Eat This Book

The angel does not instruct St. John to pass on information about God; he commands him to assimilate the word of God so that when he does speak, it will express itself artlessly in his syntax just as the food we eat, when we are healthy, is unconsciously assimilated into our nerves and muscles and put to work in speech and action.

It is entirely possible to come to the Bible in total sincerity, responding to the intellectual challenge it gives, or for the moral guidance it offers, or for the spiritual uplift it provides, and not in any way have to deal with a personally revealing God who has personal designs on you.

we commonly consult outside experts to interpret the information for us. But we don’t live our lives by information; we live them in relationships in the context of a personal God who cannot be reduced to formula or definition, who has designs on us for justice and salvation.

when it comes to Scripture we don’t do nearly as well. Maybe it is because Scripture comes to us so authoritatively — God’s word! — that we think all we can do is submit and obey. Submission and obedience are a large part of it, but first we have to listen. And listening requires listening to the way it is said (form) as well as to what is said (content).

When we submit our lives to what we read in Scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.

the way the Bible is written is every bit as important as what is written in it: narrative — this huge, capacious story that pulls us into its plot and shows us our place in its development from beginning to ending. It takes the whole Bible to read any part of the Bible. Every sentence is embedded in story and can no more be understood accurately or fully apart from the story than any one of our sentences spoken throughout the course of the day can be understood apart from our relationships and culture and the various ways in which we speak to our children and parents, our friends and enemies, our employers and employees — and our God.

But we do need to learn to pay attention in and around us as we follow Jesus. Exegesis is not in the first place a specialist activity of scholars, although we very much need these scholars working on our behalf. We are not, after all, deciphering hieroglyphics, as some would have us think. Exegesis is simply noticing and responding adequately (which is not simple!) to the demand that words make on us, that language makes on us.

Because we speak our language so casually, it is easy to fall into the habit of treating it casually. But language is persistently difficult to understand. We spend our early lives learning the language, and just when we think we have it mastered our spouse says, “You don’t understand a thing I’m saying, do you?” We teach our children to talk, and just about the time we think they might be getting it, they quit talking to us; and when we overhear them talking to their friends, we find we can’t understand more than one out of every eight or nine words they say. A close relationship doesn’t guarantee understanding. A long affection doesn’t guarantee understanding. In fact, the closer we are to another and the more intimate our relations, the more care we must exercise to hear accurately, to understand thoroughly, to answer appropriately.

it was to make us followers of Jesus that this text was given to us in the first place, and if either the large story or the detailed sentences are ever used for anything else, however admirable or enticing, why bother?

One of the most urgent tasks facing the Christian community today is to counter this self-sovereignty by reasserting what it means to live these Holy Scriptures from the inside out, instead of using them for our sincere and devout but still self-sovereign purposes.

We have three sorts of John books in our New Testaments that take particular delight in presenting Jesus as the one who reveals the God-speaking, word-of-God core and origin of everything that is: the Gospel of John, the letters of John, and the Apocalypse of John. It is by no means certain (although early tradition held it so) that the apostle John authored all these books; what is plain enough, though, is that all of them work out of a common center and emphasis — they are all Johannine. Jesus, the Word made flesh, speaks sentences that transform chaos into cosmos (the Gospel), sin into salvation (the letters), and brokenness into holiness (the Apocalypse).

But the Bible also has all the questions, many of them that we would just as soon were never asked of us, and some of which we will spend the rest of our lives doing our best to dodge. The Bible is a most comforting book; it is also a most discomfiting book. Eat this book; it will be sweet as honey in your mouth; but it will also be bitter to your stomach.

Liturgy is the means that the church uses to keep baptized Christians in living touch with the entire living holy community as it participates formationally in Holy Scripture.

It is useful to reflect that the word “liturgy” did not originate in church or worship settings. In the Greek world it referred to public service, what a citizen did for the community. As the church used the word in relation to worship, it kept this “public service” quality — working for the community on behalf of or following orders from God.

Lectio divina is the deliberate and intentional practice of making the transition from a kind of reading that treats and handles, however reverently, Jesus dead to a way of reading that frequents the company of friends who are listening to, accompanying, and following Jesus alive.

Not that there is anything wrong with the words as such, it is just that without the biblical world — the intertwined stories, the echoing poetry and prayers, Isaiah’s artful thunder and John’s extravagant visions — the words, like those seed words in Jesus’ parable that land on pavement or in gravel or among weeds, haven’t take root in our lives.

Lectio divina comprises four elements: lectio (we read the text), meditatio (we meditate the text), oratio (we pray the text), and contemplatio (we live the text). But naming the four elements must be accompanied by a practiced awareness that their relationship is not sequential.

I sometimes marvel that God chose to risk his revelation in the ambiguities of language. If he had wanted to make sure that the truth was absolutely clear, without any possibility of misunderstanding, he should have revealed his truth by means of mathematics. Mathematics is the most precise, unambiguous language that we have. But then, of course, you can’t say “I love you” in algebra.

If we don’t understand how metaphor works we will misunderstand most of what we read in the Bible. No matter how carefully we parse our Hebrew and Greek sentences, no matter how precisely we use our dictionaries and trace our etymologies, no matter how exactly we define the words on the page, if we do not appreciate the way a metaphor works we will never comprehend the meaning of the text.

The difficulty is compounded for most Bible readers because there is the assumption that what we are reading is the “word of God,” which means that it absolutely must be taken seriously. But “seriously” in our present-day reading culture very often means literally. Science provides the standard by which we judge truth. Truth is what can be verified under laboratory conditions. Truth is what is empirically true — with things it is what we can test and probe, measure and weigh; with language it is what can survive strenuous logical analysis. It is what we often refer to as “literal.”

Meditation doesn’t make things up. We are wedded to a historic faith and are rightly wary of the intrusion of human invention. But meditation is not intrusion, it is rumination — letting the images and stories of the entire revelation penetrate our understanding. By meditation we make ourselves at home and conversant with everyone in the story, entering the place where Moses and Elijah and Jesus converse together. Participation is necessary. Meditation is participation.

Prayer is language used in relation to God. It is the most universal of all languages, the lingua franca of the human heart. Prayer ranges from “sighs too deep for words” (Rom. 8:26) to petitions and thanksgivings composed in lyric poetry and stately prose to “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” (Col. 3:16) to the silence of a person present to God in attentive adoration (Ps. 62:1).

It is not easy. It was not easy for Jesus those nights on the mountain, that night in Gethsemane, those hours on the cross. Nobody ever said it would be easy. God didn’t say it would be easy. But it’s the way things are — this is the way the world is, the way we are, the way God is. Do you want to live in the real world? This is it. God doesn’t reveal it to us by his word only so that we can know about it, he continues the revelation in us as we pray and participate in it.

Contemplation means living what we read, not wasting any of it or hoarding any of it, but using it up in living. It is life formed by God’s revealing word, God’s word read and heard, meditated and prayed. The contemplative life is not a special kind of life; it is the Christian life, nothing more but also nothing less. But lived

In the time between Cyrus and Alexander, the Jewish community had gradually been dispersed all over the Persian/Greek world. The dispersion that had begun under the Babylonians was reversed by the Persians, whose policy was to repatriate exiled peoples to their homelands so they could rebuild their places of worship.

We seldom if ever think of it, but it doesn’t take much imagination to realize that the first people who read the Bible didn’t know they were reading the Bible. They were simply listening to stories of their ancestors Abraham and Samuel, or reading notes from old sermons written on scraps of paper, or discussing a letter from a man whom they had never heard of but some friends had told them was well worth listening to. These words carried no external authority with them.