Twenty-five hundred years ago the people of Judah were captives in Babylon. They believed themselves to be the `chosen people'. The main problem with believing yourself to be God's specially chosen is that everyone else becomes God's specially unchosen. Before long rejection, hatred and prejudice are being justified by the chosen ones.  

The defeat of the Jewish army and the subsequent captivity in Babylon raised troubling theological questions for the captive people: “If we are really God's chosen, how come we were defeated?” Unable and unwilling to give up the status of being God's chosen and desiring to save God from the charge of impotency, the theologians got to work. They came up with a very neat solution. ‘The defeat and exile were God's punishment upon a rebellious and unfaithful people.’ ‘They did not obey God's law.’ The people resolved, therefore, that when they returned to Judah they would be rigorous in obedience less they facedagain the wrath of an avenging God.  

There was, however, a nagging discomfort about this theological solution. It placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of the Jews' forebears. Were their ancestors so weak, so inept, so sinful? And if they were, why? Why were they disobedient, why did they not worship properly, why were they vulnerable to sin? As quickly as these questions played in the mind, answers began to emerge. 'It was not our ancestors' weakness at all,' the returning exiles argued. 'Some of our forebears had married non-Jewish spouses, who had contaminated us with alien traditions. God's judgment fell on our nation when we condoned these evil, alien practices.'

The scapegoat had now been identified. As like time and again in history, the foreigners were blamed. God's people therefore in future had to be vigilant to root out and expose any and all foreign elements. The theological problem was solved in a comfortable way. They did not relinquish that sense of being chosen, nor were they forced to entertain a vision of a powerless God.

When they arrived in Judah, using this theological mandate, Ezra and Nehemiah led the people in the renewal of their covenant with God. For good measure, these leaders proposed a statute designed to guarantee the racial, ethnic, and religious purity of the rebuilt nation of Judah. This statute required every Jewish man or woman married to a foreign spouse to divorce and banish the non-Jewish partner from the land. It further required that any "half-breed" children born of that union be banished with the non-Jewish mate. The enforcement of the law moved Judah into one of the uglier phases of her history. Racial purists organized vigilante squads.  Bloodlines were checked. Tensions ran high, as the inquisition tore families apart. Judah was to be for the Jews only. Foreign elements must be purged. No protest was heard. The hysteria drowned out every objection.

There was, however, at that time at least one person in Jerusalem who was sufficiently disturbed by the prevailing prejudice to confront it. He decided to write a story. It would appear anonymously on the streets of Jerusalem, and by its very charm and persuasive narrative power it would seduce people into both listening to and discussing it. He was sure people would comment and laugh as they listened. Then the point of the story would strike their hearts, and they would see themselves as they really were, and their prejudice would be revealed.

This brave story, this parable, is called the Book of Jonah, the first part of which we’ve heard read this morning. It is not literal history. There was no literal Jonah or big swallowing fish. Rather for the people of Judah this book held up a mirror wherein they could look deeply into their own eyes. Slowly, so the author hoped, they would see that God's love is not love limited by their love. God’s acceptance of people is not limited by whom they can accept. They needed to set aside our fears and be open to the humanity in those they rejected.

And this message continues to have a power and potency whenever immigrants are blamed and discriminated against, whenever anyone of another race or religion is assumed to be the problem. The ‘Word of God,’ the spark of the Spirit, that speaks from the past into our present, is the message, penned by Jonah, that God’s love is far more expansive than the love curtailed by prejudice.

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“The Word made flesh here is made word again

A word made word in flourish and arrogant crook.

See there King Calvin with his iron pen,

And God three angry letters in a book,

And there the logical hook

On which the Mystery is impaled and bent

Into an ideological argument.”

Edwin Muir, elegantly and pointedly, challenges the assumptions held by many of our forebears. What damage is being done when the mystery of God be reduced to ‘three angry letters’ and ‘an ideological argument.’

Unfortunately many Christians still today assume that the Word of God is the literal words written in the Bible, so that the Bible itself is thought to be the Word of God.  

Over a hundred years ago the then Dean of Chichester[i] proclaimed: "Every book of [the Bible], every word of it, every syllable of it, every letter of it, is the direct utterance of the Most High". Although the Dean was a learned man, his view of the authority of the Bible could not be further from the normative historical position of the Christian Church. The Bible is not the words of a divine being.

The New Testament, the Christian Scriptures, reveal the profound faith of their writers. The authors did not seek to write "theology", but to proclaim the excitement of their new faith in Jesus. Nor did they seek to write "history". Instead they chose to tell their stories. But because such stories are personal they are also subjective and upon close scrutiny are found to contain contradictions.[ii]

Following their personal experience, the earliest followers of Christ turned to their texts, to the books of the Hebrew Bible [in Greek translation[iii]],to find help in that great collection of memories for understanding the powerful experience which had changed their lives. The Hebrew Bible was searched for meanings, other than the literal meanings, and these alternative meanings were identified and developed. The writers used what we would call allegory or typology[iv].  

So for example[v] the reference to King David as the son of God was borrowed and applied to Jesus. Likewise with the reference[vi] to the young woman, or [in the Greek mistranslation] virgin, who would conceive and bear a child during the Syro-Ephraimite War in 734 B.C.E. was borrowed and applied to Mary.

For the Christian writers their experience of God was of primary importance. They wanted to ground this experience in the Hebrew Scriptures and, believing themselves to be led by the Holy Spirit, they engaged in unprecedented applications of those Scriptures to create what we call today the New Testament.

Over the next four hundred years after Jesus' death there was little agreement on what comprised the Bible or what inspiration or authority meant.[vii]The New Testament was not definitively agreed upon until the Council of Trent[1545-1563][viii],although by the mid-300s the four Gospels and a collection of some supposedly Pauline letters were in circulation.  

For the first fifteen hundred years of the Church the locus of the authority of the Bible was not in the literal words of a collection of books.  Rather, the primary locus of authority was in the tradition of the community alone - which after all had preceded and given rise to the books. It was the tradition of the community that could teach the correct way to read the text, and biblical literalism was held by many to be a form of idolatry. No reading of scripture was accepted within the community when it violated either human reason or common sense.

Augustine of Hippo [354-430], for example, believed that the inspired Scriptures were true, but insisted that truth could neither be limited to nor limited by the Bible.  He insisted, more strongly than most, on the importance of God's revelation outside of the Christian tradition, an idea with strong precedent in Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and St. Basil.[ix] Like so many of his predecessors, Augustine considered that every passage of scripture could have multiple true meanings.

The test in the early church to determine what was true and false in both Scripture and tradition involved the triple standard of ecumenicity [what the leadership of the five Great Churches believed], antiquity [what was the oldest], and common consent [what the people in the pews thought]. These standards emphasised the role of the believing community. Authority lay outside the scriptural text.  Doctrine and biblical understanding were understood as free to evolve in faithful response to unfolding new understandings within the community itself.  

The Protestant Reformation, important though it was in addressing many of the abuses of the Roman Catholic Church, unfortunately led some to believe that ultimate authority lay inside the biblical text.

The Bible was never meant to be a straightjacket or a book of irrefutable rules or a rigid programme for living. As the Psalmist said the Scriptures were a lamp for our feet and a light for our path.[x]They weren't to lead us, nor do the walking for us, nor the thinking for us.

The Bible encourages us to explore. It is not a rule book to restrict our experience but a body of wisdom to use as a guide. If you've ever used a guidebook to explore a complex city such as Rome, or Jerusalem, or Istanbul, you will know that the guide book gives great in-depth assistance in some places -but there is nothing like departing from the book to discover that special little place that you stumble into and wonder afterwards why it is not mentioned anywhere. So it is with our exploring in the fascinating ‘city’ called God. Many paths you won't find mapped.

In the Fourth Gospel there is a well-known verse, ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt(literally ‘tented’) among us’ (Jn 1:14). This ‘Word’ or logos is what Greek philosophy understood as the spark of divine life and creativity. This spark, says the writer, was enfleshed in Jesus. This spark too is thought of as the Holy Spirit. And although the Holy Spirit permeates the pages of the Bible, it also transcends them. God is not contained, as in restrained, by the words of Bible. Words, like all language, age. And some don’t age well.

Maybe, as the reading from Anthony De Mello today points to, we would be better to think of the Word of God as practical generous deeds to help those in distress, rather than printed words in a book.

[i] John Burgon.

[ii] The books of the New Testament differ, for example, in their use of the Hebrew Bible and in their record of Jesus' life and ministry. Some writers found the work of Jesus foreshadowed in one part of the Hebrew Bible; others found that work foreshadowed in yet other parts of the Hebrew Bible.   Each tells the story of Jesus' life somewhat differently: in Mark the women ran away from the tomb, but in Luke they remained there [Mark 16:8 and Luke 24:51; John places the driving out of the money-changers from the Temple near the beginning of Jesus' ministry, but Matthew places it near the end [Mark 16:8 and Luke 24:5]; the events of Pentecost look very different in John than in Acts [John 20:21 and Acts 2:5ff].

[iii] Christians should make a careful distinction between the "Old Testament" and "the Hebrew Bible".   The order, the message, and even the text of the two are different.   When the Old Testament is quoted in the New, it is not the normative Hebrew text which is quoted, but usually a subsequent Greek translation known as the Septuagint.

[iv] This resulted in conflicting readings of Hebrew Scripture among the Christian community, for example Matthew's and John's presentations of Jesus' disputes with authorities, Orthodox opposition to Gnostic mythic interpretation of Genesis, and the Nicene-Arian disputes over the meaning of Proverbs 8:22.

[v] Psalm 2:7.

[vi] Isaiah 7:14.

[vii] This was mainly due to the fact that there was so little agreement on how to read and interpret the various inherited Jewish and Christian texts.

[viii] It should be noted that the New Testament I am referring to here is that of the Western Church - the New Testament canon of various Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic denominations differs from ours today.  For example the Revelation to John and the Epistle to the Hebrews are excluded in some canons.

[ix] Augustine, Confessions,chapter 12.

[x] Psalm 119:105.

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