Good Teacher

FROM THE RECTOR

Have you ever read a familiar passage of scripture and noticed something you had never seen before? How has your interpretation of difficult passages changed over time? Are there any parts of the Bible that you find particularly difficult? Are there any parts that other people struggle with that you find relatively straightforward?

I recently finished a Bible study on Matthew’s account of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem. I chose that topic because it overlapped with several of the Sunday-morning Gospel lessons that we heard during worship. Although the five chapters we studied include a wide range of topics and encounters, if I had to summarize that part of the Gospel, I would say that it focuses on the implications of Jesus’ messianic identity for the church. In other words, if we call Jesus the Christ, if he really is God’s anointed one, how will that impact our lives?

In our series, we studied Jesus’ teachings on forgiveness, greatness, discipleship, and humility. We read texts about wealth, empire, sacrifice, and hope. When we began the series, I anticipated that the hardest passage we would study would be Jesus’ teaching on divorce (Matthew 19:1-12). Over the centuries, interpreters have proposed various ways to hear and apply Jesus’ sharp words about marital fidelity, but, at its core, what he has to say about divorce is hard to hear.

Preachers like me usually prefer to skip over that part of the Gospel. It is difficult to unpack the historical and cultural baggage behind the text in the span of a fifteen-minute sermon. Even an hour-long class is not enough to tackle it. We might be better served assuming that a first-century rabbi who never married has nothing to say to twenty-first century Christians about marriage or divorce, no matter how special that rabbi was. Nevertheless, whether in a group Bible study or in our own reading of scripture, we should probably ask ourselves about it. If we believe what we say we believe about Jesus, are we obligated to put even his least popular teachings into practice?

When we examined that passage in class, I was surprised to discover that what Jesus has to say about divorce is less interesting and provocative than what he has to say about reading the Bible. When the religious authorities ask him, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?” Jesus replies by quoting scripture (Genesis 1 & 2) but not the passage they expect him to cite: “Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh?’”

Surprised and a little frustrated by Jesus’ answer, the authorities ask him specifically about the more relevant text, Deuteronomy 24, in which Moses makes a provision for divorce. But Jesus remains unpersuaded. “It was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives,” he replies, “but from the beginning it was not so.”

In the end, Jesus maintains a strict, conservative position on divorce, but he does so through an expansive, liberal reading of the biblical text. Instead of treating the Bible as if it offers simple answers to complicated problems, Jesus shows us that it is better to allow the central tenets of our faith to guide how we interpret scripture. In this particular example, Jesus prioritizes God’s vision for how things were made to be over humanity’s need for exceptions and contingencies. We might even say that, in this passage, Jesus teaches us to read the Bible with the biggest picture in mind, while allowing most of the details to fall away.

Surely that is a wonderful, if controversial, gift to the church! Jesus, the Incarnate Word, shows us that we are faithful when we approach God’s Word with our whole hearts, souls, and minds. While we should not say that any reading of scripture is faithful, we can acknowledge that even the plain words of the biblical text are not unidimensional. We have been called by Jesus and empowered by the Holy Spirit to read and reread the Bible with faithful permissiveness. We can ask God and each other how a particular passage fits within the overall scope of God’s message of salvation. We should be prepared to be surprised.

Sometimes the implications of the Bible for our lives are hard to receive. We all need to take scripture more seriously, but that does not mean reading it more narrowly.

Yours Faithfully,

Evan D. Garner