Lection and Liturgy

In the previous post , I looked at some of the general issues involved in reading Paul’s letters. In today’s blog, I want to explore a couple of key themes. There are core ideas which crop up repeatedly in Paul’s thinking; but the specific ways he develops them belong to the different contexts of each individual letter. One idea which crops up in a number of contexts is usually called “justification by faith”. Since some people suggest this is Paul’s main, only, or central theme, we need to spend a little bit of time looking at it here, while saving many other themes for individual letters. It’s probably also worth repeating my previously given health warning: other views of Paul are available, and here we enter one of the more controversial (and occasionally rather bad-tempered) areas of both modern scholarship and church-dividing doctrine. Statue of St Paul in St Paul outside the Walls, Rome. Paul is commonly represented with a sword as a metaphor for the Word of Go...

If it wasn’t for the names of the biblical books, the title of this piece could look awfully like a contemporary headline. Yet in many other respects, neither Ezra nor Nehemiah feel particularly relevant for the contemporary world. Perhaps that’s why only one reading from these books crops up in the Sunday lectionary. Gustave Doré’s woodcut of the scene (1843: Public Domain) He imagines Ezra as a second Moses with stone tablets, rather than the scroll described in the story. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah are heavily edited stories relating various aspects of how things went when people began returning from exile to the land they still saw as the focus of God’s promises. Although the books have been written together on a single scroll, and are therefore often treated together, it remains a matter of much speculation among historians and biblical scholars how they (and their different parts) interrelate. 1 These books are concerned with the restructuring of society, in ...

The name Deuteronomy in Greek means second law: it catches something about the nature of the book. It is a retelling of the story of the previous three books, Exodus through to Numbers. It is, in that sense, a republication of the law – a second edition. It takes the stylised form of a very long farewell address by Moses at the end of his life, looking forward to what he will not see: the final entry of the people into the promised land. It serves also as a pivot in the Bible, looking back to the other books of the law, and forward to the history which will follow, Joshua through to Second Kings. That history has clearly been edited by someone (or some people) who wanted to draw attention to some of the themes of Deuteronomy. Key to those themes is a presentation of two ways: a way of life and a way of death. The idea of constructing moral instruction around two ways is a common theme of the ancient world. Two ways: “I have set before you today life and prosperity, de...

Leviticus was wholly legal instruction, but with the book of Numbers, we again have substantial sections of story. These narratives tell more of the travels of the Israelite people, as they make their way through the wilderness to the promised land. The lectionary only uses three short excerpts from this story. The first is a blessing, probably better known from its use in worship than directly from the biblical book. “The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you, and give you peace.” (Numbers 6:24-26) It provides the first reading for the 1 st January, eight days after Christmas, when the gospel relates the circumcision and naming of Jesus. 1 It helps relate the continuity of God’s promise of blessing between the two testaments, especially in the way Luke portrays the holy family’s Torah-observant piety.   Detail from Giovanni Bellini The Circumcision (via W...

From time to time I hear of people making new year resolutions to read through the whole of the Bible in a year. Very often, Leviticus is where such schemes get bogged down, and what seemed a good idea on 31 st December seems like a very poor idea by the middle to end of January. It may not be surprising therefore that there is only one reading from Leviticus in the three-year Sunday lectionary cycle.    This probably matches most Christian views of the book as mainly concerned with Jewish ritual, accompanied by the conclusion that it is therefore mainly irrelevant. The one reading that is used is an excerpt from Leviticus 19. Today’s post therefore seems a good point to stop for a moment and think about this genre or category of law, and see if we can deepen our appreciation of this little read book. There has been a long Christian tradition of saying that after Jesus, the ritual law has been set aside for Christians, but the moral law is still valid. A good ...

The second book of the bible launches into the story of Moses. It very quickly bridges the gap between the story as we left it at the end of Genesis, (with the favoured Israelites living in the nicest part of Egypt) and the point where the story of Moses begins (with the descendants of those Israelites all fully enslaved by the Egyptian Pharaoh). We begin with Moses’ birth. The story of the midwives is a masterpiece of subversive humour as the slave-race outwits the master-race (a similar sly humour pervades the story of the plagues). From there the text skips through his upbringing in Pharaoh’s household, to the story of his first attempt to take action in favour of his birth nation. Attempting to defend a fellow-Israelite, he kills an Egyptian, then flees in fear for his life. In the desert he encounters God in a burning bush 1 and receives the commission to lead Israel out of slavery from Egypt to a distant promised land.     Ivan Aivazovsky Passage of the...

The bible and Maria von Trapp share the same approach to learning: they start at the very beginning. Getting the do-re-mi of the scale right was essential to appreciating the sound of music; understanding the world as God’s good creation is the foundation for hearing the song of the universe. The pillars of creation – a detail from M16, the Eagle Nebula © NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage The book of Genesis falls into two distinct sections: the opening eleven chapters belong to a time essentially outside history. They deal with the same topics as the myths of other ancient Mesopotamian cultures: creation, flood, humanity and god(s). However, they give these common elements their own spin. The biblical God does not need help making the world. The biblical world is not a battleground between gods, but a home for humanity made by a kind creator. This God does not typically create or destroy on a whim, or in competition with other deities, but looks for humanity’s well-being, while e...

The first broad genre a Christian reader encounters in a description of the bible’s contents is “law”. Whenever the scriptures are referred to in the pages of the New Testament by genre, it is nearly always “the Law and the Prophets.” ( I discussed this language a bit here .) And many people are used to hearing references to the books of Moses, or the law of Moses, in relation to the first five books of the bible. However, what the reader finds when starting these books is not laws, but stories. It takes 50 chapters of Genesis and 19 more chapters of Exodus before we get to the giving of the law. This alerts us to a certain problem with the language of “law”. Detail of a Torah scroll So what’s in a name? The first five books of the bible are referred to by various names, especially Pentateuch (meaning “five scrolls”), Books of Moses, Torah (the Jewish term we’ve encountered earlier) and Law. This last is, as we’ve said, the one that crops up most often in the New Testament. Whichever t...