UNDERSTANDING THE BIBLE

Matthew 5:38-48; Matthew 19:1-9

June 14, 2009 - Rev. Janet Robertson Duggins

Some people say they just can’t understand the Bible. Other people claim that they know the right way to understand it. I want to start this sermon about understanding the Bible, by sharing a couple of the basic beliefs with which I approach this topic:

I believe that we can read the Bible and understand it. I believe it has something for us, and that through it, God somehow speaks. We ought to approach it with that confidence.

At the same time, our understanding is only human – limited, conditional, sometimes changing… So some humility is needed when we start saying what we understand.

I also believe that we have a lot in common with the people of the Bible – both the people in its stories and the people by whom and for whom and in the midst of which the books were written. In many senses, people don’t change, human nature doesn’t change, many of our most important questions don’t change, our most fundamental needs and hopes don’t change. That is one of the reasons that the Bible continues to speak so powerfully to people, even people who don’t necessarily read it for any reason relating to faith.

On the other hand: there IS an enormous generational, cultural, and language gap between us and the people who first wrote down the stories, songs, poems, rituals, lists, speeches, teachings, letters, and other materials that make up the Bible. They couldn’t possibly have imagined the world we know, with airplanes, internet, nuclear weapons, cures for deadly diseases, almost limitless choices for how to spend our time, worries about limited natural resources, and so forth. We are probably almost as unable to imagine the world as they saw it. We live in a society that is structured in an entirely different way from the one they lived in. Most of us have little if any familiarity with the languages they spoke and wrote. We have questions that would never have come up for the writers of the Bible.

Given that gap, it’s only to be expected that sometimes we will have to do some work, make some effort, to bridge that gap. The goal of course is not just to understand the meaning of the Biblical texts themselves, but also to figure out what they mean for our lives in a world that is different in a lot of ways from the world of the Bible.

What we call that endeavor is Biblical INTERPRETATION.

To some people, interpreting the Bible suggests an intention to impose our own ideas and rather than simply accept and be guided by the Bible’s wisdom. They see it as sort of a suspicious innovation rooted in skepticism about the Bible’s truth, or attempts to reinvent the Bible to reflect current culture. But the truth is, the process of interpretation has always gone on. The very act of translation from the original languages into a modern one is an interpretive process: anyone who has learned a foreign language knows that a particular word or phrase can often be translated into English in more than one way. The translator has to make decisions about what word to use, and sometimes they give the text different nuances.

You can see in the passages we read from Matthew examples of Jesus interpreting scriptural texts of his faith tradition – what we call the Old Testament – and reinterpreting them with a fresh perspective. He delves into the meaning behind a commandment to love, for example, and says that loving those who are easy to love is not all that this commandment is calling us to.

The Matthew 19 passage is a particularly interesting example, because we can see Jesus’ interpretation/reinterpretation process at work… and because we also need to ask some good interpretive questions to allow this passage to speak meaningfully to us. In this story, some religious people come to Jesus with questions about divorce. Those questions are essentially about interpretation of Mosaic law about marriage. Evidently they are referring to Deuteronomy 24:1:

“Suppose a man enters into marriage with a woman, but she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her, and so he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house….” It goes on to say that if she marries someone else, the first husband may not remarry her if she is widowed or divorced by the second husband.

The question seems to be about how to understand “something objectionable” which could be grounds for divorce according to the laws and customs of Judaism. Can it be any reason at all, even a trivial one? Jesus’ reply looks beyond the letter of this specific part of Jewish law about marriage and divorce to the bigger principle, what he sees as God’s intent for marriage, and he quotes from Genesis about husband and wife being joined, becoming one. And he adds his famous line, now part of most Christian marriage services: “What God has joined together, let no one separate.”

The Pharisees response is ‘Yes, but….” “Why did Moses command us to give a certificate of dismissal and divorce her,” they want to know. Jesus says that this practice of divorce was allowed only because of “hard-heartedness.” Quite rightly, I think, Jesus recognizes what the Pharisees don’t: that the Deuteronomy passage is very far from establishing grounds for divorce; it’s more of a recognition of circumstances that sometimes occurred, and an attempt to place some limits (which probably had to do mainly with assuring the legitimacy of children).

You can see how Jesus puts the question about one small phrase into the context of its original intention as well as into the context of the larger tradition of the Hebrew scripture. But it’s also very clear that it’s not a purely academic discussion about ancient texts: Jesus conversation with the Pharisees is about how marriage and divorce ought to be regarded in their community.

The issue of interpretation gets even more interesting when we study this first part of Matthew 19 itself. Most often, traditionally, it has been understood as a prohibition, from Jesus himself, of divorce under all circumstances except in case of infidelity. That’s not an unreasonable interpretation; it’s certainly clear that Jesus thinks marriage should be taken very seriously and divorce should never be undertaken for trivial reasons. But lots of people have found this passage troubling. Who hasn’t come across one of those lifeless, bitter or destructive marriages which gives nothing good to either person, or to anyone connected with them? We know, too, that the things Jesus says in this conversation have been used to tell women, particularly, that God expects them to stay in abusive marriages. It’s also been the basis for excluding those who have been divorced from fully participating in the community of faith.

All that is really hard for us to put together with the Jesus we know as accepting, compassionate, and forgiving. It’s hard for us to see that as consistent with all the things we read in the Bible about justice, and about God being on the side of the oppressed. It doesn’t seem to fit with the gospel message of forgiveness and new life.

The problem with common interpretations of this passage is that they don’t consider the context of the conversation between Jesus and the Pharisees. It’s really important to grasp what they are asking him and what that means in their world. They don’t ask, “is it ok to get a divorce for any reason?” They ask if a man can divorce his wife for any reason. In their culture, as in many societies, the man had most of the power in a marriage or in a divorce. Not only did women have far less ability to obtain a divorce, if their husbands wished to divorce them, they had little say in it, and their resources and options were few.

It’s really not surprising in this context that Jesus is very firm in insisting that the men who are questioning him should regard marriage as sacred, their wives as “one” with them, and divorce as acceptable only in the most limited of circumstances.

What his words might mean in a different context – ours, for example – is another question. They might or might not lead us to believe something different about divorce – that’s probably another discussion. But the point is that when we talk about divorce we don’t have in mind just exactly the same thing that Jesus and the Pharisees were discussing. We have to be careful about answering our questions with answers that were really answers to other questions.

I’m not implying that you can legitimately conclude anything you want from a text, simply because we come at it from a different cultural viewpoint. For example, it would be completely out of line to read Matthew 19 and decide that it’s fine to approach marriage as an experiment to be abandoned anytime it seems not to be working well. There’s just no way to read the text honestly without seeing that Jesus believes marriage should be taken very seriously.

What I have been describing is a kind of conversation with the Biblical text that takes context seriously. You might think of it like this:

TEXT its original context

our context

It’s really not enough to search out what Jesus’ words might have meant to the people who heard him, or what a Biblical text is likely to have meant to the writer or the first readers. It’s important, but it’s not enough.

It’s also not enough to read and ask, “Now, how can I apply these words to my life????”

A richer understanding comes from asking “what’s the relationship between my situation and the circumstances behind this story or the writing of this part of the Bible:

TEXT its original context

our context

In what ways are they alike? How are they different?

What about my understanding of the world is different from the way the writer and the early readers of this part of the Bible thought?

Remember that the perspective of the Biblical writers about things like history, literature, social norms, and the nature of the world were really different from ours.

Ask yourself, How can I enter into the perspective of the writer, or the first readers in order to understand better?

It’s also worthwhile to ask:

Is what I’m reading about the questions I’m asking or is it addressing a different concern entirely?

Remember that the Bible wasn’t written to address our questions. The Bible says nothing at all about some of the big issues we struggle with – like the pressures of population on limited natural resources, for example - simply because those issues didn’t exist then. Doesn’t mean there might not be principles and values here to help us think about those issues. But anybody who assures you that the answers to all life’s questions are clearly laid out in the Bible is either being too simplistic or is reading a lot into the Biblical texts.

Sometimes, though, when you think about the questions the text is addressing, you realize that something about those questions in universal, as relevant now as ever. You find yourself wondering, “Should I be asking different questions?”

One of the biggest mistakes people make in trying to understand the Bible is the tendency we have to take what we read out of context. Maybe we unintentionally reinforce this in church, where we usually read only short selections, often from a different part of the Bible each week. Maybe it has to do with viewing the Bible as an answer book and expecting to be able to lift out a one-sentence answer to all our ethical and religious questions. I’m sure our sound-byte society doesn’t help, either.

But most of the Bible wasn’t written to be short quotable quotes we can recite for guidance or inspiration, and in fact the division into short bits we call verses wasn’t part of any of the books when they were originally written. So it’s really important to see how any phrase, or verse, or story, or larger section fits into the rest of what’s there.

It’s almost always good to ask:

- What comes just before and just after this?

- What is this Biblical book as a whole about?

- How does this fit into bigger context of the whole biblical story?

I also find it really helpful to think about the purpose for which a passage, or a book might have been written and why it might have been preserved by the communities of faith over the centuries.

When you read the letters in the New Testament, for example, you see that they were written to Christian congregations, with advice about particular concerns and needs in those congregations. That gives you a much more grounded understanding than if you just read an isolated sentence or two and try to apply it to your life. For example, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good,” makes much more sense when you know it is part of Paul’s encouragement to a church struggling with conflict.

The Psalms take on richer meaning when you think about them as songs used in worship. The stories of Genesis and Exodus become more than a collection of tales when you remember that they are part of a larger story about the coming into existence of a people who will understand themselves as God’s people.

There is one other thing I think it’s really important to remember: not everything in the Bible is prescriptive. In other words, just because a Biblical character did something, that doesn’t mean we are supposed to emulate them. For example, King Solomon is said to have had 300 wives. Need I say more? One of the reasons the bible speaks so powerfully to us is that the people it portrays aren’t heroes but flawed people like us… and still God spoke to them, loved them, worked through them. Part of the Bible’s truth is its honesty about the human condition. So we read prayers in the Psalms that we would never dream of praying in church – prayers, for example, that express the wish for God to smash the heads of our enemies babies on rocks. We’re not meant to read that and conclude that this is an attitude God would have us take up. What we are supposed to see is that the people who wrote it believed in a God to whom they could bring even their darkest times and feelings … and we know then that the Bible IS for people like us.

I said at the beginning that I was proceeding out of the fundamental belief that the we can understand the Bible. I hope you will join Jerry and me in that confidence as we continue with our “Bible 101” series. What lies behind that confidence is something I talked about last week… the belief that God’s Spirit is still about the business of inspiration… breathing life into the scriptures as we read and study them, breathing life into us as we let them speak.