An Untraditional Approach to a Mainstream Christian Norm: Bible Reading
Ordinary Sunday 19: 13th August, 2000
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden
Assistant Priest and Archivist, St Peter's Eastern Hill
John 6: 41-52
Three weeks ago, the lections for the ordinary Sundays commenced an extended series of readings which moved from a synoptic gospel account of the following of Jesus by a hungry crowd to the long commentary in St John's gospel concerning the feeding of the multitude. At this point, I want to repeat some comments that I made a fortnight ago. I reminded you that some of the great commentaries on Jesus proclamation of Himself as the bread from heaven understand this claim to refer to Jesus' feeding of His people through the eucharistic meal - but not all. Among the products of modern biblical scholarship, there is a body of well-respected work that sees this as the intention of part of this extended passage from St John, while allowing that Jesus also presents Himself here as one who nourishes and sustains the life of God within us in a broader sense - Jesus is feeding us as Bread of Heaven, but He is also feeding us as the Word, and it is when this term appears that some scholars see a wider frame of reference to the ways in which we are built up.
As you might recall,from that point, I went on to reflect on one of the broader ways in which the life of God is fed within us, by considering the way in which the life of Jesus within us could be nourished through other people, those around us.
And because that broader sense of feeding appears to be present in the text itself, I intend this morning to continue to avoid considering Jesus feeding of us through the eucharist (there is a hidden agenda here which will eventually become apparent) and instead focus on another aspect of Jesus feeding of us in the broader sense as the Word.
And here I want to focus on His feeding of us as the Word in the most obvious way, through words, through the text of scripture and the ongoing business of interpretation carried on within the worshipping community through its reflection on that text in prayer, sermon, popular scripturally based devotion , as well as scholarly commentary.
I have been drawn to this line not only by what I understand to be a legitimate interpretation of the broad sweep of the passage of St John's gospel that we have in front of us, but also by two book reviews in the Age in recent weeks. The first is a review of a book by the distinguished Italian novelist, Italo Calvino: Why Read the Classics? For some who may be unfamiliar with some recent debates that have gone on in the literature departments of universities, it has been pointed out that lists of literary classics, works claimed to have permanent and universal status by those so describing them, may reflect the tastes, and less obviously but more significantly, the social and political values of a controlling, sometimes relatively small, group of people. Without imposing a particular short list as an absolute standard for all readers, Calvino invites his readers to interrogate their reading matter. Is its meaning exhausted after the first reading: or are its possibilities ones that grow slowly on us, and change with time? Are we able to walk away from the text feeling in neutral, as though we could have either taken it or left it, without making any real difference - or does it somehow stir us, make us question, feel annoyed, more positive, challenged?
For me, a number of books elicit positive answers to these questions. If I had to name a few, they would include the Orestia of Aeschylus; Virgil's Aeneid; the full text of Swift's Gulliver's Travels; Balzac's Le Chouan; Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (I refer to the novel based on Tolstoys original TV script); Lampedeusa's The Leopard; Proust's Au Recherche du Temps Perdu. Oh, and by the way, the Bible. I might complain of overexposure to I Corinthians 13, or John 3 16, but once I start to list the books where there are extended passages that still in some way can get me going, the catalogue gets longer and longer as I keep thinking about it: slabs of Romans, Colossians and Ephesians and Hebrews, Revelation, Job, Lamentations and Ecclesiastes, Psalms, the succession narratives in Samuel and on it goes. By Calvino's test, it certainly passes. What about you? Which incidents move you, irritate you, make you feel you have to go back and look again at yourself? What is your response when Jesus says: You have heard it said of old: you shall do no murder. But I say to you, that whoever is angry has already committed murder?
The second recent review was by a self-confessed atheist, often overtly critical of religious people, dealing with a recent Cambridge publication, A History of the English Bible as Literature. As well as praising David Norton's study as 'an invaluable reference', she did not feel any need to argue over the status of major English translations of the Bible. She took for granted that they had played a major role, not only in English literature, the formation of the written word, but in the way English has been spoken for several hundred years. Most of us are aware of expressions that have passed into common English use that have their origins in the Biblical text like good Samaritans, and prodigal sons, or turning the other cheek. And what about the skin of your teeth? Or to eat, drink and be merry? Or to heap coals of fire on someone's head? - all of which have equally come into common usage from the same source. My atheistic reviewer had no difficulty in accepting that the Bible was not only historically important as literature in its influence on our vocabulary of images and metaphors, but also on the grounds of literary merit. In accepting this, she was not espousing any new or original position. When Sir Arthur Quiller Couch lectured at Cambridge as the first King Edward VII professor of English Literature just before WWI, he referred to passages from the Bible as examples of literary art. And those who went through Melbourne University's History Department in the days of the Tudor and Stuart course that won international recognition would recall one of Brian Kennedy's set pieces, his lecture on the Authorised Version, which attracted listeners from other departments and schools as well as history undergraduates for whom it was compulsory fare.
Now I refer to these two approaches, neither of which arises from the discipline of theology, but from quite a different discipline, that of literary studies. Yet each comes to the same conclusion: whatever else we might claim for it, the Biblical texts contain some significant literature, which we ignore at the peril of our inheritance not only as practicing Christians, but more broadly, as rounded human beings who are part of a culture in which literature and words are significant as well as basic vehicles for communication.
But too many in our own tradition are hesitant to feed the life of God within them from this particular source, let alone verbalise their belief in any coherent way. In fact, our verbal presentation of our belief often leaves much to be desired. It is easy to be satisfied by the richness of the visual symbols - both those used in the performance of the liturgy, and indeed created by it; and those visuals that can be used as devotional aids that surround us in the building. But to stop there is, among other things, a form of laziness.
It is equally a specious rationalisation when people justify an ignorance of the Biblical text on the ground that they consider familiarity with the biblical text and verbal reference to it as a characteristic of fundamentalism. But because we don't like particular ways of verbalising belief, doesn't mean that alternative is simply a silence filled with our ignorance. The response should not be silence, but a search for different ways of verbalising, and we will only be able to present our message differently, and I hope better, if we have imbibed and fed ourselves deeply from the same source.
The inadequacy of our verbal presentation of our belief remains. The response to fundamentalism is not ignorance of the biblical text, but an intelligent understanding and questioning about its meaning, in which we can use all the tools of literary and historical scholarship.
And even those whose approach might at first appear to have some of those characteristics we claim to find unacceptable, might have something to teach us. If you look near the Sydney Square waterfall, you will find the word Eternity in cast aluminium set in aggregate; it was placed there by the architect, Ridley Smith. It was a tribute to a strange graffiti artist who over a period of thirty seven years remained unidentified while writing the word in crayon at intervals of a hundred yards or so, on Sydney pavements, over half a million times. The cover of Arthur Stace was blown in 1956. The child of parents who were problem drinkers, Stace became a state ward by the age of 12, and a frequent inhabitant of prisons and institutions until 1930. Then came a period of apparent crisis and conversion; Stace recalled a Baptist evangelist who proclaimed 'I wish I could shout eternity though the streets of Sydney'. In his own style, Stace transformed the preacher's wish and fulfilled it in an unforseen way. There was a short period when a ghost writer followed Stace, altering eternity to maternity; Stace quickly eliminated this as a possibility by the way he formed the initial E. Eventually Stace took to acting as a street corner evangelist in Balmain, but it was through this other use of words that he made most impact - eloquent for all its apparent silence.
Stace's use of words or a word I suspect partly came from a compulsive element in his character. But this use of the familiar word in a new way was certainly noticed. We do not need a compulsive personality to drive us to communication of our belief by an intelligent use of words, spoken and printed, as well as by visual symbols. While we can agree that it is the way we act that validates or calls into question what we verbally profess to believe, if we are to produce an intelligent way of articulating our faith, it will not be achieved by avoiding scripture but by immersing ourselves in it in a new and deeper way.
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