Tell All the Truth, but Tell it Slant
by Susan
If you haven’t already, go read Vivian’s post. Right now. And comment, too, because we live for comments. Anyway, the following thoughts were inspired by what she said, and it would be grossly unfair to her to start here just because mine is at the top of the pile for the moment.
Nearly two years ago, I read Why Men Hate Going to Church. It opened my eyes to several things that had been right in front of me forever, yet I hadn’t been able to “see” them before. The book made me wonder if some church practices (passive activities, sweet songs, and so on) had become unduly feminine. As I grappled with that thought (continuing to this day), I came across an oddly titled book, Jesus: Mean and Wild. I had to buy it — that characterization was so different from Jesus as I had understood him to be, yet I wondered what a “mean and wild” Jesus might look like. Confession: I tossed it on my huge TBR(ead) pile of books and didn’t read it for a long time. But I looked at it. And I talked about it. Every time I mentioned the title, I’d get that, “You’re crazy!” look. Okay, whatever. Some people don’t recognize hyperbole for what it is.
At Lewis’ suggestion, I agreed to co-teach the Sermon on the Mount with him, but I told him up front, “This is not my favorite topic. I don’t get it, and I don’t like reading lectures.” He told me, “That’s okay. You’re gonna love it when we’re done, because it’s my very favorite thing!” Okay, the gauntlet had been thrown, and I picked it up.
But I am so far from the “Bible is simple. All ya gotta do is open it and read it and do it. Done deal.” Maybe I’m just thick-headed, but a lot of times when I read the Bible, I’m like, “So? What did that mean? How am I supposed to do that?” Did Jesus really want me to pluck out my eye or chop off my hand? (Interesting how most of us do recognize the hyperbole here; at least I haven’t noticed any one-eyed, one-armed Christians running around, though I bet they have sinned through their seeing or touching.) Most of the Bible is told in stories. The stories reveal — obliquely!!! — the heart of God, his goals and purposes for people, his disappointments with their actions, his irrational love for downtrodden, ostracized, marginalized groups (like Israel).
==> Back to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. When I teach something, I totally dive into it. I read the text, I think about it, I listen to tapes and songs related to it, I read books on it, I write about it, I talk to people. If I stopped at step 1, “I read the text,” I wouldn’t get very far. When I stop to think about it, I get a little farther. I agree that those first steps are important, but I always make greater strides when I bring the text into a community, mulling over it with other people: authors, singers, preachers, fellow students. I don’t have the same experiences as others, and I simply can’t see the whole picture on my own. I’m like an ant on a moebius strip.
For example, I was in a small group Bible study in Uganda. We were looking at a passage about eating meat sacrificed to idols. Yeah, yeah, I’ve read that before and tried to grasp the overall point while totally losing the cultural nuance. But it will never be as real to me as it clearly was to those Ugandan men, who had attended tribal funerals where this was a big issue for them — food sacrificed to idols is routinely offered to guests. What is a Christian man to do? I am so grateful to have been involved in their discussion because it made the passage more real to me than it had ever been before.
Moreover, I am grateful to all fellow students who join me in sparring over a Bible text. Because of them, I am now in thrall of the Sermon on the Mount. It is an amazing work that inspires and challenges me. I felt such a compulsion to continue immersed in Jesus’ words, so we’ve moved on to his parables. (Greek = parabole, a literary device akin to hyperbole.) Wow, by the same process, I feel that a floodgate of understanding is opening over these oblique truths. (One author suggests Jesus told parables to reveal the truth, but almost in a riddle format that would take people a while to grasp completely. The potency of his stories branded them in the memory of “the crowd” who heard him, but allowed him to live until “his time had come.” Some of the understanding didn’t dawn on Christians until much later. If the people had understood how caustic his words actually were, they might have killed him sooner.)
Certainly it is possible that I lack understanding of the Bible because I don’t want to understand. There were lots of times in the Sermon on the Mount class when I was squirming because the truth hit so hard and seemed so pointedly aimed at me. But, really, I think I’m just too limited to grasp it all by myself. I think God appreciates this and maybe even created us to be finite in our understanding and experiences. I think he deliberately designed us with a need to join others (marriage, family, synogogue, church), to participate in a community of exchange and conversation, to challenge and encourage each other not only toward enlightenment but toward action, vigorous, robust, difficult, uncomfortable, wild, and sometimes mean action.
Okay, last thought: I just watched Amazing Grace, the movie (sets, script, actors, history, music — all superb) about abolitionist William Wilberforce and his cohort — his community — who dogged the British parliament for years with creative (and sometimes verbally mean) gusto until at last they succeeded in abolishing slavery from the UK. A lot of the time Wilberforce was confused about his purpose in the world, and he wanted more than anything to honor God’s will.
Can we, like Wilberforce, be brave enough to admit our shortcomings, be willing to undergo personal transformation, look for opportunities to impact our world, and do much of it under the umbrella of the community of God?
And can we be generous enough to forgive God for telling us the truth with such potency and opacity?
Tags: Amazing Grace, community, hermeneutic, hyperbole, parable, personal transformation, William Wilberforce
July 21st, 2008 at 9:07 pm
You wrote:
Bold!
Can God be generous enough to forgive us for ignoring the truth he has taught us so gently and clearly?
As for your penultimate paragraph
There are four obvious and difficult questions included in that marvelously challenging sentence, almost any one of which could stop any of us in our tracks. But if we are to be truly Christian, we must be able to answer yes to any of them, and we must do so with almost every decision we make.
July 21st, 2008 at 10:15 pm
Ah, yes, and isn’t that one of the many great paradoxes? It’s so simple that you’d have to be a complete moron to miss that God is saying over and over in as many ways as he can: Trust me, and stop making everything so hard on yourself and everyone else.
July 22nd, 2008 at 5:12 am
….and and and I think I hear God saying “Stop making my book seemingly so hard to understand. I wrote it in a simple language for the common folk. First, take to heart what you do understand and practice that over and over again until you get it right. You’ll get the harder parts in time. And, if you don’t get them, don’t mind, at least you’ll have been about what I wanted you to do. And, when you do find something that is hard to understand, ask me about it. Then stop talking, stop reading all the other stuff people say about my book, stop fussing and looking about, and just listen to me, listen to me remind you of the things you have read in other places in my book and have understood and I’ll bet you’ll begin to understand the harder parts, too, maybe even conclude, ‘gee, I wonder why I was thinking that was so hard.’”