READING THE BIBLE

Reading the Bible

One of the difficulties that people have when approaching the Old Testament for the first time in a long while, are the stories of violence and bloodshed, human sacrifice and even the beloved King David acting like a local gangster and warlord.
But as the old saying goes……..the past is another country, they do things differently there.
Many of the sections of the books that make up our bible would equally have caused a problem for the Jews at the time of Jesus. So how did Jesus use these passages in his preaching?
At that time, and even now, the preaching Rabbi and the student focused on what the book meant and on it’s application to the here and now. What Jesus did was to take his experience of God in the here and now, his Good News of the Kingdom of God also in the here and now, and use the books of the Old Testament (in particular the localised Isaiah) to show the actions and requirements of God right now. That is what Jesus means in Luke 4:18. “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing”. In other words, “What God is doing and demanding right now can be explained by these passages in Isaiah”.
Instead of studying the Scriptures to get an idea of what he must do “now”, Jesus took as his starting point his relationship with God, his experience of God in the here and now, and went back to the Scriptures to get explanations of why it is so.
So how can we do that? When we come to the Old Testament it is of value to know the background to the passage we are reading in the first instance, and to then find an analogy in the passage that relates to our experience of God. For instance there is a passage in Genesis which was recently read at Mass where Abraham was commanded to make a human sacrifice to his God of his first-born son on an altar of stones in a high place. At first glance this doesn’t talk to our experience of God, even if the punchline for Abraham is that it’s actually just a test. But has there not been a time when God has asked us to do something that we would much rather not? Something that we would consider unreasonable. Of course there has, many times and not often something that turns out to be a test before we start. So we can take our experience of God in our life, now, and hear God as he commands Abraham in the same way as he commands us.
Jesus is leading us to our own experience of God, and in the Gospels, uses the Scriptures to light our way.

A much better explanation of this for the scholars amongst us is in “A Galilean Rabbi And His Bible” by Bruce D Chilton)