Opening the Bible

Lenten Vespers, Week Four: Read

Reading: 2 Timothy 3:14-17

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Last year, when my wife and I were passing through Vancouver, we found not only a Gideon’s Bible in our hotel room, but also the teachings of the Buddha in the same drawer. And I said to her, “You know, you could do a lot worse than Jesus Christ and the Buddha.”

It still sometimes amazes me how easy it is to get a Bible. You can find them for free, or for so cheap they might as well be. Now, if you want a really good one, a top-notch Study Bible, it might set you back 30 bucks or so. But that’s still pretty reasonable for the Word of God.

A couple centuries back, if you lived in America and wanted a copy of the Holy Scriptures, you had to send away for an authorized edition from Britain. Such things were rare, expensive, and took months to arrive across the Atlantic. You had to pay special fees to the Crown, known as royalties—the King, after all, being head of the Church of England—and so Bibles were often large tomes owned in community, by churches, fraternal lodges, or families. When George Washington was sworn in as first President under the Constitution, they had to run to his Masonic Lodge down the street to bring forth a Bible.

Things changed in the nineteenth century. Independence unleashed the printing press, and Bible societies worked across denominational lines to miniaturize the Scriptures and distribute them for free. Many families owned exactly two books: the Bible and the Farmer’s Almanac. Soldiers marching off to the Civil War were given pocket copies to carry with them. More than one such book caught a bullet intended for the owner.

That was the most biblically literate generation in our history, the generation of Lincoln, far more familiar with the Scriptures than either their ancestors or their descendants. A few years back, NPR posted several of Lincoln’s greatest writings, but soon found that they had to go back and add copious footnotes, since modern readers couldn’t follow all of Lincoln’s biblical allusions and illustrations.

We’re fortunate, is what I’m saying. For centuries only churchmen and monastics could read the Scriptures for themselves. Now we have all the access in the world—if only we could be convinced to use it.

The monks of old had a pattern of reading and prayer every three hours, day or night. This was known as the Daily Office, or Liturgy of the Hours. Today clergy are still expected to adhere to this, but the original eight offices have been reduced now to three: Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and an Office of Readings. In this way the life of the Christian begins, turns, and ends each day with the Word of God. You can find these offices, and a three-year cycle of daily readings, in the backs of our hymnals, which are indeed intended for home use.

Of course, it can be intimidating to come to the Bible at first. There’s a lot there. Every Bible contains at least 66 books written by more than 50 authors over the course of a thousand years. This library contains mythology, history, law codes, life advice, prophecy, poetry, letters, laments, exultations and apocalypses. Where do we even begin?

Well, every journey does start with that first step, and the best way to get to know the Bible is to simply pick a reading plan, set aside a little time each day, and get to it. A commentary may help. A good Study Bible is worth its weight in silver. And of course, we should rely on the support of our community. We have Bible studies here together. And Sunday morning is the greatest of them all: four readings, every week, in every pulpit across the globe, with preaching to elucidate.

But how shall we read the Bible? How ought we to discern the meaning of the text? First up, we focus on Christ. Always, always on Christ. Luther’s Small Catechism can help with this; again, you’ll find that in our hymnals, or we have free copies if you’d like. We read the text, we meditate upon its meaning—chew it around some—and then we contemplate God through the text. As Luther wrote, we wrestle the Bible: it has feet and pursues us; hands that seize us.

And when we read the Scriptures we should keep in mind that there are always four different ways in which to interpret the text. This doesn’t necessarily mean that every text will lend itself to all four interpretations at once. But this is the tradition of the Church from the earliest centuries. The Quadriga, or fourfold interpretation of Scripture, is as follows:

First, there is the literal meaning of the text, the straightforward story. Literal doesn’t mean literalistic, mind you. We have to take the given literary form into account. That is, we read songs as song, myths as myth, as parables as parable. And this does include reading the historical sections of the Bible as history. But if those histories contain details that seem contradicted by archaeology, or even by other sections of the Bible, we can still read that text literally, which is to say, “by the letter,” by the story that it tells.

Next up is the moral sense of Scripture. We read the Bible and ponder how this informs the way we ought to live our lives today. Sometimes the moral sense is easy to discern: wisdom literature explicitly contrasts wise and foolish ways of life. But there may be other sections of the Bible, such as Joshua’s conquest of the Promised Land, which might seem to us contrary to morality itself. Just because the Bible describes certain things, it does not therefore follow that it prescribes those things. The moral interpretation includes understanding what models of behavior not to follow.

Then there’s the allegorical interpretation of the Scripture, and this is largely concerned with connections between the Old and New Testaments. Jesus constantly interprets the Law and the Prophets through Himself, His life and His mission. So do the letters of Paul, and the epistle to the Hebrews. Christians have always held that the New Testament is hidden in the Old, and the Old Testament is revealed in the New. That’s why we can read about the Exodus a millennium and a half before the birth of Christ and still insist that this story is about Jesus.

Finally (so to speak) there’s the anagogic or eschatological interpretation of Scripture, which deals with the ends of things—not simply “end” in the sense of stopping, but “end” in the sense of the goal, the purpose, the end-towards-which God is working. As Christians we must ever keep our eternal destiny in mind: the Second Coming of Christ, the Resurrection of the Dead, the Restoration of the Kingdom, and God again at last as All in All. We know the ending of the story. We know the horizon toward which we march along our pilgrim way. Thanks be to God.

So in sum, the fourfold interpretation of Scripture is concerned with the past, the present, the future, and the Christ who ties them all together.

Buy a Bible. Read your Bible. Wrestle with what you read. I guarantee there are parts of Scripture that will shock and disturb you, parts with which you must grapple, and say as Jacob did to the angel, “I will not let you go until you bless me.” And if you find a particular nut too hard to crack, remember the fourfold interpretation. Maybe the literal is not the best way to read it. What moral can I learn from this text? What end is all this working toward? And where is Christ in here for me?

Without Christ, my brothers and sisters, the book of the Scriptures is dead. But with Christ, it is nothing less than the living Word of God.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit.