Taking It Literally
Sermon
A schoolteacher friend of mine tells the story of a class of five-year-olds who were lining up to receive their inoculation against one of the childhood diseases. They all had their sleeves rolled up and were waiting for the dreaded jab. After a while my friend noticed that one child was missing. She walked back along the line of children round the corner, and discovered the missing child out cold on the floor where he'd fainted.
Naturally she was horrified, and asked the other children why they hadn't told her that this little boy had passed out.
"Oh," they replied, "we thought he was dead, so we just stepped over him." Children have such literal minds!
Humour intended for children often comes unstuck unless it's very slapstick. Introduce any element of nuance or irony, and the humour is completely lost on children. At that young stage of development, the mind can only cope with things that are completely literal.
This makes the task of the Sunday school teacher quite difficult, because so much of Christianity is far from literal. Bible stories are fine, but trying to explain some of the similes and metaphors used is well nigh impossible. For instance, we're told in the Bible that Jesus sits at God's right hand on high. That statement is obviously a metaphor, a figure of speech, but children will usually take it entirely literally, and will probably imagine a very static tableau of God on a throne in heaven with Jesus sitting next to him. And heaven will be somewhere in the sky because it's "on high".
That literal interpretation is probably as much as children can understand, but problems can arise with it later in life. Apart from the few who attend church, probably almost the entire population of the country have their religion stunted at primary school level, because most youngsters lose interest in religion from around the age of twelve.
This means that for most adults everything in the Bible is taken literally, which often means that the adult denies God, because all he or she has ever learned about God has been at the literal, primary school age. And as thinking adults they reject something which was acceptable to childhood ears, but which sounds like simplistic nonsense to adult ears.
Unfortunately, some adults continue to have a very literal Christian belief. It's much easier to simply believe without thought, than it is to make the mind work through some of the difficulties of Christianity. For instance, it's easy to oppose divorce by reading St. Luke's gospel and quoting Jesus as saying,
"Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and whoever marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery." (Luke 16:18)
It takes a little work to discover that in Matthew's gospel the quote is slightly different. It's already been modified, so that Jesus is quoted as saying,
"And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another commits adultery." (Matthew 19:9)
It takes a little more work to discover that Matthew's gospel was written some ten or twelve years later than Mark's gospel, and to reach the conclusion that maybe the quote was altered by the early church because Jesus' words in Mark's gospel were already proving too difficult to handle.
And those who dig even further will find that the accepted practice of the Israelites was for anyone who wanted to divorce his wife to give her a certificate of divorce and turn her out on the street, probably because she was too old and the husband fancied a younger model.
Once you've reached that stage of investigation it begins to become clear that when Jesus spoke about divorce he wasn't necessarily condemning people to a lifetime of married hell, but was probably protecting women from the abuse of being thrown out of the family home with no means of protection or of earning a living. Thus being thrown out to die.
But to find out all that requires work and thought. It's much easier to take the Bible literally and to condemn divorce under all circumstances because it says in the Bible that Jesus condemned divorce.
Literal interpretation of the Bible is extremely dangerous because it can actually twist the words of Jesus, or at least the intention behind them, into something condemnatory and sub-Christian.
And it was ever thus. Jesus encountered exactly the same problem when he was trying to go beyond the literal. In today's gospel reading Jesus is again talking about himself as the bread of life. Today he goes further, and tells his audience that he will give them his flesh to eat and his blood to drink.
Obviously he was speaking in metaphors, using figures of speech, but many of the audience took him entirely literally, and not surprisingly they couldn't cope with it. The thought of eating somebody's flesh and drinking somebody's blood made their stomachs turn. And it would be abhorrent to Jews, who may not eat anything with blood in it, let alone drink blood.
Some of the audience simply left, and later on in this passage we learn that Jesus lost many of his disciples on this occasion. In other words, they left in their droves. But other disciples are more open-minded and argue with him, and that gives Jesus the opportunity to begin to explain what he means in more detail.
It's all to do people with abiding in Jesus, and Jesus abiding in them. But how does a grown man abide inside anyone else? Clearly, this cannot be taken literally!
With the benefit of two thousand years of hindsight and with knowledge of the resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, we're in a much better position to understand what Jesus was trying to say than were the people to whom he was actually speaking.
It's relatively easy for us to understand that the God within us is the Holy Spirit. We experience Jesus and we experience God through the Holy Spirit, the God who dwells within us. But how do you explain that to people who have no idea of the concept of the Holy Spirit?
Jesus explained it by saying it was almost like eating him. If you were to eat his body and drink his blood, he would be inside you, "abiding" in you. And Jesus goes on to say that before too long his body will indeed be broken and his blood spilt, so it would theoretically be possible to eat him and drink him. But it wasn't until the Last Supper on the night before he died, that Jesus really explained his words by using bread and wine to symbolize his broken body and spilt blood.
That symbolic action has caused difficulty to the Church ever since, because different people interpret it in different ways. For centuries it was taken entirely literally. But few people today believe that the bread of the Eucharist actually becomes the flesh of Jesus, or that the wine actually becomes his blood.
Non-literal interpretations of the Bible are able to reach much greater depth than literal interpretations, and are much more likely to be somewhere near the truth.
And so the Eucharist is still an opportunity for Jesus to "abide" in us. Whenever we receive the Eucharistic elements we receive him. We may not literally receive Jesus the person, but we do receive his power and his love and his strength. He really does abide in us, through his spirit. And nothing can be better than that.
Naturally she was horrified, and asked the other children why they hadn't told her that this little boy had passed out.
"Oh," they replied, "we thought he was dead, so we just stepped over him." Children have such literal minds!
Humour intended for children often comes unstuck unless it's very slapstick. Introduce any element of nuance or irony, and the humour is completely lost on children. At that young stage of development, the mind can only cope with things that are completely literal.
This makes the task of the Sunday school teacher quite difficult, because so much of Christianity is far from literal. Bible stories are fine, but trying to explain some of the similes and metaphors used is well nigh impossible. For instance, we're told in the Bible that Jesus sits at God's right hand on high. That statement is obviously a metaphor, a figure of speech, but children will usually take it entirely literally, and will probably imagine a very static tableau of God on a throne in heaven with Jesus sitting next to him. And heaven will be somewhere in the sky because it's "on high".
That literal interpretation is probably as much as children can understand, but problems can arise with it later in life. Apart from the few who attend church, probably almost the entire population of the country have their religion stunted at primary school level, because most youngsters lose interest in religion from around the age of twelve.
This means that for most adults everything in the Bible is taken literally, which often means that the adult denies God, because all he or she has ever learned about God has been at the literal, primary school age. And as thinking adults they reject something which was acceptable to childhood ears, but which sounds like simplistic nonsense to adult ears.
Unfortunately, some adults continue to have a very literal Christian belief. It's much easier to simply believe without thought, than it is to make the mind work through some of the difficulties of Christianity. For instance, it's easy to oppose divorce by reading St. Luke's gospel and quoting Jesus as saying,
"Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and whoever marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery." (Luke 16:18)
It takes a little work to discover that in Matthew's gospel the quote is slightly different. It's already been modified, so that Jesus is quoted as saying,
"And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another commits adultery." (Matthew 19:9)
It takes a little more work to discover that Matthew's gospel was written some ten or twelve years later than Mark's gospel, and to reach the conclusion that maybe the quote was altered by the early church because Jesus' words in Mark's gospel were already proving too difficult to handle.
And those who dig even further will find that the accepted practice of the Israelites was for anyone who wanted to divorce his wife to give her a certificate of divorce and turn her out on the street, probably because she was too old and the husband fancied a younger model.
Once you've reached that stage of investigation it begins to become clear that when Jesus spoke about divorce he wasn't necessarily condemning people to a lifetime of married hell, but was probably protecting women from the abuse of being thrown out of the family home with no means of protection or of earning a living. Thus being thrown out to die.
But to find out all that requires work and thought. It's much easier to take the Bible literally and to condemn divorce under all circumstances because it says in the Bible that Jesus condemned divorce.
Literal interpretation of the Bible is extremely dangerous because it can actually twist the words of Jesus, or at least the intention behind them, into something condemnatory and sub-Christian.
And it was ever thus. Jesus encountered exactly the same problem when he was trying to go beyond the literal. In today's gospel reading Jesus is again talking about himself as the bread of life. Today he goes further, and tells his audience that he will give them his flesh to eat and his blood to drink.
Obviously he was speaking in metaphors, using figures of speech, but many of the audience took him entirely literally, and not surprisingly they couldn't cope with it. The thought of eating somebody's flesh and drinking somebody's blood made their stomachs turn. And it would be abhorrent to Jews, who may not eat anything with blood in it, let alone drink blood.
Some of the audience simply left, and later on in this passage we learn that Jesus lost many of his disciples on this occasion. In other words, they left in their droves. But other disciples are more open-minded and argue with him, and that gives Jesus the opportunity to begin to explain what he means in more detail.
It's all to do people with abiding in Jesus, and Jesus abiding in them. But how does a grown man abide inside anyone else? Clearly, this cannot be taken literally!
With the benefit of two thousand years of hindsight and with knowledge of the resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, we're in a much better position to understand what Jesus was trying to say than were the people to whom he was actually speaking.
It's relatively easy for us to understand that the God within us is the Holy Spirit. We experience Jesus and we experience God through the Holy Spirit, the God who dwells within us. But how do you explain that to people who have no idea of the concept of the Holy Spirit?
Jesus explained it by saying it was almost like eating him. If you were to eat his body and drink his blood, he would be inside you, "abiding" in you. And Jesus goes on to say that before too long his body will indeed be broken and his blood spilt, so it would theoretically be possible to eat him and drink him. But it wasn't until the Last Supper on the night before he died, that Jesus really explained his words by using bread and wine to symbolize his broken body and spilt blood.
That symbolic action has caused difficulty to the Church ever since, because different people interpret it in different ways. For centuries it was taken entirely literally. But few people today believe that the bread of the Eucharist actually becomes the flesh of Jesus, or that the wine actually becomes his blood.
Non-literal interpretations of the Bible are able to reach much greater depth than literal interpretations, and are much more likely to be somewhere near the truth.
And so the Eucharist is still an opportunity for Jesus to "abide" in us. Whenever we receive the Eucharistic elements we receive him. We may not literally receive Jesus the person, but we do receive his power and his love and his strength. He really does abide in us, through his spirit. And nothing can be better than that.
