With Interpretation

I've been retired from active parish ministry for over a year now. Several times in the past year I have thought that it might be good for me to continue writing sermons even though I would never deliver most of them to any congregation. For all of my years of parish ministry I understood the weekly practice of designing a worship service and writing a sermon to be my primary personal spiritual discipline. Although I don't want to go back into active parish ministry I miss that weekly practice. So I've decided to write sermons again at least from time to time though I will never preach most of them. Here's the first of them:

With Interpretation

Scripture: Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10.

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Back in the days when I was serving as the pastor of a parish I had this experience more than once. I suspect most every Christian pastor has had it. More than once people said to me that they wanted their scripture straight, by which they would say they meant without interpretation. Just give the words, they said or at least implied. I guess I can respect these good folks and their desire just to have the Bible read to them without somebody trying to explain to them what any particular passage means. I take it that they either want to apply their own interpretation to the text or, more likely, that they don’t think that they interpret the text because the text doesn’t need interpreting. For them any biblical text just says what it says and means what it means, that meaning being obvious to anyone who reads or hears the text. And of course they would understand that the text has only one meaning that is universally true for everyone. I think I get it. People want the Bible to be simple. They want its translations to be perfect and its meaning obvious to everyone.

Well, as easy to understand as that approach to the Bible may be, I’m afraid that we simply can’t accept it. We can’t go along with it. We can’t tell these good but probably biblically uneducated folks that they’re right. That the Bible is simple. That its meaning is obvious. That everything in it means the same thing to everyone everywhere at any time. You see, all that just isn’t true. In this sermon I want to talk about why it isn’t true and what we do about it not being true. And I’ll start with the passage from Nehemiah listed above.

The book of Nehemiah is one of the post-exilic books of the Old Testament. It was written some time around the change from the sixth to the fifth centuries BCE. Many of the Jewish people whom the Babylonians had hauled off to exile in Babylon around the year 586 BCE had returned under the protection of the Persians, who had conquered Babylon in the 530s BCE. Those years after the return from Babylon were not easy ones for these folks. They were poor. They had to appease the Persians and pay them tribute. They had before them the daunting tasks of rebuilding Jerusalem, especially its outer wall that the Babylonians had breached and destroyed. They had to rebuild the temple. Tradition said, and says, that King Solomon had built a temple on a hill in Jerusalem called Zion in the tenth century BCE. The Babylonians destroyed that temple, and the people were determined to build a new one on the same site after they came back from Babylon. Yet they found that they didn’t have the resources to build anything like what Solomon’s temple had been. They complained about how poor and unimposing their new temple was. The prophets who had come before them had said that the time of return would be glorious. It wasn’t. It was hard and discouraging.

The book of Nehemiah sets its story of the reading of the law against that backdrop. It tells of Ezra, whom it describes as both a priest and a scribe, gathering all the people together in a public square and reading a scroll of the law of Moses to them. By the law of Moses it surely means the entire Torah, the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. All of those books or at least most of the stories in them existed in one form or another at the time this story is set. Those books were traditionally known as the books of Moses. That’s what Ezra read to the people that day in post-exilic Jerusalem.

And here’s what I think is the most important part of this passage. It says: “So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.” Nehemiah 8:8. Verse 7, which for some reason the Revised Common Lectionary leaves out of the reading for this Sunday, says that a number of named people and the Levites “helped the people to understand the law….” Apparently Nehemiah, who was the governor appointed by the Persians, wanted the people to hear the Torah law, and he got the priest Ezra and perhaps others to read it to them. But they didn’t just read it. They interpreted it. They helped the people understand it. Our text doesn’t tell us how they interpreted the text. We don’t know what these interpreters said to the people about what the text meant. It is however striking and important that our passage stresses how the religious leaders of the day didn’t just read the text to the people and leave it at that. They interpreted. They helped the people understand. Assuming for the moment that they did that well and in good faith, God bless them for it. Clearly we have here the Bible telling us that at least a significant part of the Bible, namely, the law of Moses, needs interpretation if people are to understand it.

That lesson about the Bible, I am convinced, applies to the whole book, not just the Mosaic law found in the Torah. Why is that? Why isn’t the Bible simple? Why does it need all that interpretation that many people today don’t want? There are lots of reasons why that is so. Some of them are quite academic and perhaps hard for people to understand who haven’t studied the matter in some depth. For example, there is a whole science of interpretation called hermeneutics. Today’s hermeneutics says that meaning never resides in a text alone but arises from the encounter of a reader with the text. Because that’s where meaning arises it follows that the meaning of a text, any text, depends to some extent on who’s reading it. If you want to know more about hermeneutics you can read Stop 3 of my Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume One, Approaching the Bible, Coffee Press, 2018. But for now I’ll move on to reasons why the Bible needs interpretation that are perhaps a bit easier to grasp.

The Bible is a collection of ancient texts. Many of its passages go back to oral tradition that is over three thousand years old. It’s newest text is still something like eighteen or nineteen thousand years old. All of the texts of the Bible were written in and for worlds that were very different from ours. We live in a world dominated by science. The worlds of the Bible were all prescientific. We are products of Enlightenment rationalism that reduces truth to fact. The worlds of the Bible were all prerational. That doesn’t mean they were irrational. It means they didn’t see human reason as the source of all knowledge the way most western people have since the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in western Europe. It means that in the worlds of the Bible people understood better than people today that there is truth that is much deeper than mere factual truth. They understood the power of mythic and symbolic truth much better than most of us do today. Yes, western culture is finally moving beyond its faulty belief that only facts are true, but most western people have a long way to go before they accept that insight and live into its power to transform lives. We moderns tend to communicate truth, or at least try to, by writing directly about what we consider to be truth. We write journalism, or we write essays or books. The worlds of the Bible communicated truth not by writing modern journalism, essays, or books but by telling stories. The people who first heard those stories may or may not have understood them as factually true. The important point is that even if they did understand them as factually true they also understood that they had far deeper truth in them than mere fact. The worlds of the Bible didn’t understand what it is to be human the way we do. They didn’t understand human sexuality the way we do. They didn’t understand the structure of the universe the way we do. The list of differences between the worlds of the Bible and our world could go on and on, but I trust the point is made. Every word in the Bible comes from a world so radically different from ours that understanding even the basics of that world takes a lot of work. Some people today have done that work. Most haven’t.

Which means that most people who read the Bible today commit the error of anachronism. They read the Bible through the lenses of their own culture rather than attempting first of all to understand the Bible on its own terms. That means they often, perhaps usually, misunderstand the Bible. I’ll cite just one important example here. Most people today, both Christians and non-Christians, believe that the Bible condemns homosexuality. That’s because they read verses like Leviticus 18:22, “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination,” as referencing a modern understanding of human sexuality. It doesn’t. It says nothing at all about homosexuality as a naturally occurring variety of human sexuality because in the ancient world from which Leviticus comes people had no such understanding. They assumed that everyone was what we call straight. When we take a verse from that world and bring it into our world as biblical truth we’re elevating an ancient understanding of human sexuality to the level of divine truth. It isn’t, but we can’t understand that it isn’t without the explanation that I just gave. That explanation isn’t apparent on the face of the text. It is interpretation of the text, but it is crucially important if we are to avoid a grave mistake in our use of the Bible.

The author of the ancient book of Nehemiah knew that the Bible needs interpretation. He (the author was certainly a man given the androcentrism of ancient cultures) knew his people could and likely would misunderstand the biblical texts they heard if they heard them without interpretation. Many people today don’t understand that truth. Because they don’t, the Bible gets misused in ways that can be extremely damaging. The way Leviticus 18:22 that I just cited gets used to attack gay people is one example. The way some Christians use Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 as a reason for denying contemporary science is another. The book of Nehemiah has part of the Bible read to the people “with interpretation.” We would to well to follow Nehemiah’s example. Of course there is good interpretation of the Bible and bad interpretation of the Bible. That unfortunate truth is probably unavoidable. Yet the reality of bad interpretation doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t or mustn’t interpret the Bible. We must interpret the Bible, and do it well, if are truly to understand it and use it properly. It contains great wisdom and truth, but only good interpretation can unlock that wisdom and truth for us.

So let’s be done with “I want my Bible straight without interpretation.” It actually isn’t possible to read any text without interpreting it, but even if it were possible ancient documents like those that make up the Bible absolutely need interpreting if we are to avoid misusing them, and misusing them badly. The work of interpretation isn’t easy. Most of us need the assistance of trained professionals to do it well. So be it. May we all do that work well. Amen.