Reading the Bible

 

What on earth was THAT all about?

At Evensong in Canterbury Cathedral, as at Daily Offices throughout the world, short passages from the Bible are read; usually one from the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, and one from early Christian writings, the New Testament. Most days between one and two hundred people attend these services, joined by up to two tor three thousand online. Man, perhaps most, of these will be familiar with Christian worship. Some of us are fortunate enough to live in Canterbury, so the Cathedral is our spiritual home. A lot more come as pilgrims or visitors to Canterbury from churches of various traditions around the world, or log in from their homes. All these people will be used to hearing the Bible read in this way.

But people of many other faith backgrounds also come to Canterbury Cathedral, drawn by its architecture and/or fine musical tradition, and some of them come to Evensong. They may be Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Shintoists or those (according to the last census more than a the third of UK residents) who say they have no religion. I often wonder what they make of the Bible reading, particularly when it is part of a war story in which God seems to be encouraging the slaughter of the writer’s enemies. Do they think that is what Christians believe to be good? And indeed why do we still read these stories, and what should we make of them?  

In her sermon at Canterbury Cathedral on Bible Sunday 2024 Canon Wendy Dalrymple thought about this. She acknowledged the temptation to “edit out the grotty bits, focus on Jesus and try to be a good person.” This temptation is not new; in the second century AD. Marcion of Sinope wanted to ditch the whole of the Hebrew Bible and all New Testament writing except edited versions of one gospel and a handful of St Paul’s epistles. Wendy however suggested that the Bible, including “the grotty bits” describes “the fullness of the story of the human condition”. Like it or not this includes wars, conflicts over lands and all the other nasty things human beings do to each other. She summarised this as the story of “what happens when people hear things of God, misunderstand them and go their own way”, and suggested that one helpful response was to try to look with compassion on those biblical characters we instantly dislike.

As she put it the Bible is not a “comfort meal of beautiful thoughts”. But occasional churchgoers are quite likely to expect that it is, not least because the passages they are most likely to have heard, at baptisms, weddings, funerals and carol services, tend to be bits that fit that description. And even practising Christians may mistakenly expect passages read in public worship to give moral and practical guidance if they are not familiar with the context from which they are drawn. This error is reinforced by the custom (often observed at Mass, but fortunately not at Evensong) by saying “This is the Word of the Lord” after a reading.  

Of course the Bible is not one book written by God; it is a collection of writings of different genres and different periods by a wide variety of authors, known and unknown, which record in various ways humanity’s struggles with the meaning of life and how to live it. We need be aware of this when reading it. We don’t read poetry, historical narrative, personal letters or allegories or saga in the same way when they are not in the Bible; nor should we when they are included in it. With the historical books we need to take account of the perspective and prejudices of the writer, and the historical context in which it was written, as we would with any historian. Even the most conservative Christians and Jews do not see injunctions which might have seemed reasonable three thousand years ago, like stoning to death a disobedient son or someone who gathers sticks on the Sabbath (Deuteronomy 21:18, Numbers 15:32-36) as rules to be followed today. The Bible needs to be “inwardly digested” as the collect for Bible Sunday puts it.

Part of the problem is that often readings at Evensong are part of a serial; a book of the Bible is read in sections over days or even weeks. This is fine if like clergy or monks (for whom the Daily Office was principally designed) you take part every day, but taken alone one evening’s passage makes no more sense than a single episode of The Archers or Coronation Street. We need to understand the context.Readers often give a short introduction to the context of the reading, but what you can do in a couple of sentences is very limited.

And ideally we should do this with others, not just as individuals. Wendy pointed out that solitary Bible reading is post-Reformation phenomenon; before printing books were rare and expensive, and most people heard them read out loud rather than reading them alone. One of the best experiences of Bible reading I have had was when I was part of a “Bible Book Club”. Like any book club we chose a book to read, read it at home and then met over coffee and cake to discuss it. The only difference from most book clubs is that we didn’t choose a novel, but one of the 73 books of the Bible (we included the Apocrypha in our library). Discussing a book with other people reveals aspects of the writing we wouldn’t have thought of ourselves.

And reading a book from start to finish is very different from reading or hearing a bit taken out of context. An old joke illustrates this:

A man struggling to know what to do with his life decides to open a Bible at random for guidance. His finger landed on a line from Matthew’s Passion narrative (Ch 27 v 5): “then Judas went and hanged himself.” The man thought “that’s not right, let’s try again.” This time his finger lands on the end of the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:37): “Go and do thou likewise.”

So when we hear a Bible reading in public worship we should be aware what type of book it is taken from, who wrote it and in what circumstances, what the rest of that book says and what other Christians and or Jews have made of it. If we don’t know the answers to these questions then perhaps we should go away and find out.

But the question remains: how to explain this to visitors with no religion who decide it will be nice to finish their visit admiring the architecture of Canterbury Cathedral by attending Evensong, because they’ve heard the choir is very good?

But how can this