At the moment we have three Bible study groups available twice a month in the parish – as well as the Wendy group which looks at a variety of subjects. The Last Sunday after Trinity is also known as Bible Sunday – the day on which we ponder the nature of Scripture. How does Scripture reveal God to us and how are we to read it? How are we to read, mark learn and inwardly digest scripture, as the collect says?
It is often claimed that scripture is the word of God but if that is the case we have to learn how to read and interpret this word as we do with any new language. Though we may read it in our own language we cannot assume that we shall know how to understand it – like any new language we shall make mistakes, we shall embarrass ourselves, and it will take a long time before we feel at home in Scripture. We might appropriately ask whether scripture gives us any guidance to its own interpretation. However, the guidance it gives is challenging not to say subversive.
To start with, the Old Testament does not make any particularly portentous claims for itself as official revelation. The God it speaks of is referred to in an enormous variety of ways through stories, poetry, prophecies, historical narrative, laws, building instructions, lists of names, proverbs and even erotica. In one place it is giving us detailed ways of preparing sacrifices while elsewhere it tells us God doesn’t care for such things at all – what he wants is justice and mercy. In one place God can seem to be interfering in the course of history so much so that he even makes the sun go backwards so his people can win a battle and in another place he seems radically to dissociate himself from them – ‘my thoughts are not your thoughts and my ways are higher than your ways’. God seems to chat with some figures like a neighbour over the garden fence but then he says that none may see his face and live, and when Moses asks God his name, the reply is effectively mind your own business. Even the prophets can get it wrong, and tales abound of attempts to find a way of distinguishing true prophets from false. The Old Testament is so diverse and all embracing of human experience that it is saying perhaps that everything is revelation or nothing is. God can act in and through everything and to try to restrict him to a particular setting is to be in danger of the deadliest Old Testament sin, idolatry. God is always one step ahead and not where he is expected to be and the Old Testament is in one sense a training manual in not understanding God. But it is also a witness to the inexhaustibility of God’s involvement in his creation and his love for that creation. Listen to what a contemporary rabbi (Jonathan Magonet) has to say; ” the recurrent image of God as the betrayed lover jostles with that of the loving parent bound to forgive its errant child. We feel a constant tug of emotions of love given, expected, unrequited, denied or betrayed, love at once tender or devoted, ferocious and devouring. It is not the revelation of God that is to be looked for – it is there throughout in all its nakedness and hopelessness. But where is the revelation of human beings in response, where is that love returned?”
The answer to that question given by the New Testament is that Jesus is the revelation of the human response, the full return of human love to God. And yet the New Testament also shows us that Jesus was constantly being misunderstood and rejected by those who surrounded him, even those he was closest to. The New Testament is also a revelation of true and false discipleship in the same way that the prophets could be true or false. And yet Jesus remains as a focal point, a call, a challenge, a comforter, and yet always out there ahead of us on the road to God, pointing to a relationship with God that can be possible for all his disciples, a relationship which leads to the kingdom through the mystery of the cross.
We must never forget this crucial fact of the distance between human perception and divine reality. If we do forget it then we shall be in danger of that kind of unthinking dependence on Scripture which is the equivalent of idolatry. “My thoughts are not your thoughts and my ways are higher than your ways.” All Bible readers are going to be selectively fundamentalist in some way or other – choosing which texts they will hold onto and which ignore. What we are called to, beyond all our fundamentalisms, is a continuous but almost always painful dialogue with scripture, which as in the psalms will evoke in us both protest and acceptance.
The 39 Articles of the Church of England claim that ‘Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation.’ We read scripture for a purpose – our reading is to make us better human beings in the sight of God. However, clever our thoughts about scripture, however much we may read or hear scripture, our interpreting and our hearing and reading will be pointless unless we are somehow changed by it. Our reading should be a process of self discovery, and the effectiveness of our reading will always be shown by the quality of our humanity. So come along to one of our Bible study groups and be changed!
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker