The Bible Tells Me So

The only time a Canaanite makes it into the New Testament, and she becomes a model of faithful persistence: her faith in Jesus led to her daughter’s healing.

So here is the question people have been asking for a very long time: Why didn’t God just enact that policy earlier? Why wait? Have the Canaanites over for dinner. Invite them to church. Send over a fruit basket. Something. Anything. Maybe the Canaanites would have preferred that option—or at least it couldn’t have hurt to ask.

the ancient Israelites were an ancient tribal people. They saw the world and their God in tribal ways. They told stories of their tribal past, led into battle by a tribal warrior God who valued the same things they did—like killing enemies and taking their land. This is how they connected with God—in their time, in their way.

I have to say, I’m a lot less bothered by a Bible that tells ancient stories than I am by the thought of God exterminating a population and giving their land to others.

The Bible—from back to front—is the story of God told from the limited point of view of real people living at a certain place and time.

In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus’s default teaching method is to use parables. In John, Jesus never teaches in parables.

So is Matthew a liar? Is that what we’re supposed to think? Only if you grade Matthew along with the other Gospel writers by a standard they clearly weren’t operating under. Matthew’s portrait of Jesus serves his purpose: he drops into his Gospel images of Jesus that remind you of Moses and the exodus story. So a guiding star is like the pillar of fire that guided the Israelites to safety across the Red Sea. Herod’s edict to kill the children and Jesus’s escape is like Pharaoh’s edict to throw the male infants into the Nile with baby Moses escaping. Jesus’s trek down into Egypt as an infant and then back home again echoes Moses’s and later Israel’s journeys to and from Egypt.

Jesus didn’t read his Bible the way we today might expect him to. He wasn’t bound by the words on the page of his Bible and what they meant.

We see here Jesus handling Psalm 110 in a very ancient, creative way. We might think he is “misreading” the first line of Psalm 110—and from the point of view of the writer of the psalm he is, since Psalm 110 doesn’t say what Jesus says it says. But in Jesus’s day, such creative handling of the psalm to draw out a deeper meaning is perfectly fine.

To see Jesus, you won’t get there by sticking to the script. You will only see Jesus there in hindsight and under the surface, where your reading of the Old Testament is driven by faith in Christ, where Jesus has become the starting point for re-understanding Israel’s story, not the logical conclusion of Israel’s story. Here in Luke’s Gospel Jesus is not telling his disciples to stick literally to the script. He is telling them to reread the script in light of his death and resurrection.

Matthew used Hosea’s words in a way that Hosea absolutely did not mean, and in a way Hosea would never, in a million years, have understood. Today we would call this reading “into” the text what we want to see there. And this is exactly what Matthew is doing. His faith in Jesus drove him to adapt Israel’s story to speak about Jesus, even if Jesus is off topic from the point of view of Hosea’s own words.

Reading the Old Testament on its own terms would never lead anyone to conclude that Torah was anything other than front and center in God’s plans. But Paul isn’t reading the Old Testament on its own terms. Paul rereads his Bible through the lens of Jesus, God’s final word. That final word is Paul’s nonnegotiable starting and ending point for understanding Israel’s story. The reality of Jesus as crucified and risen messiah obligates Paul to rethink—even overturn in places—his Bible.

The Bible is not, never has been, and never will be the center of the Christian faith. Even though the Bible (at least in some form) has been ever present since the beginning of Christianity, it’s not the central focus of the Christian faith. That position belongs to God, specifically, what God has done in and through Jesus. The Bible is the church’s nonnegotiable partner, but it is not God’s final word: Jesus is.

You get the feeling from the Bible that being unsettled is almost a normal part of the process. Not that we should go looking for it—it will find us soon enough—but struggling in some way seems like something we should expect on our own spiritual journeys. True struggling in faith is a stretching experience, and without it, you don’t mature in your faith.