Welcome to Thursday, friends.
We were away from home last weekend, with information slower to arrive, so I had the strange experience of saying to my teenage children, “It looks like there is a new war in the world today.” A sad understatement: a new war, and yet an old war.
Let’s be wary of any opportunists who may arise in this season, claiming to read the signs. Every time conflict rises in the Middle East, we see end-times enthusiasts pointing out what they claim to know. As I read in Mark’s gospel just this week, no one knows the day or the hour. (13:32)
The Part Where There’s an Essay: Sitting With the Bible
As I said above, I’ve been spending some time in the gospel of Mark recently. Mark is generally agreed to be our oldest of the four gospels; it is the shortest and contains the most action from Christ’s time on earth — I’ve heard it called “the ‘go’ gospel” because of the author’s use of the word “immediately,” or “at once,” so often. Jesus is always moving, traveling, making comments, and then moving on again.
As the book progresses, mysteries start to surface, and the reader can be as confused as the disciples were. I enjoyed trudging through the fig tree series in chapter eleven, bookending the clearing of the temple. Jesus’ actions here can seem perplexing:
He curses a tree for not bearing fruit, though it was not the season for fruit.
He overthrows the tables in the temple, clearing out not only the sellers but also the buyers.
When I hear people reduce Jesus’ teaching to pithy phrases or slogans, I often come back to passages like this one. Here Jesus refuses to be reduced to a saying. He is alive, breathing — at times furious and resolved, at other times proceeding methodically. The scribes and Pharisees are seething at him. The disciples are confused almost constantly.1
We cannot rule out this Jesus in favor of our own reductive summaries of him.
Our pastors have been spending time recently in the book of Isaiah — a colossal prophetic book, and not an easy one to preach, I think. Poetry and prophecy are a nice companion to the Jesus we see above in Mark. These sermons in Isaiah have forced us to sit down, be quiet, and watch.
So often we want to live in the epistles: understanding quickly who we are and what God says about us — emerging with three easy applications. We can put this type of sermon on our calendar. We can check it off and say “I did it!”
The God present in the poetry, prophecy, and gospels has many lessons for us, but the one that has rested with me recently is:
Behold.
Consider.
See.
Feel.
In his excellent book Enjoying the Bible, Matthew Mullins names a pattern that he sees in Christians today. He says that too frequently, we read with a “hermeneutic of information.” That’s a seminary way of saying we’re reading only to find out information or facts. However, the Bible demands more of us. As seen above, it generously gives us more than facts.
Mullins writes:
Most Christians come to the Bible with the expectation that it should teach us something practical about how to live our lives as Christians. Our theory of interpretation is to try to understand the main idea in whatever text we are reading and then figure out how to apply that main idea to our own lives, or to our family, or to our church, and so on. There is nothing wrong with the hermeneutic. The problem arises when this approach governs how we read everything.
Because much of the Scripture is, itself, written to captivate, delight, entice, comfort, confound, shock, and even sicken, if we do not love to read it for these attributes, then we do not truly understand it....The point is not to exchange head for heart, intellect for emotion. The point is to develop a theory and practice of reading that account for both, even blurring the lines between them.
Speaking of Cain and Abel, Mullins says “If you come to the story solely as a work of history or information and not as a work of literature, you will focus only on what lessons might be learned from the story, how the story fits into the timeline of Genesis, or what it can tell us about the doctrine of sin. All these things are important and worthy of our attention. But the story also wants us to feel the tragedy.” (p.39)
As I’ve treaded through the past few years of upheaval both public and private, I have been helped by the reality that things in the Bible are not reductive; Scripture allows for and welcomes the full scope of human experience and emotion. We do God’s word a disservice if we attempt to narrow it to a mere “how-to” manual.
For the Anglophiles
A rare entry from CNN in our Anglophiles section this week: read about “Granny Mave,” better known as Mavis Paterson, who processed the loss of her three children by cycling around Scotland. “ ‘A lot of them have all the cycling gear, the cleats in the bike and all the lycra,’ she said. ‘I don’t have any of that stuff at all. I’ve got ordinary pedals. I can’t do (cleats)… I’d be falling off the bike all the time… I’m just a happy cyclist.’”
Reads & Listens of the Week
recently featured a devastating, bleak, and beautiful letter to a grieving friend. Time is the only hope and refuge for all of us.Reconstructing Faith is back for season two. Episode one is entitled “Sledgehammers Don’t Build Anything.”
While decidedly clinical, this article was still helpful to me when I consider the anxiety that arises just because I don’t want to accept change: Stop Resisting Change. “after disorder, there is often no going back to the way things were — no one form of order, but many forms of reorder.”
It’s really well into autumn now, so I’ll remind you that if you have elementary school children or older, your family might enjoy watching Over the Garden Wall. I’m so grateful for friends who prodded us to watch it last year. It will be an annual rewatch for us. It’s old-timey, a little spooky, and offbeat funny. Highest recommendation. (We purchased it on Prime; it looks like it’s also on Hulu right now.)
The truth is that there is an alliance between religion and real fun, of which the modern thinkers have never got the key…. being undignified is the essence of all real happiness, whether before God or man. Hilarity involves humility; nay, it involves humiliation…. GK Chesterton, The Illustrated London News (1907)
If you are also confused by the Jesus of Mark’s gospel, I commend as a starting point Jason Meyer’s Mark for You.
I recently read Philip Yancey's memoir (Where the Light Fell) and then began Collin Hanson's biography of Tim Keller this week. What struck me in both was how these men were raised in church traditions that I would find familiar, but only encountered Jesus when they began spending time in the Bible for themselves—and it was the encounter with Jesus that changed their lives, not the church traditions, not the learning three easy ways to live your faith, etc. It was meeting the complex, well-rounded, not-black-and-white PERSON that we meet in the Gospels. I've been overwhelmed lately by the deep importance of knowing JESUS above any other theological argument, and knowing him throughout the whole story—from Genesis through Revelation.
An interesting thing happening in my week is that I’ve been all teary every time I read (or even read about) the Bible. Happened again as I read your thoughtful words here. Thanks for this.