Christ and Scripture

 Purifying, by Kokecit.

Propers: The Third Sunday of Easter, AD 2021 B

Homily:

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

Hallelujah! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Hallelujah!

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

“Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.”

The Church is not a product of the Bible. The Bible is a product of the Church. Early Christians had no one book encompassing what we would call the Holy Scriptures. Rather, they had an entire library of scrolls and codices in Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek, some quite old, ancient even, others more recent. And the authority and acceptance of these scriptures varied widely.

The Bible we have today consists of five broad sections: the Torah, the Prophets, the Writings, the Apocrypha, and the New Testament. They were written by more than 50 authors over the course of some 1000 years. The Torah, the earliest books, speak of the earliest things, from Adam to Moses to Abraham. But they were not edited and compiled in the way that we know them until around 400 BC, not all that long before Jesus.

The next section, the Prophets, was largely set in stone around 200 BC, which again is centuries after the prophets set pen to parchment. And the third section, the Writings, these weren’t canonized until a hundred years after Jesus’ birth. In the time of Christ, the Writings were in flux. They were mixed in with the Apocrypha, what we would call Greek books of the Old Testament, and the Pseudepigrapha, outlandish flights of fancy which have largely, but not entirely, been forgotten.

The New Testament, the Christian Scriptures, obviously came later. The Gospels were originally written down in response to the murder of the first generation of Christian leadership: James and Peter and Paul. And the collection of letters and gospels and apocalyptic literature that we call the New Testament took form pretty early on, within a century or so of Jesus’ Resurrection. But even that wasn’t ironclad until 50 new Bibles were needed for 50 new churches in Constantinople, the New Rome. It was a process.

All of which is to say: early Christians didn’t read the Bible the way that we do. They didn’t even have it in the way that we do, in a nice neat order, a sprawling sort of saga telling the epic story of the love that God holds for His people. Arranged like this it becomes quite clear that our understanding of God changes over time. It deepens; it grows; it matures. There are things that God is said to have done in the Old Testament that we simply cannot imagine Jesus doing in the New.

Christopher Hitchens wrote that “the gods that we’ve made are exactly the gods you’d expect to be made by a species that’s about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.” He was being flip, of course, but there’s some truth to this. The presentation of God in late Bronze Age stories is comprehensible to late Bronze Age peoples. There would be nothing scandalous, to them, about a God of war, a God of violence. Indeed, they had trouble imagining any sort of nonviolence.

But the revelation of Jesus was new. Early Christian faith was not based on the Bible. They didn’t have a Bible yet. Early Christian faith was founded on the conviction of an apocalypse—and by “apocalypse” I mean a revelation, an unveiling. Christians believe that Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God: that He is Emmanuel, God-With-Us; God the Crucified peasant; God the Mediterranean Jew. Christ on the Cross reveals to us the deepest and the highest levels of all of reality.

So that if we want to know who God is, we look to Jesus. If we want to know what humanity is, we look to Jesus. If we want to know what reality is, we look to Jesus. And that’s how Christians read the Scriptures. When we read the First Testament, the Old Testament, we are not concerned with literalism or historicity. I’m not saying that the history of Israel was made up. There was a King David; there was a Temple; there is, I’m convinced, some historical truth to the Exodus, to the Flood, to Eden.

But that’s not what matters to Christians. Take a look at the Apostles’ Creed, one of the oldest and certainly the most universally accepted of all Christian statements of belief. We confess it every week. And what does it say about the Old Testament? “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.” That’s it. Nothing about Adam and Eve. Nothing about Noah. Nothing about Ruth or the Judges or Queen Esther or Enoch or Elijah. That’s not what’s most important to us. And really, it’s misleading of me even to say that “Creator of heaven and earth” refers to the Old Testament, for we believe that God is Creator now, not simply back then.

Yes, the Hebrew Scriptures are important. Jesus is a Hebrew, after all. But note how they are read. Note that the early Christians did not understand the Scriptures until Jesus “opened their minds.” Note that Paul consistently interprets the history of Israel allegorically, “written for us,” as he says, that we might believe in Christ. Or simply look to Revelation, that most vexing book of the Bible, that draws heavily from the Hebrew Bible, from the Law and the Prophets and the Writings, in order to reveal what Christ is doing now, in John’s own day. Apocalyptic literature is always about discerning what God is doing now, today, in Jesus.

When Martin Luther taught the Ten Commandments, he taught them only in the light of Jesus Christ. And there were parts of the Ten Commandments that Luther clearly said do not apply to us. We’re not ancient Israel. We have a new commandment. If you want to erect a public monument to Christianity, don’t put up the tablets of the Law. Put up the Beatitudes.

Early on in the history of the Church, there was a fellow named Marcion. And he was scandalized by the Hebrew Scriptures. He couldn’t believe that the God of the Old Testament could in any way, shape, or form be the God we know in Jesus Christ. So he rejected the First Testament completely—rejected the entire history of Israel, four fifths of the modern Bible—rejected the inheritance of Jesus’ own people because he could not reconcile it with Jesus Himself. And the Church said this was wrong. We would not reject Israel. We would not reject the inheritance of Abraham.

But it would also be wrong, the Church maintained, for us to read that First Testament without the light of Christ; to treat the Gospels as though they were just one part of the Bible, rather than the key to interpreting the whole corpus of Scripture. Origen of Alexandria, perhaps the greatest of all Christian teachers, said that there were Hebrew Scriptures that we cannot take literalistically. We just can’t. It would make God into a monster. We have to find Jesus in the text, to open our minds.

Take for example the Amalekites. The Amalekites were an ancient enemy of Israel, who attacked the Hebrews when they were most vulnerable, escaping slavery in Egypt. And because of this they are condemned in the Torah, in the book of Exodus. “God will have war with Amalek from generation to generation,” it says. In a later section of the Bible, God commands an Israelite king to utterly destroy the Amalekites, man, woman, and child, until even the memory of them is blotted out.

Now, much could be said here about Semitic hyperbole. Like other Semitic literature, the Hebrew Bible often says that people are “utterly wiped out,” none left alive, only to have them pop up hale and hearty not two chapters later. How do you blot out the memory of a people, after all, if you’re the one writing it down? Exaggeration is expected. Even so—who could accept God ordering genocide?

Some would point to the old dictum, Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi: “What is permissible for God is not permissible for cows.” God gives life, and can give it again, ergo God has the right to command murder. But how is this good or true or beautiful? And if it is none of those things, how can it be of God, who is Himself Goodness and Truth and Beauty? Origen, the early Christians, and for that matter most Jews, all interpret the Amalekites analogously: that they represent everything in us that would defy the goodness of God, and that God will wipe that out of us entirely.

This understanding of Scripture is perhaps best summed up by Bishop Robert Barron, when he preached, and I quote: “If we read any biblical passage in such a way that it encourages violence or indicts God of hatred, we have misread it.” Let me repeat that: “If we read any biblical passage in such a way that it encourages violence or indicts God of hatred, we have misread it.” The Word of the Lord.

Christ does not derive His authority from a book. Christ is the ultimate reality behind and through the history of all Creation, and especially the history of Israel. We read this book to meet the living Christ; because if we find Him here, we can find Him everywhere. And if that’s now how we read it, we’re reading it wrong.

Hallelujah! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Hallelujah!

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