The passages about the Exodus from Egypt raise some puzzling questions. Why did God harden Pharaoh’s, heart?  Why should we celebrate the slaughter of the Egyptian army? Viewed from our post-Jesus perspective these are the acts of a barbarous tribal God. So this is perhaps the point.

These are the actions of God filtered through early and early  Hebrew tribal and a later nationalist vision. When reading from this perspective the needless suffering God seems to inflict on the Egyptians is the device for the main point of the text. This is a text to remind the Israelites that God has heard us, God has freed us. Ours is a God who has taken the events of our captivity and freedom as occasions to show us his glory. We are now in no doubt that it is this God we must now love and worship.

It’s important to note our need to judge the text when it horrifies us. Yet, we need to move beyond this reaction and look behind the presentation to ask the question: what might this text mean to those for whom it was initially recorded? The subtext running at the heart of the Hebrew epic is that God has heard us, God has free us, God continues to preserve with us despite our trying of his patience in every conceivable way.

This subtext carries over into the Gospels. Throughout his ministry, and more so in the days leading to his death, Jesus is guided to act or not act by his mission that God will be fully revealed through him.

Matthew is my least favorite gospel because I experience Jesus at his most didactic and somehow detached. This, of course, is in keeping with Matthew’s view of Jesus filtered through the prototype of the greatest teacher of all, Moses. Am I able to get behind my personal reaction to Matthew to experience the words of Jesus as invitations for metanoia,i.e. the turning inside out or upside down of my heart. Jesus teaches through parables. Parables are stories drawn from everyday life in which everyday events are presented in order to challenge our default worldview. The parable of the workers in the vineyard in Chapter 20 is a case in point. Jesus conclusion is counter-intuitive to the way we normally understand just deserts. God’s sense of fairness confronts our notion of who is deserving and undeserving. Those who are important must behave as if they are the least in importance. This is a principle, whether we observe it or not in our living, that is deeply ingrained in us and so we can’t easily appreciate the radical challenge of this idea in a hierarchical world where power always went unchallenged and powerlessness was always exploited and despised. There is the simple story of the two sons, one who says yes but does not follow through and the other who says no, but then acts out his yes. How easily I see myself in this challenging story. This story then becomes the lens through which Jesus identifies through hypocrisy- appearing one way but in reality being its opposite, and all kinds of transactional thinking- acting in self-interest, or splitting hairs so as to absolve oneself of responsibility which in Chapter 23’s seven woes, so named because each begins with ‘Woe to you -‘. Here Jesus identifies the scribes and Pharisees as prototypes for these temptations in all of us.

Psalm 16 is perhaps my favorite psalm because of the lines because during what I look back on as a difficult time of life I was able to affirm the lines: The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; I have a goodly heritage. In the psalms, we find the myriad echoes of our own thought and feelings.

 

Why read the Bible in 21st Century America?

Alasdair Macintyre in After Virtue notes:

I can only answer the question what am I to do?, if I can answer the prior question, of what story or stories do I find myself a part?

Paul D Hanson in A Political History of the Bible in America has commented:

To gain a solid footing for understanding the mixed legacy of American political history, it is necessary to turn to the more ancient epic from which the leaders of our nation, from colonial times to the present, and for better or for worse, derived justification for their actions. That epic is the Bible.

So a further question is Why read the Bible at St Martin’s? Walter Bruggemann in his reflection for Day 6 of The Bible Challenge says this:

In our society where we imagine we may be or must be on our own, prayer is the core acknowledgment that in fact our lives are referred beyond ourselves.

We are a society that must reclaim a civic conversation that is both communitarian and inclusive. Personal and public attitudes and actions result from identity shaping stories. Small stories dominated by bigotry and violence have a harm upon our civic conversation. Stories of healing and liberation shape ideas of virtue and civility. Sharing such stories strengthens the moral capital of a society. I return to Bruggeman’s concept of prayer referring us beyond ourselves. Reading it, we can experience the Bible as an anchor point for an experience that cumulatively builds up in us, the more we read. This experience refers us beyond the circularity of our own small conscious stories of God or other, expanding around us the richness and texture of a larger story against the backdrop of which we become aware of our lives being lived.

Daily Bible reading is not transactional. We cannot predict the effect as if we could produce a predetermined outcome. An analogy here might be the build up of minerals in the bloodstream as the result of daily intake.

Walter Bruggemann in The Prophetic Imagination contrasts the power of prophetic imagination against that of the imagination of empire:

It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.

Reading history through a later lens

Much of the material in Genesis is technically myth material.  Myth is an expansive story that transcends the dimensions of time and space. Myth is a once-upon-a-time story, e.g. Genesis 1 – 3 and is frequently misunderstood in two ways:

1. Taken literally –as concrete truth- and imposed upon contemporary context e.g. creationism
2. Taken as fairy story – i.e. not true –and having no application in a contemporary context

What we read in Genesis is the later written recording of ancient oral tradition stories. The stories in Genesis can’t be read literally because we receive them through a reading of history through a later lens. The oral tradition stories date from around 2000 B.C. What we read is the recording of these stories beginning around 1000 B.C. for the purpose of creating a national history for David’s unified Kingdom of Israel so that it might be a nation like other nations around it. We see the same process in our own recording of our national history. We tell our history in order to challenge but more commonly justify our current status quo of national attitudes and worldviews shaped by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

The unified Kingdom of David was the end result of centuries of conquest and assimilation. Reading through the Davidic lens we read the story of Cain and Abel as a story about the conflict between herding and agrarian societies. The Israelites were a shepherding people, while the Canaanites were a farming people. Ergo, the story tells us that God favors herding activity over that of growing things. Noah curses his son Ham for beholding him while in naked, drunken stupor. Who are the children of Ham? Why none other than the Canaanites. In both stories, we see the later justification for the Israelite’s conquest of their neighbors and confiscation of their land.

In The Bible Challenge book, each day questions are posed following the daily commentary on the texts read. After the first week of The Bible Challenge here are some points we might focus on:

• Gen 1-18 covers 4 creation stories: Gen 1 & 2, Gen 3-4 (The Fall and the fist murder) and Gen 6-8 (Noah). Gen 9-11 deals with the sorting out of the Canaanite nations as a preparation for the call of Abram in Chpt12 and the creation of the Israelite people. What’s the highlight or the nadir for you?
• Note how Matt begins in true OT style with a genealogy – why?
• Matt 5-8 has a particular name – what is it? How do you feel about Jesus’ teaching here?
• How has the first week of The Bible Challenge affected you?

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