Readings
14
Beyond the Bible
Toward the beginning of a course on world religions at the theological college where I trained for ministry, our lecturer had startled us by saying, “I don’t really want to teach you about Islam or Buddhism or Judaism. You see, the problem is that these religions don’t really exist.”
He paused for a moment while we looked back at him, confused and uncertain. Religions don’t exist? That seemed an unlikely proposition. After all, centuries of history, thousands of churches, temples and mosques around the world, strong and rich philosophical and cultural traditions that had shaped the way we all live—all these would appear to suggest otherwise. Across the room I could see one of the students sitting with pen poised over his notebook wondering: should I write this down?
The lecturer could clearly sense our consternation. “Think about it,” he continued. “Where can you find Hinduism? When has Buddhism ever walked down the street toward you? Have you ever met Judaism? Ever shaken hands with Christianity? Ever eaten a meal with Islam?” He put down his notes and stretched out his hands expressively. “A religion is a really big idea, a philosophy, a huge and tremendously complex way of thinking,” he said. “But that’s all—it’s not real, not like people and chairs and dogs are real.” He looked intently around the room. “You’ll never meet a religion. But you’ll meet hundreds of religious people. I’m not interested in whether or not you understand religion; I want to know that you understand people. Not just what they believe, but who they are.”
And so we began a fascinating journey exploring not the great world belief systems but the lives and experiences of those who professed them. A journey which led a group of us, one damp gray afternoon, to an unassuming red brick building on the corner of a suburban street in southwest England. On the outside the building looked like another drab suite of offices tacked on the end of a row of houses. But everything changed once we stepped over the threshold. Suddenly our noses were filled with the fragrance of exotic spices. The place was awash with bright color: walls painted in bright blues and saffron; yellow cloth draped over tables; gaudy framed pictures hung on every surface. The contrast with the quiet English street outside was striking; this was a taste of the East. We had entered one of Bristol’s Sikh Gurdwaras.
We were warmly welcomed by a handful of smiling, turbaned men who briefly introduced themselves and offered to sit with us during the service which was about to take place. They led us into the Darbar, the main hall of the Gurdwara. Dozens of people were scattered around the hall, sitting cross-legged and talking quietly with one another. At the front of the room a huge tasseled canopy hung from the ceiling, embroidered white silk with a luxurious golden fringe. Beneath the canopy, on a low table, rested one of the largest books I have ever seen in my life; it was three or four feet tall, and laid open its pages reached almost as far as a man’s arms might stretch. Both open pages were lettered with the elegant, flowing Gurmukhi script, the text surrounded by a colorful illuminated border. Behind the book sat an immaculately dressed Sikh man waving a chaur, a kind of horsehair fan, looking for all the world like the servant of an oriental potentate. Our Sikh hosts, on entering, immediately removed their shoes and bowed respectfully.
This book was the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book. According to Sikh tradition there were a series of ten gurus from the sixteenth century onward who laid the foundations of Sikh faith and practice. The first was known as Guru Nanak Dev; he was held in such esteem by those who followed after him that they each took his name, Nanak, as their own; Sikh’s sometimes speak of the “spirit of Nanak” being passed from one guru to the next. Over the years their teachings were collected into a single great tome, a written record of the words of the gurus. The ninth guru, Guru Gobind Singh, proclaimed toward the end of his life that this book was henceforth to be regarded as the last and eternal guru, the repository of the “spirit of Nanak” and the guide for all Sikhs to come. The book itself was elevated to the status of Guru, and plays a central role in the life and worship of all Sikh communities.
Sikhs treat Guru Granth Sahib as a living person: the embodiment of the life of the past gurus. They believe that, although the book is not God, it does in some way incarnate the divine spirit, which is why it is accorded such veneration and respect. Wherever the book is present, there the gurus are also present. When a copy of the Guru Granth Sahib is damaged beyond repair, it is not simply thrown out: in a ceremony known as agan bhet it is ceremonially cremated and mourned. Clearly, for Sikhs, this is no ordinary book.
An Extraordinary Book
For Christians, too, the Bible is no ordinary book. As we have seen, it pulses with the Spirit of God. Through this book we can be drawn into the presence of God who breathes life into its pages. The voice of God speaks through Scripture, offering a word that is “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb 4:12). During her coronation service in 1953 Queen Elizabeth II was presented with a copy of the Bible by the moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; as he handed her the book he said: “Our gracious Queen: to keep your Majesty ever mindful of the law and the Gospel of God as the Rule for the whole life and government of Christian Princes, we present you with this Book, the most valuable thing that this world affords. Here is Wisdom; This is the royal Law; These are the lively Oracles of God.” Christians throughout the centuries would be happy to echo the sentiment.
But the Bible is not God, and the danger of elevating Scripture beyond its proper place is always present. We are not given the Bible so we can be led deeper into the Bible: Scripture seeks always to lead us deeper into God. We are not called to be obedient to the Bible, but to God who speaks through the Bible. We are not a Bible-centered people; we are a Christ-centered people. Our lives are shaped by Scripture, but not lived for Scripture; to paraphrase Christ, we might affirm that the Bible was given for the benefit of people, not people for the Bible. We are, perhaps, a little too eager to proclaim ourselves “Bible-believing Christians.” We are not. We are God-believing, Christ-centered, Spirit-empowered Christians whose faith is formed and fortified by the Bible. The difference is more than just words.
There is a famous icon of the Trinity which was painted by the Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev in the early fifteenth century. The icon, based on the narrative in Genesis which describes Abraham being visited by three angels (Gen 18:1-15), shows three figures seated around a table: God the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. The different figures are gesturing toward one another; Jesus is quietly pointing to the Spirit, while the Spirit is directing our gaze toward the Father. The Father is turned outward toward us, as we contemplate the icon, as though inviting us to be drawn into this mysterious trinitarian community; there is even an open space at the table, facing toward us. In various ways each of these three is redirecting our attention to lead us deeper into the divine life.
Rublev's icon of the Trinity
In just the same way the Bible leads us beyond the Bible. Scripture is noticeably lacking in self-reflection: there are very few passages of the Bible that discuss the nature of the Bible itself. The text never seeks to draw us deeper into itself but always points away toward the divine Author. Simply reading the Bible is never our final goal; it is always a means to the greater end of participation in life with God. Just as in Revelation John notes that in the new heavenly Jerusalem “I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” (Rev 21:22), we might also ask whether we will still be reading Scripture when the kingdom of God is revealed in its fullness. When we are in the eternal, unmediated presence of God, what need will we have for these written words?
From Reading to Contemplation
All good reading of Scripture inevitably leads, then, to contemplation. This comes as a surprise to many of us nurtured in more evangelical traditions who have long been encouraged to ground our reading of the Bible in action, in application of principles discovered, in practicing whatever we find taught in Scripture. And of course this is vitally important, as we saw in chapter thirteen. But this should never be the end point of our reading. If we allow the “living out” of Scripture to become the final stop in our reading of the Bible, we have largely missed the point; the real goal is “living into” Scripture, dwelling patiently within these pages until we are drawn through them into the life of God himself. This call to presence is a call to contemplation.
Christians in the contemporary Western church often struggle to understand and appreciate the vital importance of contemplation. We have convinced ourselves that our call, our purpose,
and our mission lie essentially in activity. We who follow Christ are, we are sure, summoned to change the world. Some folks are fond of quoting these words of Teresa of Ávila, the great sixteenth-
century writer on the spiritual life:
Christ has no body now but yours;
no hands, no feet on earth but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which He looks compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
In fact, Teresa never wrote anything of the sort and would almost certainly have found the sentiment shocking. The poem appears nowhere in her collected works or letters. It would be surprising if it did; as a key figure in the Counter Reformation movement within the Roman Catholic church of her day, steeped in a theology of the Eucharist that spoke boldly of the literal transformation of the bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Jesus, she would hardly be likely to pen the words, “Christ has no body now but yours.” But more than this, the little poem also directly undermines the foundations of the contemplative life itself to which Teresa and those around her were so passionately committed—a fact we perhaps find hard to appreciate, because we have become so wildly activist and so alienated from our Christian contemplative heritage.
It might help us shift our perspective a little if we ask ourselves a simple question: Why does God need us? We can clarify the question by asking it in a variety of different contexts. What aspect of the kingdom of heaven is God unable to implement without our assistance? Which injustices is he incapable of correcting alone? Who are the people he is powerless to bring to saving faith without our intervention? How do we play an indispensable role in the redemption of all creation in Christ?
If we stop for even a moment to think about it, of course, we know that these are absolutely nonsensical questions. The kingdom of God is coming and is already breaking through around us. God is restoring all things to himself in Christ. The day of the Lord, which comes like a thief in the night or like lightning flashing across the sky, approaches—whether we like it or not. There is nothing we can do either to postpone or hasten that day; only the Father knows the day and the hour. However hard we try to resist or welcome the kingdom, it comes in whatever way God graciously wills. It is, after all, his kingdom, not ours. And he is perfectly capable of bringing redemption, salvation, freedom, justice, liberation and a new heaven and earth—without any help from us.
We know this. But so much of our activism proclaims the opposite. We must proclaim the gospel, we say—or people will die and fall into the burning pit of hell! As though God’s will from before all time that someone should find life in Christ could be frustrated by our indolence. As though we had forgotten that Jesus said, “Not one [sparrow] will fall to the ground apart from your Father” (Mt 10:29). We must campaign for justice, we say—or people will be left perpetually in their suffering, their marginalization, their distress. As though God no longer hears the cry of his people, or is impotent or unwilling to act, or has closed his heart to the poor and friendless. Our activity is propelled by the implicit idea that God’s great design for the universe will somehow fail without our heroic efforts. We become a driven people.
The very basis of the contemplative life is the realization that the exact opposite is true. Contemplative prayer is only possible if we accept and believe in the most fundamental way that in Christ (not in us) “the kingdom of God has come near” (Mk 1:15). If it were true that the coming of the kingdom, whether in mission or in works of peace and justice, depended so greatly on us, what possible excuse could there be for indulging in the luxuries of silence, solitude and prayer? Would it not be a dereliction of our calling to abandon our activity in a needy world in order to satisfy our own desires for inner peace? How could withdrawing into the silence and obscurity of some monastery, hermitage or retreat possibly be of any value to the church or the world? Isn’t it spiritual selfishness? This is exactly how the contemplative life is so often portrayed in the contemporary world; the tragedy is that the church too often echoes the complaint.
But in reality contemplation is an act of profound trust. Trust that God is able to run the universe without our constant intervention. Trust that God’s love and purposes for creation cannot and will not be frustrated by human resistance. And trust that the time we take seeking to dwell in the presence of God is time invested with eternal value, not time fruitlessly wasted—a reflection of the way time will be experienced when the kingdom comes in all its fullness. This is the trust described in Julian of Norwich’s famous vision of the hazelnut. The fourteenth-century English nun lived during an extraordinarily tumultuous time in history: the ebbing and flowing of the Hundred Years’ War left people living under the constant shadow of violence, while the Black Death swept in ravaging waves across Europe, killing up to a third of the population. In the midst of this Julian experienced a vision in which she saw a small ball, the size of a hazelnut, resting in the palm of God’s hand. She was told that this tiny ball was all creation, the unimaginable entirety of the universe. She was astounded; it seemed so fragile and delicate, as though it could all be swept away in a moment. But a voice reassured her: “It lasts and always will, because God loves it; and thus everything has being through the love of God.” For Julian, it was trusting in this which made prayer possible.
An Uncomfortable Invitation
The Bible draws us into this contemplative experience. But for many of us such prayer is strange and unfamiliar. We feel comfortable with praise, adoration, intercession, conversation—those word-filled forms of prayer in which we are always active, always speaking, always expressing ourselves to God. The great prayer of silence, though, fills us with uncertainty. What will happen? What if nothing happens? More worryingly, what if something happens? Will God speak? What will he say? And what if he doesn’t speak—what do I do then?
Traveling through an airport in one of the southeastern states recently, I was asked to step aside at security; something unusual had shown up in my hand luggage on the x-ray. I knew right away what it was: a small glass ornament I’d been given following a speaking engagement a couple of days earlier. But the TSA agent explained, with typical Southern grace and politeness, that he had a protocol to follow and the bag had to be searched. It was a slow day at the airport and I had plenty of time before my flight, so I wasn’t worried. We chatted amiably as he unpacked the bag.
After a few moments he drew a small blue book from the bag and looked at it with interest. It was a copy of Martin Laird’s Into the Silent Land, one of the best books on contemplative prayer I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. I’d already worked through it a number of times and was using the opportunity of a series of flights within a few days to spend time with it again. The agent read the subtitle of the book aloud: The Practice of Contemplation.
“Looks like an interesting book,” he said, turning it over to peruse the back cover. I agreed. He put down the book and continued searching the bag; then he paused again and looked up at me. “Not many people do that any more—contemplation, I mean. They don’t make the time. No appetite for it. I guess they don’t want to face the most important question we can ask.”
“What do you think that is?” I asked him, surprised (I hadn’t turned up at airport security expecting a conversation quite like this one).
“The most important question?” he replied. “Who am I?” There was a moment’s silence, and then he pushed the bag across the table toward me. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “You can go.” I walked away with my head spinning.
All my experience teaching prayer to others tells me that the TSA agent was right: often the idea of an open-ended, uncontrollable exposure to the presence of God makes us very uncomfortable. It should. In contemplative prayer we place ourselves without reservation in the hands of a God vast beyond our imagining, more powerful than we could ever hope to express, and fiercely holy. Any sane person who prays in this way, in the full knowledge of what they are doing, would be right to feel apprehensive. After all, God is not tame or predictable. He will not bend his will to ours or submit to our direction or control. But he is so good, so gracious and so gentle; his love for us is beyond measure or description. We approach him with respect, with awe, with reverence—but not with fear.
And oh, how he longs for us to draw near.
Readings
This week’s readings have one simple aim: to provoke your desire to dwell in Christ’s presence.
Throughout the course of this book, we have constantly engaged with Scripture as a place where God can be encountered and Christ may be known. We have explored a variety of approaches to reading the Bible that can make us more attentive, more alert and more aware of that presence. We have explored ways of praying with Scripture that engage every aspect of our being, making us more present to God.
But in the end, the real trick is learning to dwell with God. Simply to remain before him, enjoying his company, allowing him to delight in you and heal you through his grace. Let these readings touch your heart, orient your will toward God, and entice you to come before his face.
Then stay there.
Day 1
Psalm 63:1-8
(desire for the living God)
Day 2
Psalm 123
(the soul looking to God)
Day 3
Psalm 131
(the soul resting in God)
Day 4
Luke 10:38-42
(sitting at the feet of Jesus)
Day 5
John 15:1-9
(abiding in Jesus)
Day 6
Revelation 1:12-16
(a vision of Jesus)
Day 7
Revelation 7:9–8:1
(the worship—and silence—in heaven)