Refocusing Scripture
In my last post I concluded “Look for Jesus” as the heart of how to read scripture.
Today I want to add a caveat to that advice: refocus scripture through the lens of Jesus.
What Jesus and the apostles called Scripture was the five Books of Moses, the prophets, the history books, and the wisdom literature. This is often called “The Old Testament” but Old implies archaic, obsolete, irrelevant and many other things that those writings are NOT.
If we follow theologians such as Fr. John Behr and Dr. Bradley Jersak, in retiring the term “Old Testament” that will not necessarily resolve our issues in reading scripture and finding Jesus! Many of those original scriptures do not flow easily or smoothly into the revelation of God contained in the gospels and the writings of the early Church. Instead there is often a sense of surprise at the way God drops in the ‘plot twist’ of the crucifixion, resurrection and ascension of Jesus, followed by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the Ekklesia.
To see Jesus in our scripture reading (especially in those writings Jesus called Scripture) requires that we refocus through the new lens. This is what Paul, Peter, John and others did in their writing. Often they took scripture out of its original context to explain their new revelation of God’s heart through Jesus. They quote scripture extensively, connecting the gospel of Jesus to Israel’s history and prophetic heritage. And as they quote, they reinterpret the ancient texts to point to Christ. The technical term for this is “Christotelic” meaning that Jesus is the end or goal of all the revelation in Scripture.
This is not a subversive or revisionist approach; it is actually what Jesus did with his disciples on the road to Emmaus after the resurrection. You can read the account in Luke 24. This is how we are to read all of scripture: refocus each book or chapter through the lens of Jesus, the living Word.
If you would like to learn more about this process, I highly recommend Brad Jersak’s book “A More Christlike Word” along with Peter Enns’ “How the Bible Actually Works”.