Wrestling

Reflections on the Lectionary for October 16th

(Jacob Wrestling with the Angle at Penuel, Eugène Delacroix. Image in the public domain, taken from Wikipedia)

Some of the most fundamental questions about the bible have to do with what the bible is and what it does. Is it an anthology that records disparate old writings? Is it direct communication from a deity? Is the bible meant for people like us, or are we eavesdropping on writings that were created and preserved for vastly different kinds of people, long ago and far away? There isn’t much agreement about what the bible is and what the bible does, possibly because it’s a book that defies genre to begin with.

My own response to these questions is to pay more attention to the latter question—what the bible does—than the former question—what it is. The social function of the bible matters more to me than anything else. We can quibble over whether the bible is a collection or a communication or a revelation or an artifact of Christian history, but in the end we are unlikely to reach agreement. What the bible does, though, is more within reach. We can look around and see what role it plays in people’ lives, and we can describe the ways it is used in the everyday lives of the people for whom it is important. There is a wide variety of uses to describe, of course, but for me, that only underscores that we can never really say what the bible is, and we can only describe what it does.

In the lectionary for October 16th, three of the texts stand out as especially important for this question of what the bible does. The passage from Jeremiah 31 is a prophetic text, imagining and predicting a future in which the author’s desperate present has been transformed into something flourishing. The passage from Genesis is a classic story, and a cinematic one, in which Jacob wrestles with someone—a man? an angel? God?—and comes away marked and changed. The passage from 1 Timothy gets to the question of scripture itself, what it is and what it does, but it has been misunderstood (in my opinion) and used wrongly in the service of a form of biblical authority that the bible does not imagine for itself. All three of these passages, for me, point to a big question of how the bible is used and understood. They all have to do with the human impulse to bounce ideas off the bible, to see ourselves in it, and to read it as an account of other people’s struggle to make meaning in the world.

In Jeremiah passage from this week’s lectionary, one verse stands out to me above all the rest: 31:29. It reads, “In those days they shall no longer say: “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” A similar verse appears in Ezekiel 18:2; this seems to have been a common saying in ancient Israel and Judah, common enough to show up in the text a couple of times as a citation of popular wisdom. It has captured my attention for a long time, because it sums up really nicely a complicated theological problem. Why do bad things happen to us? Are the misfortunes in our lives purposeful, meant to instruct us, and if so, are they sent by God? And if they are sent by God to teach us something, are they sent in response to some particular actions—our own, or the actions of someone else? In this little proverb, the implications is that children can suffer for the sins of their parents—the parents eat the grapes, the children taste the sour. It’s a kind of generational punishment, meted out as instruction and correction.

I think there are three things worth saying about this. First, it’s important to notice that this verse (and the proverb it represents) is an attempt to figure out the nature and context of suffering. It’s a search for meaning in the midst of trouble—a way of understanding why bad things happen. In that sense, it’s an example of theodicy, the same as the book of Job or the ruminations of Ecclesiastes. Second, I want to deny, as Jeremiah does, the truth of the popular saying, on a theological level. Children are not responsible for their parents’ sins, and it is a mistake to think that way. But third, we should also acknowledge the truth behind the proverb: pain, trauma, and suffering often are generational. In reality, children often do suffer for the actions of their parents, whether God intends it or not. Read in that light, Jeremiah’s words feel like a promise of a more just world to come, a world in which we each live our own lives informed by our own actions, and we are not haunted by the past. That feels like a prophetic dream.

Speaking of dreams, the second passage I want to highlight from the lectionary is the dream-like account of Jacob wrestling the person/deity/angel at the Jabbok river. It’s a strange and nebulous story, almost like a dream in its ambiguous and impressionistic storytelling, and its resolution leaves the reader with more questions than answers. In verse 24, Jacob’s opponent is called a man, but in 28 Jacob is said to have wrestled with God. Scholars have also suggested that the mysterious figure might be connected to Jacob’s conflict with Esau, which is ongoing in this part of Genesis. Whatever is the case, this short passage is evocative in its depiction of struggle—literal wrestling—seemingly with God, or at least with what Jacob’s identity is in relationship with God. The renaming of Jacob in verse 28 is a kind of marker for Jacob’s—now Israel’s—success in the match. From the earliest days of Genesis, the bible’s story is one of wrestling, metaphorically and literally, with God and God’s sometimes-inscrutable desires for humans and their lives.

The third passage, from 2 Timothy, is something of a famous one in evangelical circles, because of the common interpretation of 3:16: “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” This is, for many people, and open-and-shut proof text for biblical authority. How much clearer could it be? All scripture is inspired by God….the end. Right?

It's more complicated than that. This verse has been through the translation wringer in more ways than one. If you’re reading in the NRSV, you will see a note on this verse that tells you that it can also be translated “Every scripture inspired by God is also useful….” That’s a big difference; the first translation is saying that all scripture is inspired by God, and the second one is saying that if a scripture is inspired by God, it’s useful. That might raise the question: what kind of scripture would not be inspired by God? Isn’t it the nature of scripture to be divinely inspired? Well, maybe—but there’s still more to this verse.

The word “scripture” here is translating a very common Greek word, graphe, that appears throughout the New Testament. It shows up 23 times, in fact, always in the context of a citation of one of Israel’s ancient writings. Graphe seems to be a special way for the New Testament to refer specifically to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of what we now know as the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament. But the word graphe is also generic word for something written down; you can recognize the sense of “writing” in the modern words derived from it, like paragraph, autograph, graphic, or just plain graph, in the sense of a chart that depicts information. It’s translated “scripture” here because it does seem to be referring to texts that we would call biblical. But another possible translation of 2 Timothy 3:16 would be “all writing,” which would make the option that reads “all writing that is inspired by God” make more sense than “all writing is inspired by God.” Surely, the text isn’t claiming that all written things are inspired?

But even if you grant that graphe is describing the Septuagint specifically, it takes a bit of a leap to make “scripture” refer to the whole bible in the sense we know it today, since obviously that bible did not exist when the author of 2 Timothy wrote these words, and it wouldn’t really come into existence for hundreds (or even, arguably, thousands) of years. To take 3:16 to authorize a sacred special-ness for all of our modern bible is to do quite a bit of violence to the text, and to twist its meaning for a purpose it never intended.

This passage from 2 Timothy is a neat encapsulation of some of the questions raised by the Jeremiah and Genesis passages, and of some of the big questions about what the bible is and what it does that I started this post with. The status we afford it—be it “scripture” or “writings” or something else—makes a big difference in how we think about it and interpret it. But I still maintain that the text’s meaning is more to be found in its social function than any firm definition; we can say more about how the bible is used than we can say about what, exactly, should lie behind that graphe. It’s used very differently for different people, to describe struggle, to understand misfortune and suffering, and to discern instruction and teaching. These passages from this week’s lectionary give us an opportunity to think about the text’s function for us, individually and in community.