Musings on the Daily Lectionary

You know, sometimes I think I'd be a lot happier, and being a Christian would be a lot easier, if the Bible was a pamphlet instead the voluminous work that it is. And couldn't we have just one gospel? Even better if the picture of Jesus in that gospel was perfectly consistent, with no room for questions or interpretation regarding what it means to follow him. But as it is, we have Jesus forgiving those who crucify him in Luke. But in today's reading from Matthew Jesus not only demands that people cannot fool around, but that they cannot even think about it.

The fact is that I like some of the portraits of Jesus in the Bible better than others. And I tend to hang those on the walls of my life and put the others in the basement somewhere. And from what I can tell, I'm far from alone on this. But if God's inspiration and providence were in any way responsible for the Bible that we do have (as I assume they were), then apparently we are meant to wrestle with those images of Jesus and God and faithful life that are not our favorites.

In fact, I've come to believe that the complexities of Scripture, including those passages that we find appalling or unfathomable, serve to shake any arrogance we might have about getting God all figured out. And they keep rattling and shattering those all too comfortable images of God and faith we construct for ourselves. I think it was C. S. Lewis who called God a "great iconoclast," who allows us to seize on images that draw us closer to God, but then shatters those images so that we have to keep moving closer and closer to the divine whom we can never fully comprehend.

Not the way I would have done it. But then again, it's probably just as well that I'm not God.

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