By Steven Norris
When I became a Christian, I remember attending a “new members’ class” at my church. In it, they wanted to make sure that we understood what it meant to be a follower of Jesus. They taught us about the importance of “the two great spiritual disciplines: reading your Bible and praying.” (It would be much later that I would come to learn that there are way more than just two disciplines.)
Looking back, it strikes me as odd that my church taught me about reading the Bible but failed to teach me about learning to let the Bible read me. Over the last twenty-plus years of ministry, I have sought to remedy that oversight, centering my ministry on helping followers of Jesus see themselves through the lens of scripture.
Over the past few months, I have been teaching through the prophet Isaiah at my church. I have lost count of the number of times people have commented, “Even though this was written 2,500 years ago, it sounds so current! With everything going on in our world, it could have been written last week.” As I pondered that thought, I was reminded of a passage written by the late, Rachel Held Evans.
“If you are looking for verses with which to support slavery, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to abolish slavery, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to oppress women, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to liberate or honor women, you will find them. If you are looking for reasons to wage war, you will find them. If you are looking for reasons to promote peace, you will find them. If you are looking for an outdated, irrelevant ancient text, you will find it. If you are looking for truth, believe me, you will find it.
“This is why there are times when the most instructive question to bring to the text is not ‘what does it say?’ but ‘what am I looking for?’ I suspect Jesus knew this when he said, ‘ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened.’
Evans summed it up, “If you want to do violence in this world, you will always find the weapons. If you want to heal, you will always find the balm.”
It is that last phrase that really speaks to me. Over and over again, Jesus seemed to be more concerned with motivations than he was behavior. Read the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) and note the number of times it says, “You have heard it was said…but I say to you…” More often than not, Jesus is pushing his hearers beyond actions to the motivations and thought patterns that guide them.
What exactly are you looking for when you turn to the sacred scripture? Your motivations and preconceptions may, in fact, determine what you get out of a text more than what the author originally intended.