I don’t know if that kind of dilemma has happened to you this past year while we were reading through Leviticus,but it happens to me quite often. I grew up reading the Bible from a fundamentalist perspective where “it says what it means and means what it says.” As I grew into adulthood and started thinking for myself, that approach stopped working for me, but I didn’t have any other alternatives; I didn’t know any other way to read.
That quest is part of what drove me to seminary: a journey to ask and seek and knock that continues to this day. It was the questions that saved me. Giving myself permission to doubt what I had been taught, to re-think what I had believed, to disagree with my beloved fundamentalist preacher father, to argue with Paul the apostle—it took years for me to hear my own call into ministry because my Bible had always told me women didn’t do things like this.
Once I was able to see other truths in Scripture that had been hidden from me—truths about how God calls and sends all kinds of unlikely people—I wondered what else was hidden in this holy book that I had not understood.
Turns out quite a lot.
I like using the metaphor of scuba diving. If I think of the mystery of Scripture as a vast ocean, I can be amazed and humbled just standing on the seashore while the sea stretches out forever into a distant horizon.
But if I am bold enough to strap on snorkel gear and plunge in beneath those waves, a whole new world appears. Staying on the surface, we can have no clue what life is teeming underneath.
And then—if I’m brave enough to heft a scuba tank onto my back and drop into the depths—I discover unimaginable mystery and beauty. Of course I also may find carcasses of sunken ships and creatures that could eat me alive, but everything is part of the whole. And in my way of making sense,Spirit is ever working in everything to teach and lead and guide and nudge and shock and enlighten and to take us deeper.
That is Scripture for me.
I’m reading a great little book right now by New Testament scholar Richard Hays. It’s his reflection on how the four gospels connect and intersect the Old Testament texts.
The early Christian theologians who wrote our New Testament were immersed in their own Scriptures. The study of the Torah, the prophets and the Psalms was joy and life for them. So when they took on the intimidating task of writing their gospels and confessing Jesus as the Christ—the Messiah,Son of God and Son of Man, Lord and Savior—they naturally made sense of the Christ event from the rich ocean of their Hebrew Scriptures.
For them, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus“fulfilled Scripture” in some inexplicable way. It was their questions that saved them. Within the Scriptures that they knew and loved so well, these faithful Christians began to re-think and re-consider and re-read, asking “what does this mean?” And in their asking, seeking, knocking, diving deeper and deeper they began to discover unimaginable mystery and beauty.
The Christ was everywhere. And they never even knew it.
Richard Hays shares this wonderful quote from Martin Luther:
There are some who have little regard for the Old Testament…But Christ says in John 5, “Search the Scriptures, for it is they that bear witness to me” … The Scriptures of the Old Testament are not to be despised but diligently read … Therefore dismiss your own opinions and feelings and think of the Scriptures as the loftiest and noblest of holy things, as the richest of mines which can never be sufficiently explored … Here you will find the swaddling cloths and the manger in which Christ lies…Simple and lovely are these swaddling cloths, but dear is the treasure, Christ, who lies in them.
The Old Testament is the manger in which the Christ lies. I love that.
Hays book is titled: Reading Backwards and he explores how the New Testament writers made sense of their present tense by reading backwards into the Old Testament. And Hays teaches us to do the same: to learn how to read the New Testament by reading the Old and to learn how to read the Old Testament by reading the New. I love that.
Even so I’m still not a big fan of Leviticus; it has been so badly misquoted and misused to condemn and to harm. It has been taken out of its historical context and misapplied by Christians who—like me in those early years—don’t know any other way to read. (I really wish some of these people would learn to read!) But still, Leviticus is in our Bibles. It’s still aboard in the manger. I still take it as part of the whole.
For me, “the Word of the Lord” is not a book anyway; in our Christian confession, the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us is the ever-living Christ.
· It is our Holy Scriptures that give witness to this mystery.
· It is through the words of Scriptures that God’s Word is still speaking.
And God’s Word is always present tense.
Thanks be to God.
Offered at Lydia Bible Club Spring Luncheon 2015
Richard B. Hays, Reading Backwards (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014).
