Bible Sunday, 2007
By Mark Oakley, Monday 29th October, 2007
Children often remember the Bible a little differently to adults. In a teacher´s magazine recently some teachers sent in what some of their children had written in their exams about the 10 commandments:
The Egyptians all drowned in the dessert. Afterwards Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the 10 amendments.
- The first commandment was when Eve told Adam to eat the apple.
- The seventh commandment is, ‘Thou shalt not admit adultery’.
- Jesus enunciated the Golden Rule which was, ‘Do one to others before they do one to you’.
So, what is this thing we call the Bible? Well, first of all we generally think of it as one book, rather solid, a self-contained whole, all of a piece and sent from God rather like some divine email. But the word Bible comes from the Greek biblia. The Greeks called the plant that made papyrus, writing paper, biblos and eventually writing products derived from the plant became known as biblos, especially the scrolls that were used to write on – the biblia, plural for books. And that is the first thing to remember. The Bible is actually a library, a collection of 66 books (39 in what we call the Old Testament or Jewish Scriptures, the older texts, and 27 making up the New Testament, the later texts from the early Christian communities.
Now the questions we face when we have a collection of texts such as these that are placed together and called Holy are fairly obvious and my guess is that you have all asked them yourselves from time to time. When you hear a section of Amos, or Leviticus or the letter to the Ephesians, we want to know such things as: who wrote that? when? why? What was going on at the time? What´s the background? And what´s its future? What am I meant to make of it? How accurate are the translations of the Hebrew and Greek? How am I to hear the Bible?
That last question of course sounds strange but again is fairly obvious: human beings hear and read things differently. If I suddenly said â€?good morning, here is the newsâ€? you would listen differently and understand differently to if I began â€?once upon a time…â€?. If you picked up a poetry book you would engage differently with it than if you read a cook book or one of those impossible â€?how to put it togetherâ€? manuals from Ikea. In a similar way the Bible´s collection of texts contains an enormous variety of writings in it: poems and hymns (psalms), proverbs and wise sayings, ancient history and mythology, visions, letters and most importantly for Christians, four Gospels, accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings written between 40 and 100 years after his birth. By the way, for a clue as to how the Church has believed you should listen to these four gospels you only need to think about what happened just now. There is an old tradition that when the Gospel is read to a congregation of Christians it should be taken off a book stand and brought down into the centre or heart of the church, the people living and breathing, listening and responding around it, a body kept alive by its heart. The Gospel, as it were, where it should be: not on a stand but right in the people´s lives. The Gospel is not at home unless it is being lived as well as listened to.
But to go back to those questions we all have: I obviously haven´t got time this morning to look at all the books of the Bible and answer all the questions we have about them now. You can start your homework and I have been wondering whether to do a a few talks in Lent on the Bible if this was thought to be helpful. For now, I just want to lay down a couple of guidelines about reading the Bible.
The first is that it is not good enough to think you have resolved an issue as a Christian just by quoting the Bible. If you remember, the devil quotes scripture quite happily in the desert to Jesus. The thing is he took it out of context. If we use Bible quotes as easy answers or even as bullets to put down our opponents then we are abusing the text (the Bible has been used to support every evil there is). This is not what the Word of God means. If you take the Bible seriously then you take the questions, the reasearch and the exploration of its depths seriously. It is important also that we understand the conversational nature of God´s revelation. Think how God deals with each of us, his creatures, his people. He does not treat us as if we were blank sheets of paper on whom he can print whatever he wills. He engages us in conversation – the conversation of thoughts, the conversation of life, in the church community and beyond. The Bible is a primary part of that conversation and conversion of life. We ask questions of it and it asks questions of us back. The Bible is a friend – not to be put on a pedestal out of reach but to be engaged with for its wisdom and for debate as to who we are and what we need. There will be times when we disagree with what we encounter but we mustn’t lose sight of the symphony of scripture, all the various parts busily working to try and show how God has loved and does love his people and how they need God to be complete and fully human. For although it does not give us – it does not pretend to give us – the latest scientific knowledge and technical data, it does offer us timeless and changeless insights into what it means to be a human being, and of God’s way with men and women. For people still make love and go to war for the same motives and with the same passions as they did in the days of Noah. We still suffer anguish and know heartache just like the psalmist. We still know pain and fear and happiness and hope, just as the people did when they clustered around Jesus. And God, the Most High God, still loves us and cherishes us, yearns for us and weeps for us, sits with us in our sorrows and enters into our joys, as he did throughout all the biblical centuries.
For Anglicans we have always said that we think about God by the Bible (primarily), tradition, reason and experience all interweaving in a creative tension, a passionate balance, leading us forward towards truth. God speaks in a manner that insists we continue to grow in order to hear. The 66 Books of the Bible form a ‘canon’, from the Greek word for a measuring rod, of which we can be confident and against which we can test or measure our own experience of God. We are to read the love between the lines.
The second thing to remember is that for Christians ultimately the Word of God is Jesus Christ: the Word who became flesh. It is Jesus Christ against whom everything we do and say and believe is tried and tested. Indeed, even the Bible must be read, as Christians, in his light. And, by the way, we need to read the Bible more. If you don´t, then please do think about doing a little each day or each week. Come and talk to me what help there is if you´d like..
There was a moment in the Coronation Service, immediately after the Queen had been crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, when the Moderator of the Church of Scotland presented a copy of the Bible to Her Majesty with these words: Receive this Book, the most valuable thing this world affords. This is the Royal Law. These are the lively oracles of God.
If you read the Bible carefully and prayerfully you will discover the most profound and permanent insights into the foundations of human living; you will discover how God deals with you and me; and in the words and the works of Christ you will discover the true and authentic picture of what God is like and what he has done for us.
When a child grows up we think our parents know everything and are infallible. When we get older we are no longer bothered by the discovery that our parents aren’t infallible. We are no longer worried that they do not know the answer to everything and that sometimes we disagree with them. We learn that what is important about our parents is not that they should be some kind of walking encyclopaedia, but people of love and wisdom, of laughter and tears, of comfort and encouragement. And that’s what I find in the Bible, too: not dull, encyclopaedic facts about God, but the red-blooded story of his involvement in this one world, his laughter and his tears and his deep, deep love, and the story of men and women touched by the finger of God, whose touch has still its ancient power. And for that, thanks be to God.
