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Sermon preached by Third Sunday of Lent, 27th March 2011
WHY READ THE BIBLE? John 4:4-42 & Romans 5:1-11
Why read the Bible? We read the Bible to be able to connect more securely
and deeply with God as source of our salvation. Salvation consists in
Peace with God. Reading the Bible does not save us, but it is as we read
that we listen for God’s word to us today.
What if I suffer? We read scripture to make sense of our lives with the
help of reliable witnesses. The Bible tells us about men and women of
faith who have themselves wrestled with trying to make sense of their
sufferings. Paul, who has suffered a lot, on account of his mission in
life to make known the story of Christ, comes over as the sort of person
who bounces back from adversity. Paul assumes that all other believers
will take this same stance in how they endure suffering. His view is
that suffering, far from demolishing and annihilating, produces a
stronger character, persevering, and full of hope. The source of
strength is in God, who has poured out his holy spirit into our hearts.
I must admit his view of suffering as character building leaves me with
a problem, as much suffering diminishes people. We wrestle with the fact
of the pain of existence, but not without help. Maybe the point is that
we have to argue with scripture at times; it is not infallible or
inerrant.
We read scripture to find our way to and along the
spiritual path, showing us where to start from and how to continue.
The Bible teaches us the need to acknowledge our
vulnerability, weakness and helplessness. When Paul had his Paul counts himself as one of the ungodly, that is,
as though he were not a regular member of the piety club who kept God’s
law. He had a Rabbinical training, came from very pious background, and
was descended from the royal line of Saul of the tribe of Benjamin in
his genes. Paul would have every right to feel proud of his ancestry and
upbringing, but it is as though all that counted for nothing, for the
surpassing worth of knowing Christ. He learned a truer faith in and
trust in God and in others to help him. He found a better way than his
violence had so far led him in how to relate to others more acceptingly,
whatever the differences.
We might read the Bible for its insight into personal
and societal transformation; we read the Bible for ourselves, growing
into ‘Christmindedness’, learning to be and become all that God created
us to be. The Bible is God-centred as much as it is about how to be human. We discover, through people like Paul and John, how they encountered the spiritual.
Often, we apprehend the spiritual through the meeting of diversity over a common need. The rather artless picture of Jesus, a Jew, sat down by a well and asking a Samaritan woman to give him a drink of water is an instance of the incarnation. That the word became flesh, and sat down at a well in the heat of the day, meant the Lord of the Worlds sweated in the heat and got thirsty. God is met there, as a member of a race that is both despised by and despises its neighbours. God experiences the negativity that so often frustrates the dignifying of diversity.
A Jew asked a Samaritan woman for a drink. In the
simplest of transactions, Jesus has broken the barrier of centuries of
prejudice.
As well as why we should read the Bible, we also need
to ask how we are to read it. Intelligently and prayerfully, I would
say, asking that as Christ opened the minds of the disciples to
understand the scriptures, so may Christ by the Holy Spirit, open our
minds into understanding what we read as to how it shapes our living and
ways of being with others.
Jesus makes himself known to the woman at the well by
asking her for something, putting her into the position of giver not
recipient. She brought something to the encounter Jesus did not have – a
bucket! If we interpret this symbolically, we may see that in
encountering the spiritual we also bring all that which is of ourselves.
Reading the Bible involves our intelligent and prayerful response as
well as the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Rowan Williams reminds us
that in the pursuit of the life of prayer we are not asked to leave
behind our critical faculty.
The most important reason for reading the Bible is
that we encounter salvation. In today’s readings are two vital lessons
about salvation. One is that when Paul speaks of justification by
faith, he is not saying that Jesus died in order to satisfy or placate
an angry God. That actually is heresy. Even some modern Gospel
songwriters display astonishing ignorance of what exactly is the
transaction of the cross. There is one song which seems to suggest that
Jesus had to suffer long enough for God to be satisfied that his demand
for justice was met. God then becomes the master-torturer, which in turn
becomes a charter of abuse.
"Reconciliation does not mean Jesus paid God off so
that God's honour was intact, reconciling God to us - as though God
needed the therapy or needed to be satisfied (as though what sates God
is not love but self-love). Rather God was doing the reconciling."
[William Loader.]
The second important lesson from today’s readings, is
about how our tendency to label people, is challenged in reading the
Bible. How many commentators and Biblical interpreters I have read who
assume the woman at the well is a kind of serial monogamist! Elizabeth
Taylor, who died recently, married eight times! Would she have been a
candidate for acting the screenplay version of Woman of Sychar? In
reality, the Samaritan woman may have been the victim of the system of
Levirate marriage, whereby she becomes the property of successive
brothers when the previous one died.
Even The Message version seems to cast the woman in the role of one who has had four weddings and four divorces and is living in sin with the partner no 5. It is easy to read into the story that which is not there. An important part of the process of reading scripture is to be aware of what we are doing to the scripture. For we can easily make the Bible carry our prejudices and use the text to reinforce them, quite without really stopping to think what we are doing.
Is Christ there to justify our ways of seeing things,
or are we to try seeing it from where he sits, in need, trying to cross
a boundary, seeking to get to know this person better?
What is this salvation? What God offers in Christ is
like as if a wellspring of spiritual vitality and hope suddenly sprang
up or was unblocked in us. Like as if we were in a terrible mental and
emotional state of guilt or shame and did not know to whom to turn.
Salvation is peace with God. Let us then know and let this peace possess
us as we take into ourselves the heavenly bread and drink that speaks of
new life, new purpose. We need to read the Bible if we are to appreciate
the meaning of the gifts of God that are for the people of God. The
story of the woman at the well and the letter of Paul have this common
thread: that it is in the generosity of God, not in our having to
deserve them, the gifts of God come to his people. © Allen Morton 2011 ____________________________________________ |
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