Some years ago I recall reading a Bible commentary that suggested this episode might be a misplaced resurrection story. I don't recall details, but this scholar seemed to think that such an event couldn't have actually happened with the actual person Jesus.
Scholars have given similar treatment to the feeding of the 5000, with that miracle cast as one of sharing. Jesus got all those folks to share what they had hidden under their robes in something akin to the folk tale, "Stone Soup."
Such biblical scholarship has largely fallen out of vogue in recent decades, but it is easy to see its attraction. Most all of us have notions regarding what is and isn't possible, along with ideas about what God is like and how God does or doesn't act. Most all of us have some sort of boundaries which we don't expect even God to violate.
Perhaps your or my boundaries are fairly accurate, but perhaps they are not. And I can't help wondering what sort of God it is who is fixed by my boundaries, who is not free to surprise me or act contrary to my assumptions.
I suspect this is particularly a problem for people like me who like to figure things out and understand how they work. I like things to be explained with a fair amount of precision and clarity. I'm very much a product of and comfortable with Enlightenment logic. Only in recent years have I begun to get more comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty, and it is still easy for me to slip into old patterns of right and wrong, possible and impossible.
I'm not suggesting that one must read everything in the Bible as a real, historical occurrence, far from it. But I do wonder how much we constrain God from being at work in our lives and in our congregations by our certainties about what can and can't happen.
Click to learn more about the lectionary.
No comments:
Post a Comment