Readings
10
The Book of Christ
Brother Matthew was solemnly professed in a strip mall. I had gathered with the other members of our community of the Grey Robe Monks of St. Benedict in a small church in the mall nestled between a Chinese restaurant and a burger bar. Outside a glass-fronted door at the back of the sanctuary a group of three young men were standing around beside the dumpster, sucking down bottled beer and talking animatedly, the cigarettes in their gesturing hands leaving smoky trails in the air. In the church we watched the prior invite Brother Matthew to formally declare his desire to be received into the community under lifelong vows, rather than the “simple” vows he was already under (which last only for a single year). Matthew read the declaration, then prostrated himself face down on the floor in front of the altar, arms outstretched on the ground as though he were about to be crucified. Two brothers came forward carrying a pall, the large richly decorated cloth that is traditionally draped over the coffin during a funeral. They drew the pall over Matthew’s body and knelt beside him as one of the sisters stepped forward and began to lead us in a long, slow, haunting chant.
Matthew was dying.
Not literally dying—or, at least, not physically, which may not amount to the same thing. This ceremony was a ritual death, a symbolic departure from the life Matthew had lived until this moment. Like baptism, this ancient monastic liturgy enabled Matthew to identify with the cross and resurrection of Christ, letting go of life in order to receive the gift of new life. Watching the brothers drape the pall over him, listening to the melancholy tones of the Gregorian melody, looking into the somber faces of the brothers and sisters gathered around him—all this was intensely and profoundly moving. There was more taking place here than met the eye, more than simply a man lying on the ground while others sang. This liturgy carried more weight, more meaning.
Under the pall, Brother Matthew began to tremble. Like a bride at the altar or a soldier climbing down into a foxhole, he began to realize with unnerving clarity the reality and significance of what was happening. As the chant drew to a close, the two kneeling brothers stood and drew back the pall, allowing Brother Matthew to raise himself to his knees and read the vow of solemn profession. The words of the vow were uncomplicated and written in large, clear type on a card held before him, yet he stumbled and stuttered through them. Lying under that deathly cloth had shaken him, shattered his nerves, or perhaps he truly was a man newly born, still wrestling to command his faculties. Either way, all of us gathering in that room understood his struggle. We too had been gripped by the profundity of the moment.
Brother Matthew rose shakily to his feet to be embraced by the prior, a look of joy and relief on his face. I watched, thoughtful. As a brother in simple vows in this order, I would make the same profession in another year or two. I would lie under that pall, listening to the community mournfully sing as I relinquished life. Soon, I too would die.
Experiencing the ritual had changed my perspective. What had previously been rubrics on the page of a prayer book had become a stark reality. The seeming simplicity of the words of the vows had been replaced by a sense of the radically transformed way of life those words implied. Clearly, there was more to all this than I had first realized.
Changed Perspectives
If the whole of Scripture is going to become for us a place of encounter with Christ, we may need to experience a similar shift of perspective. After all, Jesus doesn’t even seem to appear as a character in the biblical story until somewhere around the thousandth page. Almost four-fifths of the narrative of the Bible is over before we ever get to the stable at Bethlehem. It seems easy enough to imaginatively meditate on the Gospels, as I described in chapter nine, in order to meet with Jesus. But what are we to do with Leviticus or Ecclesiastes or Lamentations? Many of our Bibles are far more well-thumbed in the New Testament and, perhaps, Isaiah and the Psalms—the most obviously Jesus-centered parts of Scripture. How are we to dive into the rest?
Perhaps we need a fresh viewpoint. It’s often the case that some experience, event or piece of knowledge can shift our perspective in a significant way. We interpret a friend’s apparently uncharacteristic behavior in a new light when we discover he’s recently fallen in love. Visiting the country in which a favorite movie is set helps us understand the story in a fresh way. Seemingly erratic decisions being made in the workplace make sense when we learn that the company is being subjected to a hostile takeover. In each case, a broader understanding of the context leads to enhanced comprehension.
This also happens every time we read a detective story or a mystery novel. At first we are confronted with a seemingly unfathomable sequence of events: some violent crime, perhaps, or a spectacular theft. A diverse collection of characters are caught up in the orbit of these events, each with their own peculiarities and problems. We know, as we read, that at least one of these people is involved in this crime—perhaps some shocking murder—but which one? And how? As their tangled tales begin to unravel we find ourselves suspecting first one person, then another; in a well-written novel (rather unlike real life) we may eventually find that almost everyone has had the motive and opportunity to commit the murder, and the complexity is overwhelming. But the great detective, of course, is not as nonplussed as we are. Just when
everything seems insoluble a revelation strikes as some vital clue is uncovered. The final scene is set and in a dramatic denouement the detective unmasks the villain, showing how the trail of evidence leads uniquely to him or her, while explaining all the red herrings and blind alleys. And we, hopefully, close the book with a feeling of rich satisfaction, nodding sagely as we say to ourselves, “Of course—it all makes sense!”
Now imagine going back to the book for a second time. Returning to the first page, we already know how the entire story will unfold. When we first meet the murderer, we know he is the murderer. At the first mention of a vital clue, we already know its significance. Hints are dropped about dark secrets—but we already know what those secrets are. For us, the whole book has changed. The story still unwinds along the same course; the detective still reaches the same conclusions. But our reading is so different. Events and remarks we hadn’t noticed the first time take on a fresh significance. Characters emerge in a new light. We have been given an oracular knowledge: we still may not understand everything, but we have seen enough of the way this story unfolds to grasp it more fully than those who participate in it. We see what the detective and the other characters cannot see, what even a first reader of the text cannot see. We have the key.
What if we could read Scripture in this way? This was the beguiling idea which enchanted the minds of some of the greatest thinkers, writers and biblical scholars in the history of the church. And no one articulated the ideas that lay at the heart of their thinking more compellingly than a young Scottish priest named John Duns Scotus.
The Absolute Primacy of Christ
In the closing years of the thirteenth century John made his way to the university at Oxford to teach theology and philosophy. The Oxford of his day was, of course, quite different from the city modern visitors see. Although John was arriving in one of the foremost cities of England, strategically situated at the heart of the country, it would seem to us little more than a village. As Oxford eased into the fourteenth century (unaware of the horrors that war and plague were shortly to bring) it boasted fewer than fifteen hundred buildings (including the churches, monasteries and college properties) huddled in a few streets in the shadow of the Norman castle; there were probably not many more than two thousand residents all told. Most people, including the university students, were housed in wood-frame, thatched roof homes, which were drafty, dark and infested with rodents. The half dozen or so colleges then in existence were small institutions largely devoted to the study of Latin, theology and philosophy (many graduates would be drawn into the service of the church), and were dominated by the newly arrived Dominican and Franciscan friars. The “dreaming spires” celebrated by the poet Matthew Arnold were only just beginning to rise, and most lay decades or even centuries into the city’s architectural future. But Oxford’s reputation as a leading center for both learning and teaching was already firmly established. Considered to be on par with such luminary institutions as the universities of Paris or Bologna, it drew some of the greatest thinkers in western Europe.
Even in this rarified atmosphere, John quickly established himself as one of the most brilliant minds of his generation. Probably only in his early thirties when he began giving lectures—maybe even his late twenties—he showed a precocious genius for philosophical analysis. His ability to work with the most obscure and abstract concepts, to draw keen distinctions and to develop a wide-ranging web of ideas into a complex but coherent philosophy later earned him the nickname Doctor Subtilis, the “subtle doctor”—a name not always applied in a complimentary fashion. John could be so hard to follow, some of his later critics convinced themselves that his apparently impenetrable writing was simply a smokescreen covering the mundane thinking of a mediocre mind. But history judged them to be wrong. John Duns Scotus is now celebrated as one of the most fascinating, if difficult, of all medieval thinkers.
Among the contemporary theological questions that fascinated John was this: Why did Christ become a human being? (That’s a question which may not seem to have much to do with reading and interpreting the Bible—but, as we shall see, the implications of John’s response cut right to the heart of the way we approach Scripture.) Thirteen hundred years before John began teaching, a Jewish child had been born in the most humble of circumstances in the back streets of Bethlehem, itself an insignificant town in a minor Roman province. For centuries the Christian church had taught that this child was God incarnate, the immeasurable deity responsible for all creation somehow compressed into a tiny human form. What could possibly have motivated God to take such an extraordinary step: to allow himself to become so vulnerable, so limited, so small? Of all the ways God could have chosen to interact with humanity, why this one?
Two centuries before John, the scholar Anselm of Canterbury had written what came to be seen as a textbook answer to this question, in a dissertation titled Cur Deus Homo? or Why Did God Become Human? Anselm’s arguments would sound familiar to many contemporary Christians. He began with the Fall: since our rebellion in Eden and the irruption of sin into this world, human beings are in desperate need of a Savior. Drawing on a line of thought which went back to the earliest church fathers, Anselm said that such a Savior would need to work within the confines of the world he sought to save and would have to assume the form of the creatures he wished to redeem. Fallen human beings can only be saved by the willing sacrifice of a perfect human being; God himself chose to become human in order to make that sacrifice, in the person of Christ on the cross. In short, Anselm said, Jesus came on a rescue mission to save the lost.
But John profoundly disagreed. Not with every part of Anselm’s thinking: he didn’t take issue with the idea that Jesus’ sacrificial death on Calvary brought salvation for humanity. But he did question Anselm’s ideas about what motivated God to become human in the first place. How is it possible, John asked, that the most wonderful event in human history—when God stepped into the material cosmos in physical form, sharing our life with us, revealing himself to us as never before, coming into close communion with ordinary people in a way they could never have imagined—how could this magnificent intervention into history have been prompted solely by the most appalling and degrading human truth: our utter sinfulness? How could the greatest good be caused by the greatest evil? To believe that Jesus came and saved sinners is a central Christian doctrine, John said. But to believe that he came only because we had sinned is monstrous. It suggests that we somehow forced God’s hand, cornering him by our depravity into his single most beautiful expression of love.
John retold the human story theologically from a very different angle. His starting point was an idea known to us as the “absolute primacy of Christ.” It’s rather like a sophisticated version of the classic children’s Sunday school credo: no matter what the question is, the answer is probably Jesus. John looked at the entire universe and the great sweep of history across the millennia, and began with a simple assumption: this is all about Christ.
All creation was made for Christ, John taught, echoing an idea we already find in Paul’s earliest letters: “in [Christ] all things in heaven and on earth were created . . . all things have been created through him and for him” (Col 1:16, emphasis added). The author of Proverbs expresses the same idea in vibrant poetry (writing about the personified figure of Wisdom, seen in the Christian tradition as a figure of Christ):
When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in the inhabited world
and delighting in the human race. (Prov 8:27-31)
And from the beginning, John asserted, it was God’s intention that Christ should take human form, living among those in whom he so delighted and participating directly in the created order. For this reason this world was shaped as a place in which Christlike life would flourish, where the “image” and “likeness” of God (Gen 1:26) would be most at home—an image and likeness most fully seen in Jesus, who is supremely the “image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15).
But there is an important implication in all this: there was always going to be an incarnation. Human sin changed the nature of that divine participation: certainly without the Fall there would have been no need for the brutal events of Good Friday. But our brokenness did not provoke Bethlehem. Sin is not the fundamental fact of the universe, the primal reality of our existence. Christ is the foundation, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. The cosmos is shaped around Jesus. We are made in his image. He is the determining force behind all reality, all history, our entire human experience. And he is the goal, the destination, the endpoint toward which all history tends. In short, said John, Jesus is everything.
Christ in All Scripture
If, as John argued, the whole of creation entirely centers on Jesus, then we might reasonably expect to discover that Scripture is equally Christocentric. Not only that, but the idea of the absolute primacy of Christ could then become a compelling starting point for our interpretation of Scripture, especially when we approach Scripture with the desire, above all else, to find in it an encounter with God in Christ.
And in fact this was the way most Christians read the Bible for much of the church’s two-millennia-long history (and for centuries before John was around to give such a strong theological foundation for the idea). During one of his sermons on the Psalms, the fifth-century African bishop Augustine of Hippo exhorted his congregation to “remember that God speaks only a single word throughout the length of Scripture, and that only one Word is heard from the many mouths of the sacred writers—the Word that was in the beginning, God with God.” Six centuries later the hugely influential Parisian abbot Hugh of St. Victor would write: “All sacred Scripture is but one book, and that one book is Christ, because all divine Scripture speaks of Christ, and all divine Scripture is fulfilled in Christ.”
These writers were developing a tradition that reaches right back to the New Testament period. Throughout the Gospels, the Epistles and the book of Revelation we see Jesus presented as the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures. We have often narrowed that focus by affirming that in Christ a specific collection of ancient biblical prophecies about the future came to pass; some even claim to be able to enumerate the number and sequence of such prophecies. But the apostles and the New Testament writers asserted so much more: for them, Jesus was the completion and fulfillment of all Scripture, of the whole Bible in its many varied aspects.
Think, for example, of Peter’s first sermon on the day of Pentecost. These few brief words draw together a collection of different texts from the Hebrew Bible—a passage from Joel and quotations from a couple of psalms—and apply them all to Jesus. Two chapters later in Acts, Peter is confronting the Sanhedrin and quotes from another Psalm (“the stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone” [Ps 118:22]) which, he asserts, speaks directly of Christ. In a prayer later in the same chapter the disciples apply yet another Psalm to Jesus, while in chapter seven Stephen, during his trial, draws whole sweeps of the Old Testament narrative into his interpretation of the significance of Christ’s death and resurrection. Philip hears an Ethiopian official reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah while traveling on the road to Gaza and “starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus” (Acts 8:35). This same pattern continues throughout Acts: the Old Testament is constantly referred to as a text that speaks of Christ.
If anything, the picture becomes even richer as we turn to the New Testament letters. Paul, in particular, seems to see Jesus
everywhere he looks in Scripture. Christ is portrayed as a new Adam, a descendant of the first man who overturns the tragic results of the first sin in Eden (Rom 5:12-21). Abraham’s unwavering faith in God’s promise makes him the spiritual ancestor of those who will place their faith in Christ’s resurrection (Rom 4:1-25). Sarah and Hagar become allegories of the challenging choice presented by Christ: between living under the law of Sinai or in the freedom of the new Jerusalem (Gal 4:21–5:1). In one text Jesus is linked to the entire story of the exodus—to the “baptism” in the Red Sea, the leadership of Moses, the miraculous food and drink provided in the wilderness—leading to the startling assertion that Jesus was present to the Israelites throughout their wanderings: “they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ” (1 Cor 10:4, emphasis added). And so it continues throughout Paul’s letters—it seems that he is able to discern the presence of Christ in almost any biblical text.
The letter to the Hebrews draws on the Old Testament in a remarkable way to expound the significance of Christ’s life, death and resurrection. After a short, breathless introduction in the first four verses (just a single sentence in the Greek original) the letter launches into a whirlwind tour of the Hebrew Scriptures: quotations from right across the Psalter; excerpts from books as diverse as Deuteronomy, Proverbs, Isaiah and Jeremiah; allusions to the meeting between Abraham and Melchizedek; the giving of the law at Sinai; Israel’s wandering in the wilderness; the design and structure of the temple; the rules governing the priesthood and the sacrificial system laid out in Leviticus; and the prophetic promise of a new heart covenant between God and his people. The eleventh chapter famously presents a panorama of Old Testament heroes, calling to mind the examples of Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Gideon, Barak, Samson—the list is overwhelming. And all this is offered as one great and glorious witness to Jesus, who is greater than the angels, who mediates a better covenant than Moses, who embodies the sabbath rest of the covenant, who fulfils the great priesthood of Melchizedek, who ministers in the true heavenly sanctuary of which the earthly temple is simply an imitation, who offers the supreme and final sacrifice, and who establishes the foundations of the heavenly Jerusalem.
No wonder, then, that the author of this letter calls Jesus “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (Heb 12:2). He is the beginning and the end, the one who participates in creation with God at the dawn of time and draws it to its conclusion at the end of days. His presence can be felt on every page, during every incident, through every prophecy, in every life. Jesus is not simply a character who appears in the Bible somewhere toward the end, drawing together the threads of a rambling and complex story. Jesus is the central character from the first page to the last. The Bible is, above all else, the book of Christ.
Readings
You may find it interesting and helpful to approach this week’s readings using the same Ignatian method of meditation described in chapter nine. In each of these passages, drawn from the Old Testament, it is fairly easy to see a reflection of some part of the life and character of Jesus Christ—in Melchizedek’s offering of bread and wine, for example, or Moses’ transfiguration on the mountain.
As you meditate on each reading, allow yourself to become prayerfully aware of these parallels and connections, and be open to the possibility that Christ may be present to you in these narratives. Don’t force it. If trying to see Jesus in these passages seems contrived, let it go—let God speak to you in whatever way he wishes through the words, and rest easy with that. Either way, journaling about your responses may help you come back and reflect at a later date.
Day 1
Genesis 14:17-20
(Abraham and Melchizedek)
Day 2
Exodus 34:29-35
(the shining face of Moses)
Day 3
Ruth 4:1-6
(Boaz redeems Ruth)
Day 4
1 Samuel 16:1-13
(David chosen as king)
Day 5
Proverbs 8:22-31
(Wisdom’s role in creation)
Day 6
Isaiah 53:1-12
(the suffering servant)
Day 7
Zechariah 6:9-15
(the crowning of Joshua)