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Why I Preach from the Hebrew Bible

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-2876521

2164-0041

Stephen H. Phelps,

Biblical Studies and Interpretation

most christian preachers do not make much use of the Hebrew Bible. Black church leaders are the main exception to this rule. As a result, many churchgoers know little of the Hebrew Bible beyond a few beloved psalms, the exploits of legendary heroes, and, alas, their certainty that it testifies to “a wrathful God.” Well-traveled parishioners who have had direct experience of many other preachers have confirmed for me how unusual it is for a church to drink deeply from the Hebrew Bible during the worship hour.Not so in the congregations I have served. There, the Hebrew Bible sounded a major chord along with the New Testament. We journeyed through Genesis and Job, the Psalms and the Samuels, the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, prophets major and minor, the histories, and more. Very much hangs on whether a Christian congregation is offered spiritual nourishment from Jewish scripture, or whether, by contrast, silence teaches Christians to ignore Judaism and the Jewish people.My own journey with this question began in seminary in a crisis not of faith, but of vocation: for a time, I felt impelled to relinquish the aim of becoming a Christian pastor. In spite of the anxiety that attends any passage with “no direction home, like a complete unknown” (as Bob Dylan sang), in that clearing, a path to learning Judaism opened for me. My Hebrew language professor infused lectures and practice with love for the tradition. I studied Hebrew texts with scholars whose knowledge and passion formed one light. I experienced Jewish cultural and religious practices, so far as seemed fitting for a non-Jew. I developed a deep appreciation of Judaism and goodwill and humility toward the Jewish tradition and people. My journey through this landscape revealed to me a mystical path for apprehending truth. It is this: adorned in a thousand names, love bids the lover discover the unknown love. This is the blood in the body of true religion, not the known, but the unknown.Drawing on these insights, I would like to offer up seven reasons why other Christian pastors ought to join me in preaching from the Hebrew Bible.Not seldom, a Christian reminds others, “After all, Jesus was a Jew.” However elementary, this is the first reason to preach from the Hebrew Bible and the only one many will ever hear. This brief commentary is often offered with gladness by a Christian who wants to emphasize unity with, not separation from, Jews and Judaism. The phrase is also meant to chasten those who seem to think Jesus was sent straight from heaven to earth unburdened with so much as a history lesson about the land he would land in. The ugly fact is that while ignorance of Christianity’s birth within Judaism does not necessarily degenerate into anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism does necessarily feed on ignorance of Jesus the Jew. The preacher of the Christian gospel who cares about the people’s lack of knowledge must keep close in mind the rutted, bloody roads of violence against Jews throughout Christian history — and ride a different road.Preachers need not shame people for their fears and ignorance. This only drives the fears deeper, which are better left by the wayside. Preaching frequently from the Hebrew Bible can clear a path along which anyone unused to seeing Jesus as a Jew can simply join in celebrating the manifold voices of the Jewish people’s devotion. These are beginning steps in wisdom for a Christian. In my experience, those who first took these steps long ago seem not to mind retracing them. A vaster prospect beckons.In the New Testament, Jesus speaks several times of “what is written in the law and the prophets.” If a preacher teaches that this phrase refers to the Hebrew Bible, the people learn a little something. If, however, a preacher teaches directly from “the law and the prophets,” she can propose a great deal more. Provided the preacher does not force the texts to point to Jesus, teaching from the Hebrew Bible invites Christians to learn something of what lay in Jesus’s heart and mind — to step in paths of thought in which he stepped. It invites Christians to “remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there.” It invites Christians to see in Jeremiah and Ezekiel models of how a prophet acts and speaks in public. It invites Christians to “let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you” as “we tried to sing the Lord’s song when we remembered Zion” and to long that “instead of the thorn, there shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier, myrtle; that it be to the Lord a memorial, an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.” All people yearn to dwell within a narrative, with heroes. I preach the Hebrew Bible to supplement my listeners’ heroes and yearning with the heroes and yearning of Jesus and of Jews.Many Christians think that Jesus thought of Judaism as a flawed religion and assume that they can or should think likewise. Unhappily, more than a few New Testament passages seem to volunteer for service in belittling the religion of Jesus. Year after year, Sunday school children are bombarded with stories of Jesus slam-dunking verbal one-on-ones with “the scribes and the Pharisees.” Adult Christians who have learned nothing about religion since childhood repeat tiresome stereotypes of Judaism as a religion of laws but Christianity as a religion of love. Thus hardens the churchgoer’s heart.A preacher needs to bust up this hard earth, but it may not work to strike it with a blade. So many Christians are centuries deep in the assumption that they alone have the true understanding of the Bible — both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. To soften the soil of ignorance, pastors can pour the stories out abundantly. We water the ground until it can accept the seeds of truth and delight that are present to any humble reading of the texts, regardless of religion or culture. After a while, people drink from the flowing cups, giving praise and honor to the source of all spiritual fruit. Gratitude and joy for the traditions replace energies once spilled in making invidious distinctions.The Hebrew Bible is replete with the Jewish people’s unique critique of itself and its heroes. From accounts in Genesis of the inner weaknesses of the patriarchs and the matriarchs to the portraits of the kings’ lust for power and for women, to the prophets’ relentless challenges to the nation in the name of God’s justice, to Job’s jousting with his friends’ heartless religiosity, the Hebrew Bible beats a drum to advance a courage that questions, criticizes, protests, and demands justice from humanity and from God. How often I have said, “They could have burned these scrolls, you know, just as America has torched memories of its savagery, weakness, and woe.” But the Jewish people saved their scrolls, the severe with the sublime. No nation’s literature was ever so bold in holding itself and its myriad of misleaders to account.Once I have laid that groundwork with a congregation, it comes time to translate. Jesus’s judgments on his own religion stand firmly within Judaism’s prophetic tradition, which invoked divine judgment upon the Jewish people for abandoning peoples and practices. Therefore, Christians today need “to be like Jesus,” as the old spiritual has it. They need to transpose Jesus’s judgments from the ancient to the contemporary situation and call down divine decision upon the dominant religion. When the critiques of Jesus are laid against how Christians do Christianity, then leaders and led alike can feel inspired to take the beam from their own eye and see the world as it is and their sin in it.In sum, it was not a flaw in Judaism that Jesus saw, but a flaw in all who grow lax in the assumption that they have God’s favor. Left in human hands for a generation or two, all religions become decadent. All grow lazy and literalistic, too sure that their God really is in that box to which they have prime access through their priests or preachers. For grace to stay awake through the night of spiritual decay is a prayer devoutly to be made. Preaching the Hebrew Bible can bring to a congregation the subversive power of divine judgment against ourselves for shutting off the people and the practices that could bring us alive before a whole world.Many who attend religious services do not expect to have to think. On the contrary, they expect to be told the orthodox thing to think. (The word “orthodoxy” derives from Greek terms for “correct thinking.”) In and out of the church, people mean by “faith” nothing more than a set of doctrines and assertions to which a believer is required to nod assent, though not one could be tested by sense, logic, or experience. Preaching from narratives — and the Hebrew Bible has plenty — can thwart conformist religious attitudes by providing space in which listeners first remove the hot garments of doctrinal assertion and division, then swim. People can wade into the divine presence, as the figures in many of the stories do. Alternatively, the preacher’s invitation to listeners is to experience delight in a tale with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and in that way, to learn to think for themselves.In contrast to the narratives of the New Testament, which keep teachings about God close at hand, in many Hebrew Bible narratives, the divine nature or will is not a major character. The Genesis cycle is rather reticent about the patriarchs’ and matriarchs’ thoughts of God. In the earliest sources of the David cycle, God is not on the stage at all; the human drama is central. Although the Elijah and Elisha cycles regularly affirm the connection between the prophets and the source of their powers in God, the action is with humans. While the preacher hardly intends to avoid exploring the divine mystery, mystery is not like mastery. Its attitude is humble, open, and curious; not self-certain, not in control. How helpful then, when Bible stories encourage the attitude of mystery by revealing the divine presence just plain everywhere, often unnamed. Moreover, since narratives (allegories aside) do not lay down only a single meaning, the preacher who also refuses univocal interpretations of the stories all but requires the listener to do her own thinking. A sermon grounded in the Bible’s “less-God” narratives can help the listener discover his own wisdom to see more of the mar-velous in the world as it is.There is yet another reason — or better, yet another way — to preach from the Hebrew Bible. It has to do with how to read the Bible with trust, no longer depending on rigid credulity vis-à-vis things that can never be known. This understanding takes again as its point of departure early Christianity’s situation within Judaism.The first interpreters of Jesus were Jews accustomed, as he was, not only to the narratives of the Hebrew Bible and the messianic hopes expressed there, but also to ways of interpreting scriptures shaped by Jewish tradition, including, for example, the early tannaitic midrashic tradition. Midrash closes gaps in Bible stories by creatively and devoutly expanding the narratives where aspects of events and characters went unexplored in the received scriptural texts. Midrash is like setting a beloved song of praise in a new key, with an added stanza.When it comes to the biography of Jesus, most Christians have been trained to avoid a question wedged way in the back of the mind: weren’t there big gaps in his life story? Those who knew plenty of facts about him cannot have been many. Were there any at all who both knew him well before his fame spread and still lived forty or sixty years later to say what they recalled? On the other hand, the intensity of desire among members of the early Jesus movement to fill the gaps in Jesus’s story can hardly be overstated. It was desire of the kind that moves people to divine praise. As a result, the lenses that first focused on the figure of Jesus for faith’s sake were more like mystical kaleidoscopes than microscopes.To be rid of the rise of infant Jesus to kingship, did King Herod decree death to all male babies? No record of such a slaughter stands, but the Hebrew Bible does tell of Pharaoh’s order to kill all male infants so as to be rid of the rising Hebrew people. Is Herod’s murderous mayhem midrash? When Mary gave voice to the Magnificat, did someone take a memo for the soon-to-be-mother maiden and leave her a copy? Or did Luke, knowing nothing of Jesus’s mother but a name, but knowing a poem that stirred hope for a permanent revolution on earth, midrash this unsung psalm upon the lips of Mary because they were empty and open for his purpose? From a mountain, did Jesus offer a sermon shaped like Moses’s Ten Commandments? Or did Matthew arrange ribbons of sayings from the oral tradition on the Mosaic template to help bring Jesus home as living Torah, down from the mountain for good? Did Jesus utter from the cross words from Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you left me”? Or, with memory of that awful day gone blank in friends scattered in terror, did the poet of the Passion put Psalm 22 on Jesus’s dying tongue to do as storytellers long to do — draw listeners interior to a truth they know, but don’t know how to speak?Long, long ago, the facts these questions imply slipped beneath the mud of history. No answer will ever come from there. Some Christians feel very anxious near such questions, as if the foundations of the world will founder if fictions are found among the Jesus stories. For them, the badge of faith is the bravado to assert as fact what cannot in fact be known. Others feel very cynical about what seems to them evidence that religion’s truths are like those of politics — all spin, no spirit.When we preach the Hebrew Bible on its own terms, refusing to press the texts into service on ships bound for Jesus, and when we help people feel something of the motives and methods of first-century Jews composing stories of Jesus as praiseful soundings of the depths of their own scriptures, a door can open into an interior castle of faith built on a rock infinitely greater than stick-built facticity. In this castle, the preacher can ask the listener to consider the risk and the spiritual adventure undertaken by the authors of the biblical stories, in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.That there was risk and adventure is not itself a fact. It is a possibility to consider. It is the possibility that the process of writing what became the Bible involved immense, intense liberties and responsibilities. To write of the things of God is like mounting an assault on a cloud-shrouded pinnacle. Somehow, the writers had to accept that their own numinous experiences could be helpful, even normative, guides for a community of brothers and sisters stirred by inchoate hopes. With courage, they drew up the needful words, some from other sources, some sourced within themselves, and gave them birth and handed them, vulnerable as any infant, into the arms of a community, hoping that the communication might live and become life for others.Some stories failed. They did not meet the “tell test” — the spiritual and organizational need of religious communities to tell their treasures to the young. Some circulated in communities that never developed effectively. Others were completely forgotten — though obviously, this cannot be proved. But some met the challenge of the generations. This is a fact, perhaps the only fact about the Bible that observers from any angle can agree on: the writings proved invaluable in shaping and strengthening communities. When the preacher imagines all Bible texts coming into being through bold and hopeful poets and prophets, and invites awareness that stories of untold number slipped into oblivion, two things can happen for those listening.When the possibility is admitted that both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament were born through the same sort of creative, community-based spiritual process, it is time to step onto holy ground outside one’s own religious tent and look up at the great and starry sky and see that “we,” with everything we love about “our” tradition, are descendants of all who have longed for God by any name whatsoever. In this blessing, a plural “we” shifts toward One. A new “we” is constellated.The idea of divine revelation is pushed off its high heavenly shelf right into the listener’s lap. She has glimpsed the possibility that the Bible — the Bible! — is composed of concrete choices by writers and readers and listeners, all taken in eternal, mystical hope. Revelation, whatever it is and however divinely driven, landed in the breasts of men and women as courage to interpret in new language all that they had received — religious tradition, instruction, insights, intuitions, moral formation, even dreams. It landed as courage to offer these interpretations to help specific communities act on and feel their unspoken hopes. If divine power was always revealed — made manifest — in this way in communities of old, then divine power can come — no, must come — this way now.Whether or not the stories happened just as told, faith takes wing, flies up to bring a new word, like the dove sign, to join ancient and long-suffering yearnings to a possible future. It becomes clear too that we cannot, Icarus-like, paste on wings of our own design and fly however high we like. To be sealed in the great constellation, we need the wings given from generation to generation. It was never about us, but it is our time to speak.I also preach from the Hebrew Bible to call two nations from the delirium of war to the demands of peace. Those nations are the United States and Israel — the first because I am one of its citizens by birth; the second, because I am one of its descendants by faith.Many Jews worldwide do not see the contemporary political nation-state of Israel as a legitimate extension of the ancient conception of “Israel” (the Jewish people), and it’s a mistake to see the modern State of Israel as an embodiment of the ancient covenant of Israel. But the truth is that, despite the strong voice within modern-day Israel of secular Zionists who want Israel to be seen and judged as a nation like all other nations and who do not take this covenant seriously, there is also a strong voice within Israel of those who argue that the modern State of Israel is in fact a religious venture rooted in the covenant described in the Hebrew Bible. When those of us — Jews and Christians alike — who uphold that ancient covenant between God and Israel hear such claims, we must speak out about how the current policies of the Israeli government violate the terms of this holy covenant.As a Christian, I too am a descendant by faith of ancient Israel and its holy covenant promise, so I share a connection with Israel today, just as I share a special connection with the United States. With no other states do I share such constitutions. For that reason, I feel no compulsion to balance every claim with notes that other nations engage in evils worse than those of my two nations, for I have no part in others’ evils like the part I have in those of my two nations.If we citizens and children of these two lands intend anything besides manipulation when we speak of God’s law, then an extraordinary and risky calling sounds in our ear. It is set forth in the first words of the Lord God to father Abram in Genesis 12. There it is said that God promised Abram first that he would be given a land in which to live securely and second that he would be father to very many children. Now, these two desires belong to every living thing; the simplest sea urchin and the most lordly lion seek a safe place to live and many strong children. Since all creatures desire these two good things, and since all that live receive them — or must fight for them — it follows that neither of these two promises sets the people of Israel apart from any tribe. Yet the word “holy” means “set apart.” Inasmuch as neither of these promises sets Israel apart, neither should be thought of as a holy promise; rather, both are conditions necessary for receiving and acting on the call of God, and are offered by God only in service of a higher purpose.Through Abram, ancient Israel received a third covenant promise: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). One might object that we have omitted God’s promise to curse any nation that curses Israel. This objection fails for the same reason that the first and second promises are not worthy of being called holy. Craving curses upon one’s enemies is a common and unholy desire. Therefore, from the Lord’s first words to Abram, only one promise stands strange and holy, fully divine and fully human: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”The whole of the Hebrew Bible unfolds as a contest. Will the Israelites scratch from a patch of earth a safe place for their babies in a fearful and competitive way? Or will they rise and become a blessing for all the families of the earth, beginning with themselves and their neighbors? As often as ancient Israel decided on its own to blast, not bless, their neighbors, just so often did God raise up a prophet of doom against the nation.If the Israeli government today seeks only, as of old, “to be like other nations,” able to fight for more space for its people, cursing and destroying Palestinians and whomever else it fears, then it has abandoned the ancient covenant with God. When the covenant is abandoned, the nation has no calling. It is as if the scrolls of the prophets were burned. The same holds true for the United States, as our government abandons the U.S. Constitution in numerous ways, abandons our weakest members, and approves military policies that rain bloodshed down on nations we loathe. Israel and the United States depend on their founding principles for their vitality and their future. Insofar as the principles are ignored, the nations become disorganized and incoherent. Perhaps divine damnation of nations has always worked this way.I believe that, despite many temptations, secular leaders in Israel and the United States can still listen for the moral coherence laid down in the stories and covenants that constitute their nations. But these leaders seem unable to voice that coherence themselves. They need to hear it arising from their people. I preach the Hebrew Bible so that those who have ears to hear may find tongues to speak a blessing for all nations that may yet save us all from ourselves.