Stick
to the Text!
July
13, 2022
The Scripture quotations contained here are from the New
Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian
Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and
are used with permission. All rights reserved.
Of course, when I
was in seminary I had some courses on the Bible. There was a general
introduction to both Testaments of the Bible. There was a class on the
prophets, or at least some of them. I did some work on the writings of the
Apostle Paul.[1]
These parts of my MDiv program all had different professors, but there was one
phrase that all of them drummed into our heads. It became almost a mantra: “Stick
to the text!” When you’re doing any kind of exegesis of any biblical text, “Stick
to the text!” Don’t go wandering off
making the text mean something you want it to mean even though that meaning is
not sufficiently grounded in the text. Don’t go speculating about facts that aren’t
in the text at all. Don’t go asking questions about the content of a text that
the text doesn’t ask about itself. I got it. I think I still get it. Stick to
the text!
I was reminded
afresh of this mantra recently in a discussion of a biblical text with some
friends and colleagues of mine. I was reminded about how easy it is for us to insert
things into biblical texts that just aren’t there. A friend and colleague of
mine wanted to do something with a biblical text reminded me of what I had
learned so long ago. In a small pastoral support and lectionary study group in
which I participate, we were discussing the story from Luke of Jesus’ visit to
two sisters named Mary and Martha. You’ll find it at Luke 10:38-42. In this
story, Jesus enters the house of a woman named Martha. We’re told that Martha
has a sister named Mary. We’re also told that Mary “sat at the Lord’s feet and
listened to what he was saying.” Luke 10:39. Martha, on the other hand, was “distracted
by her many tasks.” Luke 10:40a. Martha complains to Jesus that her sister isn’t
helping with her with those tasks. Jesus replies to her, “Martha, Martha, you
are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.
Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” Luke
10:41-42. Whereupon the story ends.
The story seems innocent
enough, I suppose. It quite obviously is telling us that no matter how many
other things we have to do, it is still most important to listen to Jesus. It
probably seems to us that that’s about all there is to learn from this story.
That, however, isn’t all there is to learn from it. To understand what else the
story can teach us we need to learn some things about the context in which this
story was first told.[2]
We understand first that the story sets up the culturally standard way in which
rabbis like Jesus instructed the people who came to listen to them. (Unfortunately,
the rabbis back then were all men. The word rabbi means teacher.) The rabbi
would sit in a chair or on something else that elevated him a little bit. The
people he was teaching would sit on the floor, thus at a level at least a little
bit lower than the rabbi. They would literally sit at the rabbi’s feet. Thus, the
story’s first listeners or readers would find nothing odd about a student
sitting at a teacher’s feet.
They would find
something very odd about Mary doing it. We must understand that in the story’s
original culture only men were permitted to sit at a rabbi’s feet and listen to
him. Men could sit and learn from a rabbi, women could not. When we understand
that truth about the story’s original context, we see how radical,
revolutionary even, the story was. Mary has taken the expected gender roles of
her culture and overthrown them. Rabbi Jesus approves of her doing so. Mary has
taken a place reserved for men. Both the Jewish culture in which Christianity
arose and the Greek culture through which it spread were strongly
anthropocentric. Men were privileged over women. Men were active in public
life, women mostly weren’t. Men studied the texts of their faith, women didn’t.
Whether the audience that first heard this story was Jewish or Greek, the men
in that audience—there wouldn’t have been any women in it—would have been
shocked by what Mary does and probably appalled that Jesus affirms her doing
it. That’s how it was with so many things Jesus said and did. He turned the
world of his day—and of ours—upside down. That, I think, is the primary lesson
Luke wanted to make with this story. At least that’s what I have long taken to
be the story’s primary lesson. I still do.
Now, obviously, I
have done something here other than just look at the text of the story. I have
delved into the world behind the text, into the story’s original context. I
have used what I found there in finding meaning in the story. So have I
violated my professors’ mantra, “Stick to the text”? Though it may seem that I
have, I actually haven’t. Rather, I have used a customary and necessary tool
for understanding any text, namely, an examination of the text’s original
context. When we do that we often find new meanings in the text that we’d never
discover merely by reading the story in our context. We have learned things the
story’s author could assume his audience knew but that we can’t assume anyone
knows today. If we have read anything into the story, it is only what the
author originally assumed.
So back to my
friend and colleague. As we discussed this story, he wanted to consider what it
would mean if we assumed that Mary didn’t just listen to Jesus but entered into
conversation with him about the things he was saying to her. In our
contemporary context, that surely would happen. In our world students interact
with their teachers all the time. Some of the richest learning comes from that
interaction. When my friend started talking about Mary doing that I said, “but the
story doesn’t say that.” It says she listened to him and nothing more. To think
or speculate that she did something other than that is to read something into
the story that just isn’t there. This friend of mine also wanted to assume that
Martha heard Jesus and Mary speaking with each other. Could Martha have heard
them? Perhaps, but the story doesn’t say that she did. Neither does it say she
didn’t. I said this story, like most Bible stories, is skeletal storytelling. It
gives us just enough facts to make its point. The author of the story didn’t
need to say anything about Martha hearing them or not hearing them to make the
main point he wanted to make with the story. So he didn’t say anything about
it. We don’t hear this story the way its original audience did even when we
have learned important things about the story’s original context. That context
is not our context. This story does of course have something to say to us about
gender roles even though our world is not quite as anthropocentric as Jesus’
world was, or as Luke’s world was too. But that truth doesn’t mean we can
legitimately make up facts to insert into the story.
Because so much
biblical storytelling is so bare bones, we often have questions that the story
we’re reading neither asks nor answers. The Parable of the Prodigal Son is a
good example. You’ll find it at Luke 15:11-32. We have questions like: What specifically
did the son do while he was off squandering his inheritance? People often say
he consorted with prostitutes, but the story doesn’t say that he did. Did he
ever get any more of his father’s estate? Did he actually work for his father
as a hired hand as he had planned? Did he and his brother ever reconcile? I
have all of those questions about this parable, and I have heard other people
wonder about them as well. Yet I avoid projecting speculative answers to those
questions into the story. Answers to them just aren’t necessary for the story
to make its central point about unconditional grace. I suppose we can make up
answers to our questions if we want, but doing so is really nothing but idle
speculation, so why bother?
So I’ll say again
what my seminary professors said to me so many times years ago: Stick with the
text! Work with it. Study what scholars have said about it. (There’s absolutely
nothing in the Bible that scholars haven’t worked to death.) Learn about the
story’s original context. Wrestle with any linguistic ambiguities the story
has, and the Bible is full of linguistic ambiguities. Compare different
translations of the story. All of those things are legitimate, helpful, and
appropriate things to do. Reading things into the text, or ignoring things in
the text for that matter, isn’t. So I’ll close where I started: “Stick with the
text!”
[1] My
seminary was the School of Theology and Ministry of Seattle University, a Roman
Catholic university. One of the very few shortcomings of the MDiv program there
was that we didn’t get as many courses on the Bible as students in Protestants
seminaries do. Roman Catholicism doesn’t put the Bible as high on its list of
authorities as most Protestants do, hence, fewer classes on it.
[2]
For my purposes here it doesn’t matter whether the event this story recounts
actually happened or not. We approach it the same way whether it did or not.
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