I Don't Wanna Read the Hebrew Bible

One of the great things about the class I'm taking on Biblical spirituality is that I'm reading much of the Bible I haven't spent much time with before. One of the less appealing things about it is the part about reading much of the Bible I haven't spent much time with before. There's a reason they publish volumes with just the New Testament and Psalms--Jesus' teachings and the prayers he grew up with are transparently relevant and full of solace. If you're having a tough time, it's pretty easy to flip through the Psalms or the Gospels and find some comfort in the fact that God promises to lift you from despair, or just to blow off your feelings in the course of meditating on how great God is.

The Pentateuch and the Prophets, in contrast, are full of terrible things happening to the Israelites, dire imprecations against their enemies, God imposing arcane rules, violence, despair, and genealogy. Individual stories are too long to fit the lectionary or too thorny to fit in a picture book (which explains why there are names I've never heard before) and, toughest of all, they don't have clear morals. It's like, okay, a bad thing happened to that person. Why? God met with Moses and was about to kill him. Huh? I thought God liked Moses. See, that's the great thing about the Gospel parables--sometimes their points are stated right in there, and if not, you've heard them in church or in cliche so often that you know what you're in for. It's easy to see why a person trying to add some Bible to her spirituality would stick to Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and David.

But that would be cheating, and Theologienne is deeply suspicious of anything that's too easy. Some folks hold that the only way to make the Bible liberative is to toss out parts of it, but I disagree. To say that any part of the Bible can't reveal some aspect of God's will to us shows a failure of imagination, and by that I mean not making stuff up but deep openness to the Holy Spirit, willingness to let your mind move in ways it hasn't traveled before. It's a good challenge to think about what meaning the saddest stories in the Bible had for those who wrote them down and what hope they can carry for us today. You might need to know the context and you might find it buried in tension, but if you trust that God wants us to hope, the good word has to be in there somewhere.

Tomorrow, my reflection on Lamentations . . .