What Would Jesus Say About What the Bible Says?
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
February 19, 2023
Good morning, Friends and welcome to Light Reflections. This morning at the Meeting we are having a special Gifting of Bibles for our children and young people. This message alludes to this special event. Our scripture for today is Isaiah 55:11 from the New Revised Standard Version.
…so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose
and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
Throughout this school year, Seeking Friends (which meets before worship each Sunday at 9am) has been discussing the book, The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It by Peter Enns.
Seeking Friends has been an ongoing discussion and study for many years at First Friends, but since I began facilitating it, I have tried to have us study books about the Bible that explore deeper and even alternative ways to view it – including books I would highly recommend such as Brian McLaren’s We Make the Road by Walking and Rob Bell’s What Is the Bible? How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything.
Obviously, I have always had a love for the Bible and thus have found it formational, instructive, and even at times prophetic to my own life.
Yet…over the years I have changed my understanding and view of the Bible.
Probably because the more I have studied the book, the more problems I have run into, everything from contradictions, myths, wrong history to struggling with specific issues such as its role in the genocide of the First Nation’s people and the enslavement of African blacks in our own country, to the oppression of women and their rights, and most definitely the anger or wrath of God – which gets really complicated as a Quaker when it comes to war, genocide, and even nihilation of people on the earth.
So why, would we teach or especially give our young people a copy of such a controversial book? Some, maybe even some of you, in this Meetingroom or online, may be asking why?
My answer to that question may need to be accompanied by a good cup of coffee and a comfortable chair to fully unpack.
Yet, this morning, I will unpack a couple of points to help us consider how we might each approach it and possibly help teach it to our children.
I want to start by returning to an article I read a few years ago that really helped me. The article was titled, “What Questions Might Jesus Ask of Scripture?” written by Progressive Christian Chuck Queen – a Baptist minister, teacher, and author who has authored five books on Progressive Christian themes. His most recent book is titled: “Being a Progressive Christian (is not) for Dummies (nor for know-it-alls).
The article really had me contemplating not only what Jesus thought of Scripture, but how Jesus handled scripture.
Obviously, I have spent a great deal of time talking in this Meeting about following the ministry and example of Jesus, but I have never really preached on or helped us consider how Jesus would look at scripture.
We must remember that the historic Jesus was a man who was part of a religious society and often did some things that many Jews and Christians, today, would find questionable – if not heresy.
To open his article, Chuck Queen quotes another article from the Washington Post by E.J. Dionne which speaks of our imperfect quest for the truth. Quoting Dionne he says,
“Christians need to humbly acknowledge how imperfectly human beings understand the divine and how over the history of faith, there have been occasions when ‘a supposedly changeless truth has changed.”
This I could understand and even easily prove by simply asking Christians to explain how their view of Matthew 5:29-30 had changed over the years. How one viewed this verse in grade school, versus high school, college, or even today, is often wildly different. If you haven’t begun to look up Matthew 5:29-30 let me read it to you. Consider how you have viewed it at different times in your life:
If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell.
The reason I often ask Christians to do this little exercise is because when I was in 6th grade I often watched Little House on the Prairie after school. One very memorable – even haunting - episode had Caroline Ingalls dealing with a cut on her leg that become a bacterial infection. Ironically the episode was called “A Matter of Faith” and throughout she contemplated actually cutting off her leg because of that scripture from Matthew 5. Just thinking about that episode gives me all kinds of weird feelings because as a junior higher – I was having a hard time with these scriptures myself because I hadn’t really formed abstract thinking skills and was taking the verse literally.
Today, I am far from taking a literal perspective of these verses, but over the years my understanding evolved.
Not only do we see “truths” change over time. Queen goes on to say that truth exists, but our experience of it is limited and fallible, just like the limits and fallibility in our sacred texts.
This was something that took a long time for me to finally embrace – but it was because as Queen says, “Jesus did. According to the Gospels, Jesus had no problem dismissing, rejecting, and reinterpreting the sacred texts within his Jewish tradition.”
I remember reading that and almost being able to see the proverbial cartoon light bulb lighting up over the top of my head.
Let’s look at this for a moment:
Deuteronomy 24:1 says,
“Suppose a man enters into marriage with a woman but she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her, so he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house;
Some religious authorities in Jesus’ day abusively used Deut. 24:1 to justify divorcing a wife for any reason whatsoever, very much the same way religious authorities today abusively use Scripture to condemn the LGBTQIA community, condone violence, and subjugate women in the home and in the church.
Did you know that Jesus actually dismissed Deut. 24:1 by offering a critical reading of it. Jesus said that this law did not come from God (as the Scripture claimed), but from Moses himself, who made the concession due to the hardness of their hearts (Mark 10:2-5).
Or consider Deut. 22:21 which reads: “…then they shall bring the young woman out to the entrance of her father’s house, and the men of her town shall stone her to death, because she committed a disgraceful act in Israel by prostituting herself in her father’s house. So, you shall purge the evil from your midst.”
This means Joseph disobeyed Deut. 22:21 by deciding to divorce Mary quietly without bringing public shame upon her. Matthew wrote that Joseph did this because he was a “righteous man.” Obviously from Matthew’s perspective, being “righteous” may involve refusing to do what the Bible says.
Those are just two examples, but as I have studied – there are many more.
Queen then gets to the queries that made me really contemplate how I understood and looked at the Bible. He says,
“When it comes to the Christian’s sacred texts the critical question is not: What does the Bible say? The key question is: What would Jesus say about what the Bible says? Would Jesus give it a critical reading and dismiss it? Would Jesus offer a new reading and fresh interpretation?
For many years, I wore a bracelet that had the letters WWJD on it. What would Jesus do? In some ways, that was a good question to ask, but maybe that popular question did not go far enough.
Queen then goes further and suggests that we ask three more queries of any biblical text to determine its redemptive value – he thinks these are the queries Jesus might have asked.
The first one is: Does the text make God look good?
If God is good; if God is always better than our best. If the God depicted in a text is not as loving, just, good, reliable, forgiving, compassionate, etc. as the best person you know, then that text cannot possibly be giving us an authentic depiction of God.
I remember contemplating this query for quite some time. While I was contemplating it, I had the opportunity to hear Brian McLaren speak on his respect for the work of Philosopher Renè Giard who specifically studied how God is viewed in the Old Testament and concluded that it is man’s flawed interpretation of God that we read in the Old Testament.
Our focus always should be on a God who is good, loving, reliable, forgiving, compassionate. This is why, I do not teach the idea of atonement where “God killed his son for our sake.” I do not believe a loving God would do that. The people who were threatened by Jesus and his messaged killed him. There is another entire conversation over coffee and probably over several days that we could have.
For now, let’s move on to the second query Jesus may ask: Does it make me want to be good?
Does the text in some way offer a vision of God or human possibility that inspires me to deal with my false attachments and strive through God’s grace to be a better person?
The Bible is filled with negative examples, failures, and stories of real people with real problems. There are many stories where we can relate. They may need to be translated to our situations or day, but many of the stories, morals, and virtues that the Bible shares are good for us to wrestle with and allow to inspire us to be better humans. Yet another good reason to give our young people Bibles, as I said last week, to have better conversations and learn to offer gestures of love.
The third query Jesus might ask: Is it reasonable?
Not, “Is it provable?” or “Is it without inconsistencies?” which many Christians obsess over. If you really read the scriptures, you will find that authentic spiritual truth is filled with paradox and many on-the-surface contradictions.
What Queen means is, “Does it make sense and does it reflect common sense?” Does it align with the deepest truth I intuitively know in my heart about what is good and true?
Sure, some of the stories in the bible are great myths and narratives – but Jesus often told myths and stories – which he called parables to help make sense of the world. Often his parables reflected common sense and led to a deeper truth about his life and ministry.
Teaching and allowing our young people, and ourselves for that matter, to learn and explore the depths of the stories help us relate to our world and those we are called to love.
Folks, Chuck Queen helped me realize that the Bible, while central to our faith, argues with itself on almost every issue of any importance. And I think there are reasons for that. One of the biggest is the biblical writers and communities that gave us our sacred texts brought their biases, cultural conditioning, beliefs, worldviews, and presuppositions into the process of discovering God’s will.
Just as we should continue to do, today.
What amazes me is that Quakers have been doing this since our very beginning.
Retired Earlham School of Religion Professor Michael Birkel points this out, saying,
“The relationship that early Friends had with scripture was rich and complex. They read the Bible in terms of their own particular inward experiences, yet they perceived their world in profound Biblical terms. Their spiritual experiences shaped their reading of the Bible, and the Bible shaped their understanding of their experiences. They did not simply read the scriptures. They lived them. For them, the Bible was not just an exercise in information. It was an invitation to transformation.”
That I believe sums up exactly why it is important to give our young people Bibles and why we too should take another look. Just maybe it will inspire us to live them out and transform both us and our world!
So, this week, I challenge you to go grab your bible off your shelf or open it up in an app on your phone and try reading it again. But this time read it while considering how Jesus might have answered these queries:
Does the text make God look good?
Does it make me want to be good?
Is it reasonable?
Let us now enter a time of waiting worship. You may want open a bible and begin reading in the silence while considering those queries.