Readings
11
Sacred Reading
The desert air was still cool as dawn broke over distant mountains to the west. Abba Anastasius, one of the hundreds of elderly monks scattered across the fourth-century Egyptian desert, pushed himself up from his reed mat bed, crossed himself, and stood in the doorway of his simple cell as he recited his familiar morning psalms by heart. As his prayer drew to a close he stayed in the doorway a moment longer, savoring the stillness of the wilderness and allowing himself to be cheered by the memory of the fervent monk who had visited him the day before. Such an eager young man! They had sat for hours discussing their prayer, their fasting and their experience of the spiritual life. The visitor had seemed especially delighted with Anastasius’s Bible. Hardly surprising, of course; the hand-copied volume, a gift from a grateful nobleman, was worth a small fortune. Together they had pored over passages from the Psalter, the Gospels and two of Paul’s letters, the young man’s eyes sparkling as they read.
Anastasius stretched, went back into the cell and reached up to the shelf above the window for his precious text.
It was gone.
For a moment Anastasius could only stare up at the empty shelf in surprise. Then, slowly, realization washed over him. Only one person had enjoyed access to the cell the previous day: his enthusiastic visitor. The young man had left late the night before, and clearly the book had quietly departed with him.
The elderly monk went back to the doorway and sat down, looking out down the rough path leading up to his cell from the distant desert road. And he began to pray, singing softly to himself the psalms he had memorized from his beautiful book.
A few hours later the sun had climbed high in the sky, but still Anastasius sat praying in his doorway. And then through the shimmering air he caught a glimpse of someone approaching him from the road. Two visitors in two days! He half thought—half hoped, even—that it might be the young monk returning, but as the figure came nearer he recognized one of the merchants from a nearby town.
“Abba Anastasius!” called the trader in greeting, respectfully bowing his head before he approached the cell. “Are you able to spare me a few moments of your time?”
“Ammon,” the old monk replied, “it’s always my honor to welcome you. Come and sit. Let me fetch you water. It’s a tiring journey across these sands in the middle of the day.”
The merchant climbed down from his donkey, accepting gratefully the monk’s cup of water and the accompanying prayer of blessing. Then he pulled a cloth-wrapped package from the donkey’s saddlebag. “Someone visited me today offering to sell me something quite unusual,” he said handing the package to Ana-stasius. “It’s a Christian relic of some kind. I’d like your opinion on it, abba.”
Anastasius gently unwrapped the cloth covering and was not wholly surprised to find himself holding his precious Bible. “It certainly is beautiful,” he murmured. “I’d be very glad to own it myself.” He ran a finger across the leathery cover. “What price is being asked?”
The merchant named the prodigious sum. Anastasius looked thoughtful, then handed back the book. “It seems a very good price,” he said quietly. “I think you should buy it. You’ve found a real bargain, Ammon.” And he said nothing more as the merchant packed the book back into his saddlebag, mounted the donkey and rode away.
Three days later Anastasius was weaving reeds into baskets when he heard a knock at the cell door. He opened it to find the zealous young monk standing before him, clutching a very familiar-looking cloth-wrapped package. Without speaking the young man peered intensely into the older man’s eyes. Then finally he burst out, “‘A bargain’? Is that all you had to say? ‘A very good price’?”
Anastasius nodded, not speaking.
“But that’s ridiculous!” cried the young monk. “I stole this from you! How could you simply let me get away with that?”
The older monk placed his hand around the younger man’s shoulders and guided him back into the cell, where they sat down together. “The abbas tell the story of Abba Serapion, who owned a very fine copy of the Gospels. One day he sold the book and gave all the money he received to the poor. And then he came back to the brothers, grinning, and told them, ‘I had a book which told me to sell everything and give the money to the poor. So I sold it!’ When I saw you had taken the book, I reminded myself of Serapion. What did I know? Perhaps you needed the book more than I did. Besides, when you came to me, I welcomed you as Christ. I could hardly deny Christ his own book!”
Slowly and thoughtfully the young monk unwrapped and handed back the Bible. “Pray for me, abba,” he whispered.
“I’ve done nothing but pray for you these last three days,” replied the old monk.
“Well, it must have done some good,” answered the younger man. “After all, you’ve recovered your book.”
Anastasius regarded him for a few moments, then with a smile said, “Oh, I think I’ve recovered much more than that.”
Jesus at the Center
The ancient desert monks understood instinctively what Duns Scotus would later articulate so intellectually: that Jesus is at the very center of Scripture, and any authentic reading of the Bible will ultimately lead to an encounter with Christ. And it is this encounter, this meeting with God on holy ground, that is the very goal and purpose of our reading. To perceive only the text, without perceiving Christ who inhabits the text, is to entirely miss the point. Our ability to meet with Jesus in the pages of Scripture is far more important than any academic mastery of its contents. But the encounter begins with the recognition that the Bible is, first and foremost, a book whose contents are redolent with Christ from first to last.
This simple idea—that Jesus is the center and focus of Scripture—completely transformed the way subsequent generations of Christians read the Bible. In the centuries following the New Testament era the church’s greatest thinkers continued to explore and expand the implications of understanding Jesus as the key to interpreting Scripture. In a tradition that can be traced right back to such influential figures as Philo, the gifted first-century Jewish philosopher, and Origen, a remarkable Christian theologian who flourished in Alexandria in the early third century, biblical interpreters came to think of the Bible as consisting of a series of overlapping layers of meaning—layers which combined to form a picture of Christ at the heart of creation.
Before the advent of computer-based technology, animators used to draw cartoons frame by frame on a series of “cels”—transparent celluloid sheets. Every moving element in the picture would be created on a separate cel. For example, one cel might contain a background image of a kitchen. A second would show one of the characters placing cheese into a mousetrap, while on a third the animator would paint a mouse peering around a corner. When the cels were all complete they were overlaid to form a single image: the homeowner baiting the trap while the mouse watched. Each cel makes a certain degree of sense on its own, but only when they are combined do we get the full picture.
In a similar way, these ancient Christian interpreters came to see in Scripture a picture formed from overlapping images, each coherent in itself but only together revealing the whole image. They increasingly came to believe that these layers of meaning not only told the story of the people of God across history, from the creation of the world to the formation of the church, but also spoke throughout—from Genesis to Revelation—of the nature and character of Jesus, of his coming, of our present life in him and of God’s eternal desire and intention to reconcile all creation to himself in Christ (2 Cor 5:19).
So what are these overlapping layers of meaning? First, every text of the Bible has a literal layer, its straightforward and most obvious sense. This is often very clear, especially in the long sections of biblical narrative; when Scripture says David slew Goliath, or that Jesus was baptized in the Jordan, or when Paul writes that “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 5:1), the words mean exactly what they say. Not every text is quite so blunt, of course; poetic passages lean heavily on metaphors and imagery that need to be correctly understood and interpreted, and some sections of the Bible are simply obscure and difficult to interpret (the book of Revelation has shipwrecked any number of doomsayers across the ages). But in general the Bible can be read and understood in terms of its plain and obvious meaning, a principle the Protestant Reformers called the “perspicuity of Scripture.”
But overlapping that literal layer of Scripture are other deeper layers of meaning. The first of these is usually known as the allegorical layer. This is the meaning the text acquires when it is read not simply on its own terms, but in light of the cosmos-shaking events surrounding the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. For example, the book of Exodus tells us that the Israelites passed through the Red Sea, wandered through the wilderness, drank water from the rock Moses struck and ate the bread of heaven. But Paul, as we have seen, relates all this to Christ and his role in delivering the people of Israel: they were baptized in the Red Sea, ate the spiritual food of Christ’s body and drank from the rock that is Christ (1 Cor 10:1-5).
In fact, it is Paul who gives us this word allegorical. In the fourth chapter of his letter to the Galatians he draws on the Genesis stories about Hagar and Sarah, and writes:
Now this is an allegory: these women are two covenants. One woman, in fact, is Hagar, from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery. Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the other woman corresponds to the Jerusalem above; she is free, and she is our mother. (Gal 4:24-26, emphasis added)
Paul is not suggesting that the literal sense of these Old Testament stories is untrue. There really was an exodus through the Sea, a wandering in the wilderness and manna from heaven. The two women, Hagar and Sarah, were real flesh-and-blood women. Paul is not purely spiritualizing the texts. But since the advent of Christ he can no longer read them as though they were only about a national deliverance, a journey or two feuding wives. He sees in them a deeper significance, another layer of meaning. In every part of Scripture, he sees Christ.
The third layer of meaning is often called the tropological layer (from the Greek word tropos, meaning a manner or way of life). It is sometimes called the moral layer, but that term can be misleading. When we seek to unearth the tropological layer of Scripture we are not primarily looking to define principles of morality and ethics, nor are we looking for the “moral of the story.”
Take the tale of David and Goliath in 1 Samuel 17. If we approached that narrative the way we consider one of Aesop’s fables, we might try to formulate an appropriate moral to the tale—for example, “strong faith will overcome strong opposition,” or “stand firm with God even when the odds are against you.” Many contemporary preachers treat the biblical stories in exactly this way, as rich seams from which we can mine practical wisdom—principles to apply and action points to follow through. This may have its place, but has little to do with the layer of meaning we seek here.
Thus, we begin by looking behind the third layer at the second (allegorical) layer of the text: how does this passage relate to Christ? We can see in the conflict between David and Goliath a reflection of the wider cosmic conflict between good and evil, between the kingdom of God and the power of the prince of lies. It doesn’t stretch the imagination much to see in David a likeness of Christ, humble and seemingly outmatched by the powers of this world. The defeat of the mighty Goliath is as surprising as Christ’s overthrowing of this sinful age through his own death and resurrection. In fact, ancient interpreters found rich soil for an allegorical reading here.
Drawing on this we can explore the tropological layer by asking: how should we live in response to Christ as he is revealed in this passage? The text clearly invites us to align ourselves with Christ in his humility and weakness, rather than adopting the tactics of power and force. In this light the Scripture appears to be calling us to a particular tropos. We can read it not only as an encouragement to trust God when we are in a position of weakness but also (like Christ) to deliberately and intentionally embrace weakness and vulnerability for, as Paul reminds us, “whenever I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:10). Rather than a simple “moral of the story,” this layer of meaning suggests to us ways of living that form a consistent and appropriate response to the reality of Christ in our lives. (We’ll begin to explore this in more detail in chapter twelve.)
The final layer is the anagogical (from two Greek words meaning “to lead toward”). The question here is: how does this text speak of the way our lives are being drawn into the life of Christ? This has two dimensions. First, the Bible consistently points us toward the consummation of all things in Christ, the “last day” or “end of the age” when God will reconcile all things to himself, when he will usher in his glorious kingdom in all its fullness, and when God will become “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28). Since all history and all human experience is inevitably ordered to that final end, however much we might resist it, we can reasonably expect to find that expectation and hope threaded throughout Scripture. But the Bible also suggests that we are experiencing that “last day” to some degree right now, in the present. God is reconciling all things in Christ, but we are now already reconciled to God. The kingdom is coming, but it is also among us.
At the end of the age every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (Phil 2:10-11)—but we make that confession on bended knee today. The presence of God, which defines heaven and eternity, is a presence we experience here and now.
The other three layers of Scripture (literal, allegorical and tropological) seek to instill knowledge and faith in us, and elicit a lived response. But this final layer is like the doorway to the throne room itself; it seeks to entice us directly into the living presence of Christ. An ancient (and very compact) Latin rhyme was used to teach the difference between the four layers:
Lettera gesta docet,
quid credas allegoria,
moralia quid agas,
quo tendas anagogia.
Loosely translated, this can be read as:
The literal layer teaches us what happened;
the allegorical layer shows where our faith should be placed;
the moral layer tells us how to act in life;
and the anagogical layer reveals what draws us.
Scripture, then, speaks plainly of the history of God’s people, of doctrine and wisdom, of poetry and prophecy. Its deeper layers, though, speak constantly of Christ, the Word of God from eternity. Through these layers of meaning, the Bible provokes us to align our lives in particular ways which are consistent with the way of Christ. And it actively draws us, not only toward our future destiny in Christ, but now, at this present moment, into his immediate presence.
Practicing Christ-Centered Reading
How then might we begin to develop our ability to read the Bible more Christocentrically—that is, as a book that speaks everywhere to us of Christ?
First, it is essential that we develop the skills of attentiveness outlined in chapter ten and have some experience of using those skills in our reading of the Gospels. Until we have learned, at a deep level, to discern and respond to the presence of Christ in the Gospel narratives (where he is most conspicuously present), we will always struggle to identify how, say, Leviticus or Job might be revealing Christ.
Second, we need to approach Scripture with new questions. Typically, many of us are taught to interpret the Bible by asking questions such as: What is the history and context of this passage? What theology is taught here? Are there principles I need to uncover and apply to my life? Are there commands to be obeyed, promises to treasure or challenges to heed? And all these are, of course, good and necessary questions. They help us become very aware of the literal sense of Scripture, the straightforward and plain meaning of the text—which is by far the most important layer of meaning. Every other reading of Scripture rests on the foundation of this literal sense.
But there are other questions we also need to learn to ask. How does this passage speak of Christ? How does it fit within the wider sweep of a biblical story centered on Jesus? What does it reveal about Christ’s life, his character and nature, his challenge and call, his love and grace? How does this text help me frame my life in appropriate response to the life of Jesus? In what way does this passage draw me deeper into an experiential relationship with Christ?
One of the most helpful traditional approaches to reading Scripture, an approach that helps to open up exactly these kinds of questions, is known as lectio divina, or sacred reading. A recovery of interest in lectio divina during recent years has led many Christians and churches to explore a more meditative style of private and public reading of the Bible. But in my experience lectio often seems to mean little more in practice than “reading the Bible
really slowly, two or three times, with a candle.” Genuine lectio is far deeper and richer than this. It is a way of reading that helps to expose all the different layers of meaning in a passage of Scripture, and at the same time helps us to open every part of the ourselves—senses, imagination, reason, memory, emotions and will—to God who is present in the biblical text.
The best written description of lectio divina, even though it is some eight centuries old, is The Ladder of Monks, a short book written by a medieval French Carthusian prior called Guigo II. At the beginning of his book Guigo describes the practice of lectio in very simple terms: “One day when I was busy working with my hands I began to think about our spiritual work, and all at once four stages in spiritual exercise came into my mind: reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation.”
Many will be familiar with these four stages by the Latin words Guigo employs: lectio, meditatio, oratio and contemplatio. Throughout the rest of the book Guigo explains what he means by each of these terms.
Guigo writes that reading, or lectio itself, is “the careful study of the Scriptures, concentrating all one’s powers on it.” It is, he says, “the foundation; it provides the subject matter we must use for meditation.” In this first stage of reading we are using perception to the full. We absorb the text as best we can, directing all the power of our senses toward it (throughout most of history Christians have read Scripture aloud, even when reading alone, so that the words are not only seen but also heard—often an enlightening experience, as anyone who has tried it can testify). We also make use of the imagination to allow Scripture to come alive, to speak as fully and presently as possible to us. We try to take everything in; as Guigo expresses it, good reading “puts food whole into the mouth.” All this helps us to explore fully the text’s literal layer of meaning.
Reading is followed by meditation, the act of chewing over the food we have taken in. Meditation, writes Guigo, is “the busy application of the mind to seek with the help of one’s own reason for knowledge of hidden truth.” This includes analysis and study of the text—considering the language, grammar, context, genre and interpretation—but it also involves the mind in actively seeking the presence of Christ in Scripture. In this way we begin to tease out the allegorical layer of meaning. Meditatio encourages us to use the skills of cognition, the faculties of memory and reason, to understand the text as fully as possible in the light of our knowledge of the rest of Scripture and of Christ.
This leads us to prayer, oratio. But for Guigo the nature of this prayer is very specific: “prayer is the heart’s devoted turning to God to drive away evil and obtain what is good.” Writing about this drives Guigo to prayer himself:
So the soul, seeing it cannot attain by itself to that sweetness of knowing and feeling for which it longs, and that the more “the heart abases itself,” the more “God is exalted” [see Ps 42:11], humbles itself and betakes itself to prayer, saying: Lord, you are not seen except by the pure of heart. I seek by reading and meditating what is true purity of heart and how it may be had.
This prayer, then, seeks to address the waywardness of our desires and drives—which leads us into the tropological layer of meaning. As we meditate on Scripture and find ourselves being drawn nearer to Christ, we become more painfully aware of our corrupted and sinful nature. At this point, our prayer is a longing and begging for grace, for the renewal of our lives, so that we might no longer be alienated from his glorious presence. Prayer addresses our emotions, not only as we feel them but as we inappropriately express them in our habits and behavior.
And finally comes contemplation. “Contemplation is when the mind is in some sort lifted up to God and held above itself, so that it tastes the joys of everlasting sweetness,” as Guigo puts it somewhat rapturously. Here we finally settle into the anagogical layer of the text. We have carefully absorbed what we have read. We have meditated on it—studied, reflected, pondered, considered. This has led us into a deeper awareness of our fallenness, which has driven us to a desperate prayer for transformation. But in this final step we find ourselves welcomed into the ever gracious presence of Christ, and we experience a longing simply to be allowed to dwell here. This is truly a movement of the heart, a stretching of the soul into God—an act of intendere, of intention, reorientation, stretching into the divine. Our whole person is joyfully absorbed into the life of God.
Only Scripture truly has the capacity to be read in this way. Other texts may connect with our souls, but no other quite like this. It is because of this capacity that Christians throughout the ages have spoken of the Bible as inspired, as filled with the breath of God. It is this that leads us to give the Bible our fullest and most intense attention. This book draws us into the living presence of the Creator whose gaze sweeps across the breadth of an unimaginably vast cosmos without losing sight of us, in all our humility and smallness. It is because of the ability of this book to speak to every part of our soul, to touch every facet of our inner life, that we come to it as such ardent seekers and lovers.
Readings
As an introduction to the practice of lectio divina, reflect on each of the Old Testament passages below and answer as best as you can these simple questions:
Don’t forget to record your responses in your notebook or journal. Even if you never go back to read them, just the act of writing them down encourages us to think more clearly. On the whole these readings are somewhat more challenging than those we used last week; the way these Scriptures speak of Christ is less immediately obvious. So don’t worry if you find you can’t answer every question for every passage; the point is not finding all the answers, but learning the habit of asking the questions.
Day 1
Genesis 28:10-17
(Jacob’s vision of the ladder)
Day 2
Exodus 29:1-9
(the ordination of Aaron)
Day 3
Deuteronomy 27:1-10
(the inscribed stones of the covenant)
Day 4
Job 3:1-10
(Job laments in his suffering)
Day 5
Jeremiah 20:7-12
(Jeremiah’s struggle)
Day 6
Ezekiel 3:22-27
(Ezekiel is held in silence)
Day 7
Jonah 3:6–4:5
(Jonah resents God’s mercy)