The Imaginative way of approaching Scripture

THE ‘IMAGINATIVE’ WAY OF APPROACHING SCRIPTURE

Chapter Five

from “COMMUNICATING THE WORD OF GOD. Practical Methods of Presenting the Biblical Message” by J N M Wijngaards, Theological Publications in India, Bangalore 560 055, 1974. First published in Great Britain in 1978 by MAYHEW-McCRIMMON LTD Great Wakering, Essex, England.

The whole book can be found online here: http://www.wijngaards-clackson.com/contents-communicating-word/ .

THE ALMOND BRANCH AND THE BOILING POT

Freely adapted from H. Arens, F. Richardt, J. Shulte, ‘Die Predigt als Kommunikationsmedium’ in Communicatio Sozialis 6 (1973)(pp.123-33)

L. Mencken once remarked that the chief contribution of Protestant preachers to human thought has been the massive proof that God is a bore. It looks as if Catholic preachers will be credited by history with a similar verdict. A study done on present-day preaching has brought to light that most sermons are monotonous and have little interest value. Small wonder that audiences are bored. This in turn leads to people avoiding sermons or drawing little profit from them.

In communication, the degree of information value is measured according to the degree of improbability or unpredictability of a piece of news. It is not the intrinsic value of the information, but the unexpectedness that holds attention. The motorist who is killed in a crash gets into the news; the hundreds of thousands of others who get home safely are no ‘news’ because their safe return is normal and expected. If a cyclone in India kills ten thousand people, it will be considered important news. If, however, the catastrophe continues long enough, its newsworthiness wears off; people get tired of hearing about it.

News need not always consist of things that happen unexpectedly. A good feature article will also attract attention if the topic has not been treated in the same way before. A feature article on the Pygmies in Zaire will be considered to have a high interest value if the information contained in it is specific, concrete and if it highlights unusual features.

The trouble with much of our preaching is that its information value, if measured with an ordinary communicator scale, is practically zero. The preacher says nothing new. Not only the tone and style he uses, but also his vocabulary and the contents of his talk are highly predictable. The typical sermon is full of generalities discusses fashionable topics and refers to well-known Scripture texts. The information it contains is uninteresting and redundant.

PARTY LINE OR REAL LIFE?

The monotony and dullness of the message imparted by many teachers and preachers cannot be ascribed only to their lack of imagination and poor communicative skill. One of the fundamental reasons why the standard instruction fails to interest is that it is seen to propagate an ideology, rather than proclaim a salvific message on behalf of a living God. Many preachers and teachers project the image of being not mystics or witnesses, but party men.

There are historical reasons for this development. The main thrust of theology in the Middle Ages was to establish an overall scheme into which all the truths of reason and faith could be harmoniously brought together. It was the period when the ‘Summae’ were written. In such a harmonising approach, the stress necessarily fell on general principles, on abstract notions, on universal laws. When the Reformation split the Church, the Roman Catholic part defended its orthodoxy by freezing its creed into a rigid lattice of beliefs and rules. All textbooks followed a uniform pattern. Catechisms were devised in which the whole of Catholic doctrine was spelled out in simple questions and clear-cut answers. Treating doctrine as a set of well-defined truths and duties had its value in a time when poorly instructed Catholic minorities had to hold their own within a hostile religious environment. But the image of Christian doctrine being an ideology or party line imposed from above remains as an unfortunate hangover.

For many Christians instruction about the faith is identified with an endless repetition of the same truths. By the stress on dogmatic theses, the reality of living faith is passed by. Sermons and instructions focus on the abstract truths about God instead of presenting him as a real person who wants to meet us face to face. Doctrine only becomes real if it is understood in terms of the mystery of life, its excitement and paradoxes. Salvation cannot be adequately expressed in tenets of the creed formulated in the past tense; it is the search of God for each person here and now.

In the protective scheme of medieval and post-reformation thought, people were sharply divided into distinct categories. Dividing lines were drawn between priests and laity, orthodox and heretic, Christian and pagan, true Church and Protestant, between practising and non-practising Catholics, between saints and sinners. These clear- cut divisions don’t do justice to what real people are really like. Human personalities are far too complicated to fit any such rigid scheme. The tendency to generalise and categorise kills human interest. People will recognise themselves more easily in such confusing types as the pagan who believes or the saint who isn’t orthodox.

Many sermons and instructions still show a tendency to moralise. There is a one-sided stress on the avoidance of sin and the performance of external duties. The preacher sees it as his task to point out to the people which actions are sinful and which are not. That the same information has been given often before does not seem to make any difference. The moralising sermon presents a ready-made table of vices and virtues, thus neglecting to help people in forming their own consciences and arriving at a personal Christian maturity.

The old type of Christian instruction lays heavy emphasis on authority and establishment. It holds out obedience as the highest virtue. It admires uniformity and rigid organisation. It expects the individual to fall in line with the existing rites and sacramental routine. Insufficient attention is given to the freedom with which Christ has made us free, to the individual growth of every person’s spiritual life, to the importance of personal conviction. The life of a Christian is judged by his measure of conformity, not by his experience of the Spirit.

The analysis offered here is not meant as an indictment of our teachers and preachers. There is no reason to doubt their good intention or to deny that the system had its merits in certain circumstances. But we should recognise that it has serious shortcomings too. It presents a one-sided and limited view of Christianity. It reduces a living encounter between God and man to doctrines and rules. And, as a consequence, it makes Christian instruction predictable and boring.

THE FRAYED EDGES OF LIFE

Both theology and the science of communication suggest a remedy in which Scripture, too, can play a role. It can be formulated as a rule; the more specific and the more concrete our presentation is, the more unpredictable and profound it will be. Generalisation and abstraction make what we say unreal and boring. Presenting individual persons or events with specific detail, we lay a connection with real life. It is through reflection on real life that we approach closest to the mystery of being and the reality of God.

It is here that the Bible can be of great use to us. For the Bible is essentially made up of real persons and events, of a multiplicity of specific and concrete happenings. In fact, this may be the reason why God did not want to inspire his word in the form of an abstract creed or a logical catechism. Instead he expressed his ideas and his love for mankind through his tangible dealings with individuals in genuine human experiences. The Bible is the ideal medium for communicating the message precisely because it is itself made up of real life.

In the book of Jeremiah we read:

“And the word of the Lord came to me, saying, ‘

Jeremiah, what do you see?’

And I said, ‘I see a rod of almond’ (Hebrew: shaqed).

Then the Lord said to me, ‘You have seen well, for I am watching (Hebrew: shoqed) over my word to perform it’.

The word of the Lord came to me a second time, saying, ‘What do you see?’

And I said, ‘I see a boiling pot, facing away from the north’.

Then the Lord said to me, ‘Out of the north evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land’ (Jer. 1,11-14).

This oracle of Jeremiah’s always reminds me of the picture of ‘Radha in the Kitchen’ (Fig. 10). Radha, who symbolises the human soul, is in love with Krishna, the incarnation of God. As she is cooking rice in her kitchen, she thinks of Krishna with great love. Meanwhile Krishna, who in the top right-hand corner of the picture can be seen sitting on the flat roof, listens with interest to a description of Radha’s virtues by one of her maids. However, while this intense spiritual and mystic interplay is going on, the earthly realities of the kitchen remain. The artist has underlined this by carefully painting the things one normally finds in a kitchen: a bundle of firewood, a pitcher of water, a basket containing vegetables, piles of brinjals and lotus leaves, a bunch of plantains and various cooking utensils. It pictures the experience of divine love in an everyday setting.

The same seems to be the point of the almond branch and the boiling pot. Jeremiah’s mind is full of the things of God. With prophetic foreboding he understands that God will mete out punishment to Jerusalem in the immediate future. While he is cooking his evening meal, his eyes are suddenly opened in a prophetic vision. The almond branch with which he is stirring the pot, which is called ‘shaqed’ in Hebrew, suddenly sparks off the message that God is standing guarantee, Hebrew ‘shoq’, that he will bring about his verdict. The tilt of the pot from the north makes him see in a flash that it is the enemy from the north, Assyria, that will be God’s chosen tool. Haven’t we all experienced, even though it may be to a much lesser degree, how at the most unexpected moments events or details that are insignificant in themselves, can help our minds switch on to a profound realisation of truth?

Fig. 10. Radha in the kitchen. Chamba painting, India 1800 A.D.

Take the story of the two wicked priests, Hophni and Phinehas, who ministered at Shiloh during the early days of Samuel (1 Sam 2). The Bible gives us a vivid description of how they used to give scandal to the ordinary folk.

The custom of the priests with the people was that, when any man offered sacrifice, the priest’s servant would come, while the meat was boiling, with a three-pronged fork in his hand, and he would thrust it into the pan, or kettle, or cauldron, or pot; all that the fork brought up the priest would take for himself. So they did at Shiloh to all the Israelites who came there. Moreover, before the fat was burnt, the priest’s servant would come and say to the man who was sacrificing, “Give meat for the priest to roast; for he will not accept boiled meat from you, but raw”. And if the man said to him, “Let them burn the fat first, and then take as much as you wish”, he would say, “No, you must give it now, and if not, I will take it by force”.

Notice in this paragraph of Scripture the striking detail of description. The callousness of the priests is well described by the fact that they do not mind upsetting people’s consciences simply because they prefer to eat their meat roasted. The three-pronged fork is a symbol of their greed and selfishness. This is real life and we can recognise ourselves in it. Don’t we too at times use our position to profit rather than render service? Does it not happen, for instance, that a priest performs his ministry to get admiration or royal treatment from the people for himself? In such a case God’s complaint could also apply to us: “Why do you look with envious eyes on the sacrifice which I receive from the children of Israel? Why do you allow yourself to grow fat on the best part of the things my people offer me?” (1 Sam 2,29).

These illustrations may suffice to show what is meant by the rule that we should be as specific and concrete in presentation as possible. Hophni’s servant holding his three-pronged fork or Jeremiah sitting in front of his boiling pot are images from the Bible in which God’s word finds expression in very specific and true-to-life forms. Making use of this scriptural approach, we liberate ourselves from generalisations and abstract statements and enter the field of mystery, experience, real life and personal encounter with God.

What we should learn from it is to value whatever is specific and concrete. As I will explain later when introducing narration and characterisation, we should on no account diminish the original force of the text by levelling it off into a more general presentation. At all costs we should preserve that awareness of real life that radiates from the scriptural pages.

RE-LIVING SCRIPTURE IN OUR OWN WORLD

Normally people are very much aware of the inadequacy of their own personal experiences. They feel hemmed in and constricted by the smallness of their own lives: the routine of their daily task, the narrow circle of friends and relatives, the oppression of anxieties and worries. Many try to escape from this prison by giving free rein to their imagination. By seeing films or reading novels, they try to give themselves vicariously the experience of other emotions, exciting adventures, totally different surroundings; I say ‘vicariously’ because they undergo these experiences by identifying themselves with the heroes of fiction.

To transcend the limitations of our small human lives is a deep- seated human need. It is even a religious need. The need is not adequately met by escaping into the realms of fiction, because this doesn’t help us to face reality; it postpones problems, but doesn’t solve them. The real solution for man lies in a conscious integration of one’s own narrow experience into the wider reality of existence. By art, music and poetry we touch on realities such as harmony, beauty, contrast, rhythm. By learning about other people and by sharing their experiences, we make common cause with them and widen the meaning of our own life. By an attitude of listening, of reflection on the mystery of existence, of being open to what reality tells us, we become aware of new dimensions. All this gives meaning to what seems small and insignificant in our own life.

It is in the context of this integration of oneself into the wider reality – in this religious context – that the Bible has to play an important role. For the Bible contains the message of God through which the narrow limitations of our lives are torn down in a decisive manner. And this message of God comes to us in the form of human experiences, so that, by identification, we can easily make it our own. To benefit from the Bible in this way, we have to re-live it, in all its richness, so that the experiences recorded there become our own experiences, our experiences today.

Jephthah was a half-caste Israelite, a robber chief, who had been asked by the men of Gilead to lead them in their war against the Ammonites. In his own way, Jephthah was a religious man. At the beginning of the war, he made a vow, “If you will give me the victory over the Ammonites, then whoever shall be the first to come from the doors of my house to meet me when I return victorious, shall belong to you. I will offer him up as a burnt offering”. Imagine his distress when, after the victory, it was his daughter who came out first!

“And Jephthah returned to his home at Mizpah. And behold, his daughter came out to meet him dancing to the sound of timbrels. She was his only child. Beside her he had neither son nor daughter” (Judges 11,34).

The story of Jephthah illustrates the kind of tragedy one often meets. The joy of the victory and the happy dance of the daughter are marred by the ugly prospect of death. Jephthah is misguided: God doesn’t want human sacrifices (Dt 12,31), but Jephthah doesn’t know it. He feels bound in conscience to perform his vow. Don’t we recognise the same tangle of blindness and good intention in Christians who burn heretics out of religious zeal, in a father who refuses to take his daughter back home because she is pregnant, in a general who sends a soldier on a mission where he will be certainly killed? To understand this kind of situation, to be able to live with it even if we cannot change people or correct their opinions, we have to approach it the way the Bible does. We ourselves can observe what goes on from a distance; only God can make sense of it.

We have to learn how to make creative use of the biblical material. Real human experiences are so complex that they can spark off different responses in different people. That is why the Bible is so long and so varied. If we were to restrict ourselves to its intellectual content, the scriptural text could have been compressed into at most one-tenth of its present size. But precisely because the Word of God is more than an intellectual idea, because it expresses a living encounter between God and man, exemplified and made real through human experiences, it cannot and should not be reduced in such a manner.

No part of Scripture, therefore, is superfluous. Last century Scripture scholars debated about the wagging tail of Tobias’s dog. It will be remembered that young Tobias had gone on a journey to collect some money on behalf of his father. Blind, old Tobit and his wife Anna were anxiously waiting for his return. The Bible recounts the moment as follows:

Fig. 11. Blind Tobit by Rembrandt (1651).

“The dog which had accompanied Tobias and Raphael during the journey, ran ahead and as a messenger of the good news it merrily wagged its tail. Then Tobias’s blind father rose and started walking tottering on his feet. Eagerly he stretched out his hands towards his child and so walked out to meet him.

He embraced him and kissed him. His wife did the same and both began to weep of joy” (Tob 1,9-11).

The second half of verse 9 (describing the wagging of the tail) is not found in the Greek manuscripts; but it was in the Aramaic text from which St. Jerome made his translation. It shows that the story existed in different forms: at least one of the narrators thought it worthwhile to bring in the description of the dog. Among Scripture scholars a discussion arose as to the role of this verse. Some stated that it is superfluous because it does not contain matter of revelation. Others contended that it could not be inspired because its contents were too insignificant. To me it would seem that the whole discussion took a wrong turn because it started from the presumption that God is interested only in revealing some intellectual truths or moral obligations.

The function of the dog in the story is obvious to anyone who starts from a recognition of human experience. The running ahead of the dog is exactly the kind of thing that will happen at such a home-coming. Because we can visualise the dog with its wagging tail, because we can feel how it radiates happiness, because we can almost see with our eyes the effect it has on old Tobit, the little incident of the dog helps us to experience the story as something real. It is because we omit “the wagging tails” that our sermons and instructions are so dull and dreary.