power, and only the barest and heavily ironic remembrance of him. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! was meant one way by proud Ozymandias the king, but it signifies now in a new way, because we look on his works — the wreck of them, the crumbled ruins half-buried in the desert — and we despair for a different reason: We despair only if we put our trust in the sort of might that Ozymandias once trumpeted.

I think the Book of Ecclesiastes is like this. We see Ecclesiastes trumpeting his own wisdom about the futility of life, but we also see the “wreck” of him, his mental anguish throughout the book, the contradictions that he can neither resolve nor be at peace about, and finally the dissolution of his body, the breakdown of the “corpus” of the sage, in 12:1-8. I think we are meant to look on his “works of wisdom” and despair. But not just despair: as the Epilogist finally makes clear in 12:13, we are to look on them, despair, and know now with a deeper and fuller conviction than ever before that we must obey God, that we must fear God and keep God’s commandments, because all else is dust and hopelessness and vanity.

The book of Ecclesiastes is a work of utter genius, because through the skepticism of the character Ecclesiastes, it renders the exhortation to love Torah more impervious to irony this way than that exhortation ever could have been if it were given straight. If someone just said, “Look, obey the Law. That’s what you have to do,” a skeptic could wing right back with, “Yeah, sure, and look how it doesn’t help the innocent, who still suffer, nor does it end up punishing the wicked, who still prosper,”  &c. This way, Ecclesiastes himself has said all those things already, and we see that those observations, while partly true  (this is how irony works, playing on the “said”), are not sufficient.

We have come to the end of our time. I hope that I have convinced you that biblical irony is an extraordinary gift of God. Biblical irony shows us that we can do ourselves much more spiritual harm than enemies ever could if we forget that we are God’s people (Balaam). Biblical irony encourages us not to become over-confident in our sacred traditions but rather to continually seek God and live (Amos). And biblical irony shows us that the only way out of the bleak despair of existential skepticism is to fear God and obey God’s Law, which of course for Christians is the Law of love that we know in Jesus Christ. Thank you.

By Walter Brueggemann

(Fourth Sunday of Easter)
(Psalm 103; I John 2:18-29; Mark 6:30-44)
We have this wondrous story of Jesus transforming the wilderness into a place of nourishing plenty. Jesus radically disrupts how the world was thought to be. The wilderness, the “deserted place” in the story, was where there was no viable life support system. He thought he was going there to rest, but he was met by a big crowd of those who were drawn to him. They believed he would indeed disrupt their failed world, though they knew not how.

I.
Jesus does not disappoint them. He was moved with great compassion when he saw the hungry crowd. He had his stomach turned by their need. He engaged their hunger, because they lived in a false world without resources. His disciples accepted the barren wilderness without resources as a given; they wanted the crowd dispersed. They tried to protect Jesus from the need of the world. But Jesus scolded them and tells them to do the food for the crowd. But they are without resources. They say, “We do not have resources to do that,” only puny supplies of bread and fish. They accepted the scarcity and force of the wilderness; the crowd may have expected food, but his disciples have no such hope. They have no such hope, even though they traveled with Jesus and had watched him work.

But Jesus jerks them to attention. He tells the crowd to sit. He disregards his weak-hearted disciples with their feeble notion of scarcity. He takes the puny supply of bread and the puny catch of fish. And then, without fan-fare, he utters the four big verbs that are the center of the church’s life:
He took the bread and fish;
He blessed the bread and fish;
He broke the bread and fish;
He gave the bread and fish.

You want that again? He took, he blessed, he broke, he gave. He enacted a Eucharist right there in that deserted place for the hungry crowd without resources. They all ate. They were all filled and satisfied…five thousand men…plus women and children. And, we are told, they finished with a surplus, with bread enough for all the tribes of Israel…twelve baskets! Fini! Thanks be to God! The world is transformed; the wilderness has become a place of abundance by the force and presence of Jesus in the midst of need.

II.
Well, the text is assigned for the day. And I am invited and paid to exposit it for you. The story is a fantasy, the kind that the church enjoys about Jesus, the kind of miracle that is given without explanation:
-We try to explain it as best we can. They all pulled out their lunches, and shared more than enough. But the text does not say that!
-Or we say it is a retelling of the manna story of the Old Testament that is itself only an older fantasy narrative.
-Or it is a creation of the later church in order to anticipate the later sacrament of the Eucharist, as the Jesus Seminar might say.

In any case, the story is not credible, because we measure it by the story that we know better. The one we know better is true; contrasted to that, this one is a silly fantasy for nice romantic church folk. The story we know better, the one we live out each day, is about scarcity. There really is not enough food to go around. There really are starving people in Africa and in Philadelphia. And because the story of scarcity is true, we hustle to get ahead, or to stay even, to make sure we do not run out of money or bread or oil or security, to make sure we and our grandchildren will have enough, to make sure the US has enough power to protect our food and oil supplies. We work and work in the rat-race to stay even, to make sure that our kids succeed.

And we limit and ration. We limit access because there is not enough. We limit food and health care. We limit grace, cutting out those not qualified, excluding those who are not like us. We live in anxiety on endless Orange Alert, knowing that we must fend off others to protect ourselves. And I am invited and paid to tell you this fantasy that does not square with our society and our way in it, and the story we have come to believe about ourselves.

III.
Well…take a deep breath…and consider this: the reason we are here this morning together is to entertain the radical thought that the story of abundance enacted by Jesus is true. The story we tell about scarcity is a fantasy. It is not a true story. It is a story invented by those who have too much to justify getting more. It is a story accepted by those who have nothing in order to explain why they have nothing. That story is not true, because the world belongs to God and God is the creator of the abundant life.

So we meet to sort this out again. If we were not here together, we could adopt the story of our society and live out our lives in anxious rat race the world puts upon us. But here we listen to this other story. And when we hear it, we say, “Praise to you, Lord Christ.” Praise to you, Lord Christ, for giving us a better story. Praise to you, Lord Christ, for a true story. Praise to you, Lord Christ, for a story of abundance with twelve baskets left over. Praise to you, Lord Christ, for your transformative verbs, “He took, he blessed, he broke he gave.”

The abundance that Jesus performs in this narrative is not a simple, safe church sacrament. It is the performance of a new narrative of the world, a narrative of well-being, satisfaction, abundance, and surplus. And when we place our hearts and our imagination and our faith in this story, the old narrative of scarcity turns out to be a fantasy.

In this dramatic act at the table, we see that the story of Jesus’ feeding has deep implications for us in the church and, eventually, for us in the world. It invites us to bask in God’s shalom. It invites us to act out that abundance, to perform abundance in the neighborhood with generosity and hospitality. It summons us to new policies, new money management, new relationships grounded in God’s endless giving. It urges us to new policies that allow for sharing with all of the needy and the vulnerable who are in the scope of God’s compassion.

So we do this sorting out. Some of us are so set in the scarcity story that we will take this as church fantasy. Some of us will be grabbed by the story of God’s blessing, and tilt in fresh ways toward the world toward the neighborhood. Some of us will be unsure and in wonderment, and will continue to sort out. But all of us are invited to be children and practitioners of this other story. The Gospel is not a fantasy. It is the true story of God’s world. That is why we say with our will and our faith and our life, “Praise to you, Lord Christ.” And then we act it out in ways that disrupt our society, even as he continues to disrupt our world of scarcity with his abundance.

By The Rt Revd Pierre W. Whalon, D.D.

Ten years ago, on Christmas Eve 2001, I heard for the first time Olivia de Havilland read the Scriptures in the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, Paris. When I had first learned that Miss de Havilland read several times a year, I had wondered whether it might be some way of gaining notoriety for the church. I was struck by her resonant alto voice and meticulous preparation, which clearly communicated not only the words but also something of the Word. It was immediately clear that this woman is a model for lectors — what we used to call lay readers — everywhere.

One Easter Vigil, at the end of the service, I thanked her for her reading of the account of the Fall in Genesis 3. “You may have retired from the cinema,” I said, “but not from your art.” She gave me a shrewd look and said, “If you pitched it right, you could have people rolling in the aisles, you know.” It was then that I determined to ask Miss de Havilland for an interview, in order to write this very article.

Incidentally, I find it impossible to call her “Olivia” though most parishioners do with her encouragement. It has to do in part with the way I was brought up: she is after all a distinguished artist with a great portfolio of theatre and cinema awards. It was her unwillingness to allow the studio system of virtual indentured servitude to rule her that led to the emancipation of actors, directors, screenwriters, and musicians in a precedent-setting lawsuit against Warner Brothers — “the de Havilland precedent,” which is still invoked regularly. She was then able to do the kind of work she wanted to do. Three Academy nominations soon followed for To Each His Own, The Snake Pit, and The Heiress. Both To Each His Own and The Heiress won her an Oscar. In retirement, she lives in Paris.

Beyond these well-known facts, Miss de Havilland is a woman of genuine faith, which she brings to bear on her lay reading so as to make each lesson a personal statement. Her paternal grandfather, Charles de Havilland, was an Anglican priest whose last cure was on the isle of Guernsey, where the “de H’s” (as she calls them) have lived for a millennium at least. Her British mother raised her as an Episcopalian, though she did have a stint as a girl in a Roman Catholic convent school, which gave her a lasting admiration for women religious.

She eventually gave me an interview. Over tea in her home, we discussed in detail how she came to read the Scriptures in church.

But first, why do we read the Bible in church? It would seem to be a silly question: of course we read the Bible in church. However, when else are we subjected to someone reading a text aloud to us? Poetry readings, political speeches, lengthy quotes from law tomes in courts, some sermons, and parents telling children a bedtime story, seem to be the last occasions in our experience for what was once very important in people’s lives before television and the Internet.

We read the Scriptures because that forms the spine of every Christian worship service in the world. In the Episcopal liturgy, the Scriptures are read as part of the overall prayers. Then the preacher expounds them to the congregation, seeking to convict of their truth, to which we all rise and respond by saying “We believe” (or “I believe”). In the flow of the Eucharist, the creed is the catharsis for the tension set up by the reading of the Bible and the homiletical commentary upon it. Thus we can then offer our prayers of thanksgiving and petition from a right place in our hearts, leading to the most intimate prayer, the confession of our sins. (This latter is far too often omitted, as if it were embarrassing…)

With the absolution, we are ready to make peace with ourselves and our sisters and brothers, and we are then worthy to offer the Great Thanksgiving and share in the Body and Blood of Christ. Then we leave to our several ministries, assured that “we are living members of the Body of Christ” and sent forth “as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord.”

It is obvious that the reading of the Scriptures is essential to our worship, not just to receive a kind of “holy information” but as meat and drink for our life of faith. Therefore, the readings should be an authentic expression of the reader’s own faith — complete with struggles and doubts as well as hope.

Olivia de Havilland was one of the first women lectors at the Cathedral in Paris. In the 1970s, the then-Dean, the Very Rev. Robert G. Oliver, determined to introduce women as lectors. It was a daring innovation for the time in that congregation. According to Miss de Havilland, he began by asking a conservative wife of a corporate executive. She was followed by another impeccably dressed lady of similar standing. Finally he ended with “the movie actress.” By then people had grown accustomed to women readers, even liking the contrast with masculine voices. Until fairly recently, Miss de Havilland was on the regular rota for reading.

Today she still reads for major feasts and special occasions, such as a memorial service for another previous Dean, Sturgis Riddle. She kindly shared with me her method of preparation, which is a model for every lector to consider, and not just among Episcopalians.

First of all, Miss de Havilland brings to bear what she herself learned as a fledgling actress under Max Reinhardt, the great theatrical and movie director of the 1930s. She describes what happened: “Just after graduating from high school, I played Puck in an amateur production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the California village of Saratoga where I was brought up. Having won a full scholarship to Mills College [in Oakland, California] where, upon enrolling in late September, I planned to major in Drama and Speech Arts, I wanted to watch the great Max Reinhardt’s rehearsals of his Hollywood Bowl production of the same play. After auditioning for Max Reinhardt’s assistant director, to my surprise and great good fortune, I was appointed second understudy to the role of Hermia and finally inherited the part! My engagement in the Hollywood Bowl production prevented me from enrolling at Mills – which I never attended.”

Then Reinhardt asked her to take the part of Hermia in his touring company, and eventually, the film version of the play. “He was the type of director who showed you what he wanted by acting the role himself,” Miss de Havilland said. “I made notes of everything he wanted, devising a sort of hieroglyphics for myself in the script. That way, I could reproduce his inflections on the words to his satisfaction.”

She showed me the texts she had read last Christmas Eve. Each was printed out in large type, and festooned with underlines, semi-colons, and other diacritical marks. “I think I prepare in a way the Church would not approve — I add punctuations.” I replied that the original Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible had virtually no punctuation at all. “The punctuation marks help me to get the right inflections.”

And how can she tell what to choose? “I start on the preceding Monday by reading the texts I am assigned. The next day I re-read them, and I think the night’s sleep often helps me see things I hadn’t noticed at first.” Then Miss de Havilland wrestles with the text, to find its underlying “architecture.” “You have to convey the deep meaning, you see, and it has to start with your own faith.” During the days that follow, she tries to figure out what the text means to her, and then how best to get it across.

Blessed with a resonant alto voice as well as her training, she reads with a natural authority. “But first I always pray. I pray before I start to prepare, as well. In fact, I would always say a prayer before shooting a scene, so this is not so different, in a way.”

She likes the New Revised Standard Version, though she often prefers to use the Revised English Bible, the heir of the New English Bible, for its poetic style. (In fact, I prefer it as well in many instances.) But Miss de Havilland finds some texts very difficult to read in this authentically personal way that she has developed: “That Yahweh can be so awful sometimes!” she pointed out.

To sum up, reading the Scriptures in church has to be an authentic proclamation of the reader’s faith. Preparation is essential — there are far too many last-minute readings in our churches. In order to get across the words so that they become for the listener the Word, not only must the reader be trained in the rhetoric of reading aloud but must also be willing to risk wrestling with God over the meaning. Not all biblical texts are comforting, as Miss de Havilland pointed out. People of faith always have doubts — only those who have no faith have no doubts. It is when we have well prepared the text, rehearsed the inflections to give various key words to as bring forth the meaning, and prayed for the Spirit’s help, that we can be authentic proclaimers of the Good News that lies in the Word written.

Not everyone will have the talent and experience of an Olivia de Havilland. That is not the point. When the worship comes from the heart, including the readings, and the whole liturgy is done with loving care, visitors “will fall down and worship God, exclaiming, ‘God is truly among you!’” (I Cor. 14: 25)

And let her have the last word. “I once asked Jimmy Cagney, ‘just what is acting?’ He said at first, ‘I dunno…’ But then he said, ‘All I know is that you have to mean what you say.’”

Amen.

(reprints allowed with authorship attributed to Bishop Pierre Whalon and © 2012 Anglicans Online)

By Revd. Canon Prof. Martyn Percy

Teabing smiled.  ‘Everything you need to know about the Bible can be summed up by the great Canon Dr. Martyn Percy.’  Teabing cleared his throat and declared, ‘the Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven…the Bible is a product of man, my dear.  Not of God.  The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds.  Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations and revisions.  History has never had a definitive version of the book…More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only [four] were chosen for inclusion…The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great…’. [Chap. 55, The Da Vinci Code]

Speaking as the person quoted above, I guess I ought to try and clarify my views a little.  It is true that ‘the Bible is not a fax from heaven’ is a quote correctly attributed to me, although to the best of my knowledge, I have only ever said this in lectures, radio, TV and newspaper interviews – all in connection with understanding fundamentalism.  But behind the slick sound-bite, there is in fact a fairly sophisticated theological point.  Let me explain.

Views about the authority and status of scripture cannot be directly resourced from the Bible itself.  The Bible has no self-conscious identity.  As a collation of books and writings, it did indeed come together over a long period of time.  Indeed, the word ‘Bible’ comes from the Greek biblos, imply meaning ‘books’.  Equally, the word ‘canon’ (here used in relation to scripture, not as an ecclesiastical title) simply means rule.  So the Bible is, literally, ‘authorised books’.  But as I say, the authorisation of the compilation took place after the books were written.  It should be clear that Paul, when he wrote ‘all scripture is inspired by God’ (2. Tim 3.16) in a letter to his friend, Timothy, could hardly have had his own letter in mind at the time.  The conferral of canonical status on his letter came later – some would say much later.

My point is simple.  Views about the authority and status of the Bible cannot be solely resourced from the Bible.  The Bible needs to be held and understood in a particular way, independent of its content, in order to have any authority.  Furthermore, behind such a view, is some kind of nascent notion of how the power of God works in the world.  For some (perhaps especially fundamentalists), the power of God must be mediated through clear, pure and easily identifiable channels or agents.  This guarantees the quality of that power: it is unquestionable and unambiguous.

But for others – usually of a more mainstream or perhaps liberal persuasion – God acts and speaks through channels and agents that are fully themselves.  So God works through culture, peoples and history, not over and against them.  Correspondingly, the power of God is only ever known provisionally (not absolutely); it can only be encountered ‘through a glass darkly’, and not ‘face to face’.  Thus, although the power of God may be pure and absolute at source, God always chooses to mediate that power through less than perfect agents (such as language, people, times and places).  And this is because God’s primary interest is in disclosing [his] love in order to draw us into relationships, and not in unequivocal demonstrations of power, which would leave no room for a genuinely free response, but merely obedience in the face of oppression.  So we have the burning bush for Moses – but he covers his face.  And although Jesus is the light of the world, ‘the darkness comprehend-eth it not’, according to John.  What is revealed is still ‘hidden’ to those who are blind.

But how does the ‘fax’ quote relate to the Bible?  Simple.  Some Christians believe that scripture has come from heaven to earth, in an unimpaired, totally unambiguous form.  Such views are fundamentalistic: the Bible is the pure word of God – every letter and syllable is ‘God breathed’.  So there is no room for questions; knowledge replaces faith.  It is utterly authoritative: to question the Bible is tantamount to questioning God.

But to those who believe that scripture is a more complex nexus of writings, the authority of scripture lies in the totality of its inspiration.  Thus, the Bible does indeed contain many things that God may want to say to humanity (and they are to be heeded and followed).  But it also contains opinions about God (even one or two moans and complaints – see the Psalms); it contains allegory, parables, humour, histories and debates.  The nature of the Bible invites us to contemplate the many ways in which God speaks.  The Bible is not one message spoken by one voice.  It is symphonic in character – a restless and inspiring chorus of testaments, whose authority rests upon its very plurality.

So, when Paul tells us in 2 Tim.3:16 that ‘…all scripture is inspired by God…’, he is not talking about himself.  For the early Christians, the ‘scripture’ Paul refers to may have meant the Old Testament, and perhaps what they knew of the Gospels.  But it didn’t mean the New Testament, because as a settled volume or concept, it did not exist until the 4th Century, the same time Creeds crystallised.  So is the New Testament ‘the work of man’?  In one sense, yes: people had to write the texts – they were not faxed!  But on the other hand, there is a case for arguing that the church only chose authentic and faithful records that testified to Jesus accurately, and history bears this out.  As Michael Ramsay remarked, ‘the Bible is a consequence of Christianity, not its cause’.

But what does any of this have to do with an Arts Festival?  The answer lies in what we make of this curious word we use about quite a lot of things – a kind of fluid currency, if you will.  The word is, of course, ‘inspiration’, which in its original Greek usage literally meant ‘god-breathed’ –theopneutos.  There are many kinds of inspiration, naturally; but the question arises, what kinds of inspiration does God use?  A burning bush may seem ‘obvious’ to you: but to others?  Remember Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes –
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

In my choice of pictures to meditate upon this evening, I happen to have chosen two particular and personal favourites: Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Census in Bethlehem, painted around 1580, and Rembrandt’s The Entombment, painted in about 1630.  In a moment I’ll explain why these paintings might be linked by ideas that are located in our readings, but first, let us look at Bruegel’s work.

According to Luke’s gospel, Christ is born in Bethlehem because of the census that the Emperor Augustus set in motion throughout the Roman-controlled world.  But Bruegel’s Census is a contemporary ‘take’ on the story: he sets the events leading up the birth of Jesus in a busy Flemish village.  His picture is filled with men, women, children and animals, going about the common business of living. There must be more than two hundred figures in this village scene, going about their daily chores: no-one sees anything unusual.

Bruegel’s art unifies this random bustle. But how?  No obvious focal points direct us as we look at the painting.  Bruegel wants us to enter into the village and orient ourselves as visitors would have done.  When we get our bearings we notice that a crowd of people is collecting in front of the building in the foreground left.  Just inside some men sit at a table examining documents and making notes in a ledger. The villagers crowd around waiting to be examined.

Reading from left to right we can’t help noticing two large wooden O’s made by the wheels of some hay wagons.  Here, the circle has been universally accepted as the symbol of eternity and everlasting existence.  As the monogram for God it stands for both the perfection and the eternity of God.  Then we notice a young woman on a horse led by a man on foot (see above left). The woman is almost hidden by her heavy winter clothing. But we realize this is Mary.  So here is Jesus – only hidden from our sight.

Rembrandt’s picture – by no means one of his best – also has a strange quality to it.  This is the entombment of Christ: he is being laid in the burial chamber by his friends and mother.  But look at what Rembrandt has done to the story.  The light seems to flow out of Christ’s body – almost as though, in death, he still glows.  The light has no external source in the picture – it comes out from Jesus’ body, and almost at us.  It has more than a passing resonance with the countless nativity scenes painted by many of the great masters – where the light of the world, newly born in the stable and lying in the crib – is the central and brightest image in the painting.  Here, Rembrandt has taken that nativity idea and put it into the entombment.  As the infant Jesus shone in the cradle of life, so here, the adult Jesus, is allowed to shine in the cradle of death.

So what links these pictures?  Well, they are, in their own way, inspired.  They play with light and dark, with what is hidden and revealed.  Like a good inspired text, they don’t tell us what is happening, but rather draw us in together, asking: ‘what do you see?’ or ‘what might this mean?’.  They help to make, in other words, a community of interpretation and appreciation, gathered around signs, symbols and words – or, in this case, art.  The pictures are also linked more subtly.  In both paintings, the Jesus we know is either not yet born or only just dead.  We have moved from womb to tomb in one easy leap.  Moreover, the eerie light used by Rembrandt is a deliberate harking back to the nativity.  Could he be saying that, just as Christ came from the womb, so in this tomb, somehow, there is a new nativity at work – a second birth?  That even in the burial of Christ, there is already a hint of resurrection?  It is as though, even here, Rembrandt has found a way, at the point of the death of Jesus, to link that tragic event to the opening of John’s gospel: ‘the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it’.  And then we turn to Bruegel, who ‘loses’ Mary and Joseph in the crowd, and conceals Mary’s pregnancy under a heavy winter coat.  He is saying we must look for Jesus; a kind of sixteenth century Where’s Wally?  But if we look with care, we will find the light of the world.  In the meantime, we we must sit and wait in anticipation for his birth.

Inspiration, then, is not about re-stating the obvious.  It is about receiving the breath of God; discerning how his presence ripples to us through signs, symbols and stories.  Scripture – like art, music poetry, symbols and signs – invites us to stay awhile and contemplate.  The burning bush has more than one meaning.  It is an invitation to pause and look; and then step through the gates of mystery that God provides.  It is in contemplation that we find wisdom.  God did not send us a fax, but rather his son, born of a woman.  The light shines and the fire burns; and some people are struck by the beams of radiance, and perceive.  But the rest, as Browning says, carry on picking blackberries.

The Revd. Canon Prof. Martyn Percy is Principal, Ripon College Cuddesdon

By Helen Fairbank Goodkin
Last Advent, my three year old granddaughter and I set up the crèche together.  As I placed the three wise men with their camels, she said, “But Granny, where are the three wise women?”  I was about to say that there were only wise men, when I realized that she was talking about Mary, along with Elizabeth and Anna, the three women who surround Jesus’ birth in Luke’s narrative.  Emma made it quite clear that we had to find more figures for the crèche!

Even though these three women open the gospel in Luke, and other faithful women close it with Jesus on the cross and as witnesses to the resurrection, in between, the contributions of women to the Gospels are generally  considered  insignificant and their presence marginal.  Their roles are demeaned; their voices muted.   Even though we know from Paul that women were vital to the early development of Christianity, the Bible and the church have down played women’s roles throughout the centuries.  Why, indeed, does it take a three year old to point out that there are three wise women who recognize Jesus in addition to three wise men?

Yet, there are several women in Gospels who jump out, shouting their stories, proclaiming a unique relationship with Jesus, a relationship that the apostles didn’t appear to share.  These women create a relationship with Jesus based on listening and responding, upon conversation, upon respectful dialogue. On many fronts, it is this dialogue and conversation that is missing in the world today, yet here two thousand years ago, we have our models.

Let’s start with the Samaritan woman at the well in John’s Gospel.   She is preceded by Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews who wants to speak to Jesus, but he is so afraid of what others will think that he comes in “the dark of the night.”  He is mystified by what Jesus says, but instead of asking questions, he disappears from the narrative, silent until Chapter 7.  Following the meeting with Nicodemus, Jesus travels home, and on the way he meets a poor Samaritan woman, alone at a well at high noon, in the brightest light of day.  Despite the animosity between Jews and Samaritans, Jesus asks her for a drink of water.  She is startled by this request from a Jewish man, and says so, and the two engage in what is the first Christian theological debate.  Each knows well the tenants of their own faith tradition, but Jesus urges her to believe that he has a “new way,” that cares not whether one worships in Jerusalem or at the Samaritan temple, but that all “worship God in Spirit and in Truth.”  Through this conversation, the woman is converted to faith in Christ, to belief in “the living water gushing up to eternal life” that Christ brings.  She returns to her village and calls her neighbors to believe as well.  The first woman to engage in ecumenical dialogue becomes the first Christian missionary.  Yet, when is her feast day?

Tradition has not been kind to her.  Instead of praising her for her knowledge, her curiosity, her willingness to be open to dialogue, she has been maligned as a “tramp,” a “prostitute,” a “five time loser” because she has had five husbands.  Nothing in the text says anything about loose morals or divorce; she may have simply been widowed many times over.  Yet for centuries, her remarkable dialogue with Jesus has been overlooked, while folks have built up conjectures about her “background.”

A second woman, a Canaanite or Syrophoenician, appears in Matthew and Mark.  A gentile, she asks Jesus to heal her sick daughter.  Jesus has healed women and gentiles so why he chooses not to heal this child, we will never know, but he tells the poor mother he came only to serve the “children of Israel.”  They must enjoy the fruits of the Kingdom before “food is thrown to the dogs.”  One doesn’t have to be a parent to understand her rage, but she calmly presses her case.  “My Lord,” she says, using a title of honor, “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”    In her own way, she takes Jesus to task, and he responds to the rightness of what she says and the faith with which she says it.  The daughter is healed.   This woman stood up to an injustice; she reminds Jesus that he came to heal the sick, all the sick, to help the poor, all the poor.  She engages in dialogue with Jesus, a dialogue that causes him to change and to grow, to expand the scope of his mission.   It is Jesus’ ability here to change and to grow that provides a model for us to recognize our own mistakes and change as well.

Finally, there are Mary and Martha.  In Luke, you will recall, Jesus says that Mary has “chosen the better part” because she sits silently at Jesus’ feet and listens to the word.  Yet, in John’s Gospel, when Jesus arrives at their home late, after their brother is already dead, both sisters greet him independently with the words, “Lord, if you had been here [sooner], our brother would not have died.”  Martha, like Jesus’ mother at the wedding at Cana, knows that God will give Jesus whatever he asks.  She is respectful, but she too questions him, and the ensuing dialogue expands and empowers her understanding of Jesus’ message of new life.  On the other hand, Mary’s deep sadness is movingly felt by Jesus.  Together, the two sisters model the life of Christian faith, struggling with life’s hardships, while engaging in conversation and questioning in order to embrace the fullness of God’s glory and promise.

Perhaps because these women were not “chosen” to be apostles, but were simply folks trying to grapple with their faith, they were not afraid speak their minds, to question, to struggle with the true meaning of Jesus’ message.  In doing so, their understanding of Jesus’ message increases, and their faith grows.  Dialogue such as this helps us all to clarify, to expand, and to enrich our own faith.  It enables us to know and to love one another.  This is the gift of conversation.

This dialogue, this conversation, is often absent today.  In the church, in the nation, in the world as a whole, it is increasingly difficult to bring folks to the table for civil conversation that recognizes the complexity of situations and strives for resolutions that honor all parties, while furthering justice and peace.  The world is not lacking for issues, but humankind often lacks the willingness to engage in open and honest dialogue.  These women teach us that healing and reconciliation happen only through engagement with one another.

For further reading:  Samaritan Woman:  John Chapter 4; Canaanite/Syrophoenician Woman:  Matthew 15:21-28 and Mark 7:24-30; Mary and Martha John Chapter 11 and Luke 10:38-42

After retiring from a career in healthcare, Helen Goodkin earned a Master’s Degree in Biblical Studies at GTS, receiving the Greek Prize and the Sutton Prize for her thesis on the healing stories in Luke-Acts. She is a regular Bible study and conference leader in New York and elsewhere on the East Coast, including the Center for Christian Spirituality at GTS and the Adelynrood Conference and Retreat Center of the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, in Massachusetts, and she has also been an EFM Mentor.

By Alan Jones
Not long ago, I was driving behind a truck with a large bumper sticker. In bold letters was the command: “Read the Bible everyday!” As I got closer, I could read, in smaller print, the warning” “It will scare the hell out of you!”  The Bible can be scary and, as a kid, I was intrigued by those gory bits in the Old Testament. I remember, in particular, the story of Samuel hacking Agag to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal and Jezebel being thrown out of the window to be eaten by dogs. I loved all these stories but my favorites were the ones about Joseph and his brothers and Moses and the Burning Bush. In fact, the whole story of the Exodus captured my imagination. I wasn’t, however, given much help (as an eleven year old) in understanding what I was reading.

Later I learned that the Bible is an amazing book, which takes us on a great journey from a Garden (Genesis) to a City (The Revelation of John) and presents us with all the glory, challenge and complexity of being human.  It used to be a custom to read the Bible from cover to cover once a year. Its images provided the architecture of people’s thoughts and the conversations of our grandparents – certainly mine – were full of Biblical allusions (with quotations from the King James Version).  That world of shared allusions has largely disappeared and many of us, even in the Church, are bereft of a common Biblically based treasure house of images. So, how should we read the Bible today? What might be some of the ground rules to help us understand it and live in and by its wisdom?

We might start by recovering two simple truths. First,  the Bible is actually a library, a collection of books, written at different times and in different styles, for different audiences. And second, that the Bible isn’t a set of rules.  Some of the books read like history or chronicle, some stories sound mythical (a very important way to convey deep truths), others are collections of moral sayings and poems of great beauty and passion (the psalms).  There are also blood-and-guts adventure stories, like the amazing one about Samson and Delilah. And there are tender stories about love and loyalty like the story of Ruth.  I was taught that while the Bible wasn’t a rule book,  all the stories have one single message — “God reigns!” God is God.

Finding out who God is, how God acts, and what our relationship is with each other and with God, is why people have read the Bible with devotion and deep attention through the centuries. It reminds them that, rather than a rule book, the Bible is a great Drama, which is bigger than their own little psycho drama. It’s wonderful and liberating to find yourself part of a bigger unfolding story.

Most people know that God’s Library comes in two sections. The first one is the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament). The second section (the New Testament) starts with three life stories of Jesus – the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. They were written by the early Christian communities in such a way as to challenge the readers and hearers to change their lives and be signs of hope in dark times. This second section ends with a very strange book called The Revelation of  John.

What’s really odd is that Christians have called this varied collection of books “The Word of God.” How can this be so?  How can an odd collection of peculiar material, some of it contradictory, be thought to be God’s Word?  It may be that many find the Bible to God’s word because God is an actor in its pages. The Bible is exciting, intriguing  and nourishing precisely because it is a book having a vigorous argument with itself as the drama unfolds.  But thinking of the Bible as directly the Word of God has got a lot of people in trouble. It has been used and abused by people more concerned with power than with being willing to be open to its liberating energy. Part of the good news is that this abuse hasn’t thwarted the Bible’s power to change lives for the good.

A friend of mine says reading the Bible is rather like thumbing through a very large family album with photographs of our relations, the disreputable ones as well as the admirable. We gather round at Thanksgiving or Christmas and get the old album out to recapture the sense of the family drama. There’s uncle George who often tried to wreck family occasions with his conspiracy politics and aunt May who always had a little too much to drink. When we read the Bible or thumb through the photo album, we  get back to our roots, know a little more of who we are and where we’ve come from.  It’s more accurate, therefore, to think of the Bible as containing God’s communication to us. The Bible is the Word of God only in a secondary sense. Jesus is God’s Word in the first instance. The Word is Person with all the depth and impenetrable mystery of a person. The Bible bears witness to Jesus who invites us to re-imagine what it might mean to be human in communion with God and with each other.   The important point, then, is that the Christian tradition insists that God’s word  is primarily a person not a collection of texts. Jesus is God’s word to us about ourselves. And persons are intractably elusive and yet palpable and present. Martin Luther put it well. He tells us to think of the Bible as the swaddling clothes in which the infant Christ is laid.

Reading the Bible, particularly the New Testament, was thought to be of paramount importance because it helps us understand who we are and interpret what’s happening to us. The principle is, everything that happens to Christ happens to us. We go through times of exhilaration and fulfillment and times of suffering and diminishment. If we are awake and aware we know something the cycle of death and resurrection in our own lives.  Another way of understanding why we read the stories of the first disciples is that we repeat their experience of Jesus.  We start off with great enthusiasm. We’re captivated by the parables, the miracles, the teaching and then we become disappointed, disillusioned and even fearful when the going gets tough, when Jesus sets his face towards Jerusalem. We didn’t sign on for this. Like the early disciples, we run away (“they all forsook him and fled”). And like the early disciples on the road to Emmaus we find renewal and courage in the presence of the Resurrected Christ. In other words, reading the Bible is a way by which we move through our own experience of life.

When I was growing up in England during and after the Second World War, there was a popular book published in the late fifties called Your God is too Small”.  We need to broaden our understanding of the Bible by placing it in the context of the wonders of the universe.  The medieval mystics insisted that the Bible was  one of three “books” available to us. Such is God’s generosity. The other two books are Nature and Experience and lead us to that “experimental knowledge of God” celebrated in the mystical tradition.

There’s a story about the early rabbis arguing about which was the most important text in the Bible. Rabbi Akiba said the greatest principle of Torah is found in Leviticus: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Only one of the rabbis challenged this.  He argued that the simple words ‘This is the role of Adam’s descendents” were more important because they revealed the unity of the entire human race.  The human race is one.  That’s one of the wonderful things at the heart of God’s Library. This lure, this call to life “as if” there is only one human family is what excites me about the Bible. The Bible invites us simply to fall in love, like St. Francis who fell into the Christian path from sheer joy at its possibilities.  As one of my mentors (a Welsh Franciscan) told me years ago, “St Francis had a head-on collision with the living God. It knocked him silly but it also knocked him into the kingdom.” The Bible, particularly in the context of the Eucharist, provides such a collision with the shock and newness of Jesus and through Word and Sacrament we are catapulted into a new way of being in the world. Annie Dillard writes somewhere about the strange way we go about reading the Bible. She wonders whether anyone has the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke when we pray. We’re like children playing on the floor with our chemistry sets., “mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.”   In Jesus, a new way of talking about being human was initiated. The news is explosive!  Our problem is that because of the huge historical distance, we tend to miss the strangeness of it all.  Christ was a drama of rebellion against the prevailing reality of despair and diminishment, and the Bible is the great witness to this rebellion.

So, what’s the key to interpreting the scriptures?  One principle is that you never get to the bottom of it to come up with a final meaning.  The rabbis liked to point out that King Solomon used three thousand parables to illustrate every verse of the Torah, and could give a thousand and five interpretations of each parable – which meant that there were three million, fifteen thousand possible expositions of each unit of scripture.  For them the Torah, written down and read wasn’t the end of the story.  We are supposed to use our imagination to bring something fresh and new out of it – like making flour in order to bake a loaf of bread. Rabbi Hillel was asked to summarize the Torah while standing on one leg. So, he stood on one leg, and said: ‘What is hateful to yourself, do not do to a fellow human being. That is the whole Torah and the remainder is but commentary. Go study it.” And, remember all those laws and rules? The rabbis affirmed that at the heart of all the legislation and the stories lies the core compassion of God’s loving heart. Love is the absolute key of all interpretation  “even if this means twisting the original meaning of the text.” This is the ancient interpretive principle, largely forgotten in this literalistic age — Whatever in the Bible is not conducive to love must be interpreted figuratively. We can then read the violence of Samuel and the death of Jezebel as cautionary tales rather than as prescriptions for behavior! St. Augustine tells us, “Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of our neighbor does not understand it at all. Whoever finds a lesson there useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived.”

Novelist Mary Gordon still calls herself a Christian – partly because of her response to her reading of the parable of the Prodigal Son – its oddness, its sheer unfairness to the older son. She writes,  “The radical challenge of Jesus: perhaps everything we think in order to know ourselves as comfortable citizens of a predictable world is wrong.” She then asks the question: how do we live? The answer?

In celebration.
Without envy.
Generously[i]

Not a bad way to read the Bible – God’s library!

Alan Jones is dean emeritus of Grace Cathedral San Francisco and honorary Canon of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres.

[i] Mary Gordon, Reading Jesus, New York Pantheon, a division of Random House, Inc.2009

by the Rev. Margaret Guenther

I must begin this reflection with a confession: I love stories!  If I am compelled, I manage to use my left brain–which is sort of like learning a second language–but I am happiest when my mind is alive with images, when things don’t necessarily add up, when I am invited to wander down mysterious, maybe awesome, often beautiful paths.

I managed acceptable, even rather good grades in my Scripture courses in seminary. But I have always been happiest when I could immerse myself in a story.  So sometimes in my imagination the Last Supper took place in the parish hall of my childhood–ample ladies, flushed with the heat of the kitchen, would peep out through the pass-through to acknowledge the applause of the Twelve gathered with Jesus around the table.  Blind Bartimaeus would sometimes be sitting beside a Missouri country road when Jesus passed by, and sometimes he would be in the heart of downtown Kansas City.  The stable at Bethlehem smelled like the barn on the farm I visited often with my father. It was a rather nice smell, not at all what one might expect.

The stories in my King James Bible– ceremoniously bestowed on me when I reached the fourth grade–were alive, vibrant with sound and color and action.

And I haven’t quite grown up–despite the ponderous commentaries in my study bookshelves.  It was a joy to discover that I am not alone!  To discover that St. Ignatius of Loyola was way ahead of me in the sixteenth century.

At the heart of Ignatian prayer is the conviction that God can be found in all things. As a consequence, this way of praying appeals to our senses and encourages our imaginations.  The Gospel becomes alive, vivid, and present as we put ourselves in the story.  This can be a dynamic experience for anyone who has plodded through Scripture, conscientiously squelching each stirring of fantasy. After all, the Bible is a holy book, right?  We are supposed to read it reverently, quieting our random thoughts and ignoring the pictures that flit through our consciousness–in other words, deaden ourselves as much as possible, right?  Yet if we let ourselves be guided by Ignatius, the answer is a resounding Wrong!  He invites us to read Scripture as if we were present, to let ourselves see, hear, taste, and smell.  Mere reading is transformed into a lively, imaginative experience.

His Spiritual Exercises currently enjoying great popularity, not just among Roman Catholics or among clergy and members of religious orders.  Ordinary folk are discovering them, either in the intense experience of the traditional thirty-day retreat or–more commonly–in way set forth in the Nineteenth Annotation to the Exercises.  Ignatius must have had these ordinary busy people in mind when he offered this provision: “One who is educated or talented, but engaged in public affairs or necessary business, should take an hour and a half daily for the spiritual exercises.”  In either event, the exercises are undertaken under the guidance of a spiritual director skilled in Ignatian spirituality.  For those drawn to this experience, William Barry’s Finding God in All Things offers a highly readable introduction, the first step in exploring whether this is for you.

It is not necessary, however, to make the Spiritual Exercises to benefit from Ignatius’ approach to prayer.    Welcoming imagination, instead of regarding it as distraction, gives permission to those parts of ourselves which we often suppress in worship bringing an immediacy to our prayer.   Only when we experience the Gospel in the present tense, can we truly own it. Instead of suppressing our five senses, we use them as a passage into the mysteries of Christ’s life. The Gospels, after all, depict Jesus as a person who used and delighted in the senses.  His denigrators–in the colorful language of the King James translation–called him a “glutton and wine-bibber.”  He told stories that abound in imagery of touch, taste, sight, and hearing.  He touched people when he healed them; he took his disciples’ dusty feet in his hands and washed them.  People brought their children to him so that he could touch them and bless them.

Hence Gospel stories are especially good material for this type of meditation, broadly called Ignatian. We let ourselves read or hear a familiar story, then let ourselves be in that story and let the story be in us. In a sense this is a playful kind of prayer, for we give our imagination freedom to lead us where it will.  Sometimes it takes us to surprising places where we hear surprising things.

The God who is disclosed in the Bible does not conform to our generic notions of God, either the stern disciplinarian of righteous indignation or the generous Santa Claus of availability. Nor does this God conform to our more reasonable “orthodoxies” of “perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent.” Our conventional notions of God derive primarily from the logic of Greek philosophy that yields a God who is a fixed point of reference “contaminated” by the vagaries of lived reality.

But the God of the Bible does not arise from the syllogisms of such logic that hold promise of certitude. Rather this God, so definingly Jewish, inhabits open-ended narrative. (Rabbis do not voice syllogisms; they tell stories!) And in open-ended narrative, unlike logical syllogism, all sorts of things can happen that are surprising, unexpected, inexplicable, and sometimes disconcerting. Thus this narrative-dwelling God is part of a plot and emerges as a full character who acts amid the plot. Both the plot and the character violate ordinary, generic religious categories. The outcome of this way of disclosure is a God who is free and elusive and ofttimes irascible. It is this God who warns David not to try to box God into his temple, for this is a God who “moves about” (to and fro) with freedom, who refuses our settled categories (II Samuel 7:6).

The large plot in which this God is cast as lead character is that God evokes (creates) the world and spends the rest of historical time wanting to heal and restore a broken creation, that it may become an organism of authentic shalom. This work of healing restoration entails, on God’s part, both judgment against those who violate creation and generosity that makes new creation possible. This large plot that runs from “creator of heaven and earth” to “his kingdom shall have no end” consists in many lesser sub-plots in which God is the defining character: the emancipation of the Exodus (Exodus 3:7-9), the wonder of manna in the wilderness (Exodus 16:14-5),  the healing of a sick king (Isaiah 38:9-20), deliverance from lions (Daniel 6:16-24),  the raising of a dead son (II Kings 4:32-37), and so on. In each of these inexplicable exhibits of God’s power for life, God is at work contributing to the larger plot a new creation.

In that plot, YHWH, the God of Israel, emerges as a full character who works in engaged concert with the world and its inhabitants. The defining term for this dialogic engagement is “covenant” wherein God makes commitments, both to the creaturely world (Genesis 9:8-17) and eventually to Israel as a vehicle for God’s work in the world (Deuteronomy 26:16-19). Given that relatedness, it is clear that YHWH has a complex internal life and is capable of all kinds of emotional extremity, from rage and jealousy to self-giving love and generosity. It is precisely the dialogic quality of YHWH’s role that makes narrative possible, because without such a readiness for risky interaction there can be no lively story to tell. This lively dialogic engagement, moreover, is what makes praise and prayer possible for Israel. In its prayers of lament, complaint, and protest, Israel can and does impinge upon God to generate new divine initiative. Thus the wonder of the biblical God and the scandal of the biblical God is that God is available, at risk, with freedom; engagement with this God is always with open-ended possibility of another story yet to be told. And we are among God’s partners in the demanding, wondrous destiny of covenantal existence. The temptation of the church is always to tone down and domesticate God and require God to fit in to our reasonable notions or our moral passions. But it is clear from this disclosure that this God is can never be corralled by our reason or our passion, any more than could David with his temple.

It is this God, we confess, who inhabits the New Testament as well, who has “become flesh” (John 1:14) or, as we say in the creed, “Who became man.” It is the daring conviction of the church that in the Son we have seen the Father (John 14:9). That is, in the bodily life of Jesus we have fully seen the character of the Father God of the Old Testament. This “equivalence” is such a familiar cliché to us in the church that we do not notice what a radical claim it is. The formulation of “Father-Son” (albeit in patriarchal language) is the church’s capacity to connect what is in fact is incommensurate, namely the holy God of creation and new creation, and the human character from Nazareth. This incommensurability of the two means that the witness to Jesus in the New Testament will not square in every detail with the character of God in the Old Testament, and that there are important differences between the two. Given that, however, the linkages and the reiteration of plot and character in the narrative of Jesus are to be fully appreciated.

Thus Jesus is a player in the large plot of the restoration of creation. His wondrous deeds are summarized in Luke 7:22:

Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them.

All the items in this inventory are acts whereby the creation is restored to full function. Indeed, these acts replicate the inventory of the restorative actions of YHWH on the lips of Israel:

…who executes justice for the oppressed;

who gives food to the hungry.

The Lords sets the prisoners free;

the Lord opens the eyes of the blind.

The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down;

the Lord loves the righteous.

The Lord watches over the strangers;

he upholds the orphan and the widow… (Psalm 146:7-9).

The feeding miracles of Jesus are a “jump-start” on the abundance of creation that is to “be fruitful” (Mark 6:30-44; 8:1-10). His stilling of the storm is the restraint of chaos that makes a safe, viable life in the world possible (Mark 4:35-41).

It is clear that Jesus, Son of the Father, is a fully engaged agent in the life of the world. Thus he engages the power people in their scramble for truth (Mark 12:13-37). He engages the “losers” and brings them to new life (Luke 13:10-1719:1-10). Finally he confronts “the rulers of this age” as he engages the Roman Empire and its governor (John 18:28-38).

He is, moreover, fully capable of full range of “human emotions” that turn out in fact to be a full range of divine emotions. Thus he variously knows anger and sadness and joy. We do not need to overstate the consistency of the Old and New Testaments, but we are able to see that the God of ancient Israel who is capable of severe wrath and lavish generosity is the God exhibited in the person of Jesus.

All of this remarkable, elusive testimony concerning the one who is “truly God, truly man” comes to play when we affirm that we are made in the image of a God meant for dialogic engagement for the sake of the restoration of creation. We are commonly seduced by cultural religion to imagine that we are made in the image of a God who is “all powerful and all knowing.” And then we are more “God-like” when we ourselves are all powerful and all knowing. But that is not true! We are, rather, made in the image of this God who is bent on generative dialogic freedom and risk. The summons then is to go freely “to and fro” into the neighborhood for the sake of restoration.

- Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary

Jesus says: “The kingdom of the [Father] is like a woman who is carrying a [jar] filled with flour. While she was walking on [the] way, very distant (from home), the handle of the jar broke (and) the flour leaked out [on] the path. (But) she did not know (it); she had not noticed a problem. When she reached her house, she put the jar down on the floor (and) found it empty.”

Jesus says: “The kingdom of the Father is like a person who wanted to kill a powerful person. He drew the sword in his house (and) stabbed it into the wall to test whether his hand would be strong (enough). Then he killed the powerful one.”

Have you ever heard these two parables of Jesus? No? Good! The trouble with parables is that we have become too familiar with them. We know (or think we know) all the details of the parable of the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son. They have become old hat.

If that’s true for you, then I have a few suggestions. Find some of Jesus’ parables (like the ones above from the Gospel of Thomas) that you’ve never heard before. Say them out load, read them in different translations, discuss them with other people and think about what on earth they are trying to say.

Or try to memorize one of Jesus’ more familiar parables so that you can retell it in your own words without reciting a text. Just the act of memorizing and retelling teaches us things about oral delivery. Do you stress particular words or different aspects of the parable? Why are these important to you? You’ll find that every time you tell the parable or listen to someone else telling a parable, it’s a different event. You hear it differently.

Why do we care about engaging Jesus’ parables? Because everyone agrees that Jesus’ parables lie at the heart of his proclamation of God’s kingdom. So if we want to understand Jesus’ message about God, we have to engage with parables he spoke.

Jesus says “Listen! Behold! A sower went out to sow…” as a story of different seeds some of which sprouted and thrived in different kinds of soil. So God’s realm is like a sower sowing seed in soil and it is also like a person who planted good seed in a field, amongst which an enemy came and sowed weeds. And that the kingdom is like a tiny grain of mustard seed growing in the ground, or a net cast into the sea that gathered fish of every kind, or like a seed someone plants in fertile soil that grows automatically by itself in a mysterious way. Jesus also speaks of a younger brother who wanted his father’s inheritance before the father dies and who went off into a far country having squandered the inheritance. And of a merchant in search of a pearl of great worth or someone who found treasure hidden in a field.

God’s kingdom is there in the midst of life: in the smallest seed and the often-overlooked tiny details, in human relationships and human tragedies, in the way people hear and act, or partially hear or simply don’t hear or see God’s actions and presence in the world.

So take an old familiar parable or a new and dangerous one and memorize it. Let it soak into the fiber of your being so that it becomes part of you and your announcement of God’s presence in the world. Then listen to the parables of others as they speak the truths of different parables. Then stand back and see what happens….

-  By Professor Deirdre Good, Professor of New Testament at the General Theological Seminary