I’d like to offer some spiritual advice so that you can read Scripture the way that Jesus did and use it for good purposes.
Offer a prayer for guidance from the Holy Spirit before you make your interpretation of an important text. With an open heart and mind, seek the attitude of a beginner and learner. Pray as long as it takes to feel any certitudes loosen.
Once you have attained some degree of openness, try to move to a position of detachment from your own egoic will and its goals and desires—to be correct, to be secure, to stay with the familiar. This might take some time, but without such freedom from your own need for control, you will invariably make a text say what you need and want it to say.
Then you must listen for a deeper voice than your own, which you will know because it will never shame or frighten you, but rather strengthen you, even when it is challenging you. If it is God’s voice, it will take away your illusions and your violence so completely and so naturally that you can barely identify with such previous feelings! I call this God’s replacement therapy. God does not ask and expect you to do anything new until God has first made it desirable and possible for you to do it. Grace cannot easily operate under coercion, duress, shame, or guilt.
If your understanding of Scripture leads you to experience any or several of the fruits of the Spirit—
- love,
- joy,
- peace,
- patience,
- kindness,
- goodness,
- trustfulness,
- gentleness, and
- self-control
(Galatians 5:22-23)—I think you can trust that this interpretation is from the Spirit, from the deeper stream of wisdom.
As you read, if you sense any negative or punitive emotions like
- morose delight,
- feelings of superiority,
- self-satisfaction,
- arrogant dualistic certitude,
- desire for revenge,
- need for victory, or
- a spirit of dismissal or exclusion,
you must trust that this is not Jesus’ hermeneutic at work, but your own ego still steering the ship.
Remember the temptation of Jesus in the desert (Matthew 4:3-10). Three temptations to the misuse of power are listed:
- economic,
- religious, and
- political.
Even Jesus must face these subtle disguises before he begins his public ministry. Only when he has found freedom from his own egoic need for power can Jesus teach with true inner authority and speak truth to the oppressive powers of his time.
Jesus’ Hermeneutic (Richard Rohr)
Jesus’ approach to interpreting sacred text was radical for his time, yet honored his own Hebrew Bible (or what Christians call the Old Testament). Even though Jesus’ use of Scripture is plain enough for us to see in the Gospels, many Christians are accustomed to reading the Bible in a very different way. We simply haven’t paid attention and connected the dots! Over the next couple days, I’ll share some examples that reveal Jesus’ hermeneutic so that we might follow his methodology:
- Jesus actually does not quote Scripture that much! In fact, he is criticized for not doing this: “you teach with [inner] authority and not like our own scribes” (Mark 1:22).
- Jesus talks much more out of his own experience of God and humanity instead of teaching like the scribes and Pharisees, who operated out of their own form of case law by quoting previous sources.
- Jesus often uses what appear to be non-Jewish or non-canonical sources, or at least sources scholars cannot verify. For example, “It is not the healthy who need the doctor, but the sick do” (see Mark 2:17, Matthew 9:12, and Luke 5:31), or the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (see Luke 16:19-31). His bandwidth of authority and attention is much wider than sola Scriptura. He even quotes some sources seemingly incorrectly (for example, John 10:34)!
- Jesus never once quotes from nineteen of the books in his own Scriptures. In fact, he appears to use a very few favorites:
- Exodus,
- Deuteronomy,
- Isaiah,
- Hosea, and
- Psalms—and those are overwhelmingly in Matthew’s Gospel, which was directed to a Jewish audience.
- Jesus appears to ignore most of his own Bible, yet it clearly formed his whole consciousness. That is the paradox. If we look at what he ignores, it includes any passages—of which there are many—that appear to legitimate violence, imperialism, exclusion, purity, and dietary laws. Jesus is a biblically formed non-Bible quoter who gets the deeper stream, the spirit, the trajectory of his Jewish history and never settles for mere surface readings.
- When Jesus does once quote Leviticus, he quotes the one positive mandate among long lists of negative ones: “You must love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18).
Jesus Quotes Old Testament Verses Without the Vengeance
look also at how Jesus references the Hebrew Scriptures in Luke 7.
Verse 22 reads (with OT references): “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight (Isaiah 29:28, 35:5, 61:1-2), the lame walk (Isaiah 35:6), the lepers are cleansed (1 Kings 17:24, 2 Kings 5:1-27), the deaf hear (Isaiah 29:18, 35:5), the dead are raised (1 Kings 17-24, 2 Kings 5:1-27), the poor have good news brought to them (Isaiah 29:19).”
In every reference Jesus makes to the book of Isaiah, there is an associated Isianic verse that includes divine vengeance. Yet, when Jesus quotes from it, he leaves off such vengeance.
For John, this would have been a great offense. Thus, Jesus concludes his message with, “And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”