Pentecost 12: Bread not Stones

1 Kings 4:25-5:2

Psalm 34:1-8

Ephesians 4:25-5:2

John 6:35, 41-51

 

The Gospel of John is perhaps the most spiritual of all the gospels, and hence a favorite of many.  However, I often have trouble getting beyond some of its language.  I must admit that when I came to read the gospel for today I had difficulty getting beyond the second sentence – The Jews.  “The Jews began to complain about [Jesus].”  Next week we’ll hear how the Jews disputed among themselves.”  Again, the Jews.  Blanket statements like these always require of intelligent, sensitive people questions.  Questions like: “Exactly which Jews does the writer of the Gospel of John mean?”  When the writer says “the Jews” does he mean Jesus’ followers as well, since they were themselves Jews?’  “In saying ‘the Jews’ does the writer actually mean all the Jewish people?’  Well, the fact is that the writer can’t possibly mean all the Jews, the writer most likely means the Jews who opposed Jesus or means the Jewish authorities; and yet the Gospel of John is persistent in its unqualified use of this phrase – “the Jews.”  The writer uses the term “the Jews” literally dozens of times.  For our own part, I believe that when this stock phrase crops up we must read it with a certain suspicion.

The context in which the Gospel of John is written is one in which the lines dividing Christians and Jews were becoming more harshly defined.  Most scholars date the Gospel of John to around the year AD 90, that is toward the end of the first century.  The Temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Romans as a result of a Jewish insurrection in the year 70.  The Jewish people had lost the chief symbol of their faith, the symbolic centre of their worship and were in the midst of imagining a Jewish identity which did not include the regular priestly worship and sacrifices of the Temple.  In this climate there was little room for Jews who did not interpret the Jewish faith along traditional lines.  Indeed, many Jews believed that the destruction of the Temple signalled the fact that many Jews had already abandoned the covenant with the Lord;  many interpreted the destruction of the Temple as punishment for apostasy.  There was, among some Jewish communities, persecution of those Jews who deviated from the traditional understanding of Judaism.  Of course, the Christians were one of the prime targets for this hostility; and it is in this context that we must understand the Gospel of John.  “The Jews” are the enemies of Christ in the Gospel of the John, because “the Jews” were understood as the enemy of Christians in the community out of which the Gospel of John arose.  This historical accident has had horrific repercussions and has throughout history fuelled hatred and distrust of the Jewish people in the western world.  As Christianity gained the upper hand culturally, politically and socially it used texts like the Gospel of John to legislate and enforce prejudice and hatred against “the Jews”; a hatred the culmination of which we witnessed in the systematic murder of six million Jewish men, women and children in the last century.   

            Uncritical readings of scripture have been the source of bigotry and abuse and continue to be so.  Shakespeare’s line from the The Merchant of Venice  “Even the devil can cite scripture for his purpose” is all too true; and uncritical readings of scripture have been used to advocate slavery, the inherent inequality of men and women, and  racial prejudice.  Scripture has been made to serve the cause of emotional and physical violence against gay, lesbian and transgender people, as well as to demonstrate that deaf people – because they cannot hear – cannot receive the word of God, and therefore cannot be saved.  In the past, facile readings of Scripture have been used to prove why women should wear hats in church and to justify the physical and even abusive punishment of children.  In short the “Word of God” has been relentlessly called up to testify in defence of all forms of human sin, wickedness and depravity.  Disturbingly, it continues to be so to this day.  Simply witness the pseudo-theologies of hatred, fear and oppression which emerge from some contemporary “christian” – and I use the term loosely – groups via television, radio and the press.

And yet as Christians we cannot ignore the scriptures altogether.  Indeed, as Anglican Christians our identity is bound up in the appeal to scripture, reason and tradition when informing our decisions and ecclesiological self-expression.  In our Anglican self–understanding, scripture is one of the legs of a stool on which we stand to proclaim the Good News of God and to order our common life.  Without it we totter and fall.  But reason is also one of the legs of that stool; and it is our human reason which we must always employ, as individuals and as communities, to ask questions of the scriptures we have inherited.   Without a proper use of our God-given reason we also totter and fall.  An honest approach to Scripture demands that we ask serious questions of the texts that we encounter: “How does this part of scripture relate to the rest of the Bible?”  “What is the context of the the writer and did she or he have a particular agenda in writing?”  “How does what I read or hear relate to my own experience of life?”  “Is this that I am reading reasonable?”  We must always ask questions; and Christians have usually found it most helpful to ask those questions alongside other Christians.  Prayer groups and Bible studies are especially helpful for this.

In her work, the theologian and biblical scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, speaks about a hermeneutics of suspicion.  Now, hermeneutics, put quite simply means “theory of interpretation”, and whoever we are we all have a hermeneutics, a way in which we interpret the biblical texts we encounter.  A hermeneutics of suspicion assumes that there is always an agenda in the writings of the Bible, and that to simply swallow – hook, line and sinker – everything the Bible says at face value is irresponsible and even dangerous.  Fiorenza advocates that scripture should be approached with a certain degree of suspicion, particularly when it uses blanket statements like, “the Jews”, makes culture-bound bound pronouncements like “women should be silent in the churches”(1 Corinthians 14.34), or puts words in the mouth of Jesus like: “No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14.6b).  Such statements belie a certain agenda which may have more to do with human social restrictions, fears and control issues than with the liberating love of God.  Fiorenza’s most famous book, Bread not Stones, is aptly named.  If scripture is to be the word of God by which the people of God are nourished and fed, then it must be bread not stones.  For too long historical readings of scripture have provided, most especially for marginalised people, not bread by which our spirituality can be nourished, but stones which have served as stumbling blocks to our development as well as to our relationship with God.  For too long we and our ancestors have been given biblical interpretations which have literally killed us – spiritually, emotionally and even physically.  We have searched and longed for the bread of life in the pages of the scriptures, but have been given stones which have crushed down some of us and killed others.  A hermeneutics of suspicion is a healthy way to approach any biblical text, because the first demand which a hermeneutics of suspicion makes of us is to ask questions: questions of the the text, questions of the Church (locally, nationally and globally), questions of ourselves; questions, quetions, questions.

In the Hebrew Scriptures the newly crowned Solomon prays to the Lord not for wealth or power, but rather for the right use of his human reason, he prays for wisdom; and it is wisdom we too need if we are to be nourished and fed by the holy scriptures.  The wisdom to discern what God is saying to us through a text which is thousands of years old and written by cultures the workings of which even experts today do not fully understand.  Scripture that is not creatively encountered by human reason is a dead thing, and at it worst becomes a death-dealing thing.  If scripture is to be bread – real nourishment on the journey – for the people of God we need to encounter it with questions, encounter it with our reason and experience, and approach it even with suspicion; if not in the end we may not be reading the Bible, but eating stones.