Surprised by Jesus Again: Reading the Bible in Communion with the Saints

By Jason Byassee and Michael Gulker

A bold, historical, robust approach to reading Scripture and encountering Jesus anew

No one expects to be surprised. Yet biblical interpretation can do exactly that. Christians expect to see Jesus as they read the Bible, but when and how Jesus actually speaks through Scripture can still surprise us!

Drawing on the early church’s theological giants—Origen, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and more from the historical cloud of witnesses—author Jason Byassee models how we can recover ancient Christians’ multiple ways of reading the Bible to our benefit. As Byassee says, God himself is Jewish, Catholic, and Pentecostal—so much larger than our own little corner on the truth—and this book offers readers a refreshingly enhanced vision of the Bible and of Jesus himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jun 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781467456524

Jason Byassee

Jason Byassee teaches preaching at the Vancouver School of Theology in British Columbia, where he holds the Butler Chair in Homiletics and Biblical Hermeneutics. He is a longtime contributor to Christian Century magazine and the author, most recently, of Northern Lights: Resurrecting Church in the North of England (2020).

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PREFACE

To be able to offer this book on reading the Bible with the church’s tradition is a gift of grace for me. I have tried and failed two times before to write this book as a sort of sequel to my Praise Seeking Understanding on Augustine’s way of reading the Psalms. A first effort was a more popular version of that book. A second was a more academic book on how to draw on the ancient church’s ways of interpreting. Both volumes were presented to publishers under contract and mercifully turned down. Neither was good enough. If this one is, then I have several people to thank.

I must thank especially The Colossian Forum (TCF), founder Kurt Berends and present leader Michael Gulker. I so admire its vocation to help congregations run toward the sort of trouble that pastors and churches often run away from. To that end they have crafted a leadership training program to help churches and Christian organizations use the energy around polarizing topics as a catalyst for intergenerational spiritual formation and as an occasion to display the beauty of the gospel in our fragmented world.¹ Several of their offerings deal with the fracture between theology and science, toward which this book also gestures at the end.² TCF is convinced that much of that fracture is due to our misunderstanding what the Bible is, especially the purposes for which God has given it to us. The Bible can only be understood well when it is seen as a gift in the context of God’s relentless work to make all things new.

As I was completing this book, I spent several days writing at Queen of Peace Monastery in Squamish, British Columbia, whose sisters I must also thank. While there I heard a homily from Don Goergen, OP, who preached to the sisters from the Sermon on the Mount. There Jesus swears he is changing nothing in the law—he is rather fulfilling it, raising its bar higher. In his words, "Whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 5:19). Moving on from interpretation to speculation, though guided by a conversation with a Matthew scholar, Father Don made a connection to St. Paul’s comment that he is least among the apostles (1 Cor. 15:9). Biblical scholars debate whether Paul even knew the traditions that would become the gospels, so this is not strictly a historical observation. The linguistic connection is homiletically interesting—the wording is so similar: least, something most people don’t ever want to be, but that saints seem, oddly, to long to embrace. Matthew and Paul say quite different things about being least, and about other things too: Matthew’s Jesus insists on his law-abiding and law-heightening; Paul suggests that gentile Christians need not follow the Torah but rather follow the law of the Spirit. Father Don made this comment, appropriate to any order, any congregation, any family, any grouping of human beings striving for any corporate good: conflict is no bad thing. The New Testament blesses disagreement right within the church’s first few generations. Matthew and Paul indeed seem to have quite different views of Israel’s law and its place in the life of the church of Jews and gentiles worshiping the risen messiah, Jesus. And the Bible is not anxious about this conflict. It stands there naked, not tidied up, rough edges exposed for all to see. Not that the difference does not matter, not at all.³ But scripture sees fit to include difficulties on its face to show us that God is not afraid of conflict. God in fact uses it to make us holy, to teach us to forgive, to show us that our grasp of truth is only ever partial, even as the Truth enfleshed in Jesus has grasped us entirely. The Colossian Forum has a similar view of conflict. It is nothing to run from, despite whatever pastoral instinct drives me to want to do precisely that. (What am I afraid of? Scaring off members? Missing budget? Where, chapter and verse, does Jesus ask us to worry about such things?!) I am honored to be part of their work.

I have already tipped my hand as to who I am as an interpreter. My work has been a combination of journalism, scholarship, and preaching. I’ve been graced to write for the Christian Century, Sojourners, and other publications about God’s renewing work in the church. As a journalist I love to ask interesting people big, nosy questions and then tell others what they say. Some of this journalistic approach is present in this book, especially in chapters 1, 5, 7, and the postlude. I’ve worked also as an academic, studying the ways that the early church’s theology can inform the church’s preaching today. I am trained in theology and not in history or Bible (as experts in those fields will be quick to point out!). I write, then, as an amateur in the etymological sense—a lover of these fields, not an expert. I do theology in conversation with saints living (chapters 3 and 7) and saints long dead (chapters 2, 4, 6, and 8). And I write as a lover of the church. This approach is present throughout all the chapters. I see preaching as an act of taking part in Christ’s intimate wooing of his church and all people back to the love for God and neighbor for which God longs for all creation. My work is unapologetically homiletical, then. Arguably anybody putting pen to paper for any other reader is always already preaching. The difference here is that the first sermon is the one God preaches to us in Christ. The church’s sermons participate in God’s own preaching, enabled to do so by the Holy Spirit who brooded over the waters in the beginning and who is making all things new.

None of this makes scripture safe or easy. We biblical interpreters have to see how strange scripture is. Every Christian in every age has been tempted to paper over scripture’s cracks, explain away its oddities, show it’s no different or more demanding than what we hearers already think we know about God and the world. This is a mistake. Scripture is spectacularly odd. Preachers must point out these oddities—historical, cultural, temporal, practical, linguistic, the list is endless. And then we have to show how scripture refers to Jesus. Not woodenly or awkwardly, or it won’t delight. But naturally, beautifully, on the other side of the oddity. It is a key contention of this book that discovering Jesus in his scripture is not a matter of finding someone smuggled in. When scripture is read aright, Jesus is already there, drawing all creatures toward himself. All creation is made in Christ, Paul argues (Col. 1:15–20). So all things reflect him in whom they are made. This can be hard to see. Creation is fallen. We creatures reflect Christ poorly at first. But over time we come to reflect him more clearly as we grow in holiness. Those training themselves to see Christ in all things see him first and principally in scripture, on the way to seeing him everywhere. This is also hard at first. Then we grow accustomed to it. And once we see him, we cannot but point him out to others. To do so is our delight, and theirs, and God’s.

I also want to thank Eerdmans Publishing Company, which has been exceedingly patient waiting for this manuscript. I love Eerdmans’s originally Reformed vision of the world in which God rules over all and is presently working to make all things new, not in any narrowly religious sense, but in every part of creation. Their Reformed vision is broad enough to include Christians of all types, and I’m honored to be among their number.

I am grateful to students and colleagues at the Vancouver School of Theology (VST) and Duke Divinity School on whom these ideas have been tried out and with whom they have been sharpened. Portions of the argument have been tried out with audiences at Regent College, St. Mark’s College, Carey Theological College, Wycliffe College, and Asian Theological Seminary, and at continuing-education events with the Anglican Diocese of New Westminster, Grace Presbyterian Church in Calgary, and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver, and with the alumni association of Queens Theological College. I thank the people of Boone United Methodist Church, where my preaching was steeped in these views of scripture. I’m grateful to Sojourners magazine, where I was privileged to write lectionary commentary for its Living the Word section off and on from 2015 to 2017. Those very tight strictures—just a few hundred words!—reminded me that biblical interpretation need not be verbose. Inspiring others to read scripture well can come more in the form of poetry, just a few sentences even, a slight gesture rather than ponderous length or theatricality. If those reflections were any good to anybody, well, here are the hermeneutical presuppositions that birthed them.

As time goes on, I’m increasingly grateful to my teachers at Duke Divinity School: Will Willimon, Stanley Hauerwas, Reinhard Hütter, David Steinmetz, Geoffrey Wainwright, Richard Hays, Ellen Davis, and, though I knew them less than the others, Nicholas Lash, Kathy Grieb, Robert Wilken, Lewis Ayres, and David Hart, whose principal appointments being elsewhere than Duke meant that I only got to study for a short time with each. They showed me that the church has been interpreting the Bible for a very long time, and there is wisdom to be found in tradition, though it doesn’t come easily. I am grateful also to my VST colleague Rabbi Laura Duhan Kaplan, with whom I taught a course on Jews and Christians that made me realize at once how strange Christians’ way of reading the Bible is, and how delightful. Thank you to my research assistant at VST, Eliana Ku, who saved me from many mistakes. Adam Joyce’s expert editing made this book much better than it would have been without his wisdom.

This book is dedicated to Richard Topping, the principal of the Vancouver School of Theology, whose gospel-infused cheerfulness as a preacher and leader I so admire, and for whose friendship I give great thanks.

This book is about interpreting the Bible as a mystery of seeking to be surprised by Jesus again. Historical criticism tries to read without surprise. All the evidence is in. All that needs to be done is sift through the layers of historical detritus, determine what is scientifically true or not, and then leave the wreckage of the archaeological tell after carrying off whatever treasures the museum wants. But for a people who believe in a living God this is not enough. God is constantly surprising us. Robert Jenson said the difference between a dead god and a living God is a dead god can’t surprise you. This book tries to proceed as though God is constantly surprising us. It proceeds with chapters on ancient exemplars—Mary, Origen, Augustine, and Gregory the Great. It includes some chapters drawing on contemporary interpreters who try to read the Bible guided by ancient insight. I will sometimes agree and sometimes disagree. The book will conclude with a proposal for reacquaintance with the medieval pattern of fourfold biblical interpretation: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. Biblical texts should be read for what they say, historically and on their face; then we read them for what they say about God, we read them for what they say about the moral life, and we read them politically—about the city of God that Jesus longs to birth in our world and is presently making real through the church. Not every text can support every sort of meaning. But what they hold together is this—Jesus is the Lord of the world, of the scriptures, and of the hearts of those who walk with him and burn with his fiery presence (Luke 24:13–35). If a reading of the Bible doesn’t require a resurrected Jew to make sense, it’s not a Christian one. We read instructed by this stranger on the road, who only reveals his identity to us slowly, waiting until we can hardly stand it anymore, and then . . .

1. For more information, see www.colossianforum.org.

2. See the much more developed volumes by Cavanaugh and Smith, Evolution and the Fall, and Smith and Gulker, All Things Hold Together in Christ.

3. They can indeed be reconciled: Jesus is a Torah-observant Jew himself, but the gospel calls all nations, as gentiles, to covenant with the God of Israel, so we gentiles need not observe the whole Torah.

1

Grafted In

Relearning God’s Promises to Israel

It is the spring of 2017. I am co-teaching a class to a room of Jews and Christians. My colleague, Rabbi Dr. Laura Duhan Kaplan, and I are trying to talk about God again. For a millennium and a half or more, Christians and Jews couldn’t talk explicitly about God. Jews mostly had to figure out how to survive Christian mistreatment. Christians launched evangelism efforts that didn’t work and crusades and inquisitions and pogroms of which we’re still ashamed. More recently, in modernity, as Christians recoiled and reassessed after the Holocaust and Jews in the West muscled in to a more secure place, we had conversations about things that matter: civil rights, human rights, justice around the world, Israel and its policies toward its neighbors and its protection.¹ These weren’t always pleasant, but they were good. And they’re not what I mean here.

In our class, Jews and Christians: A Theological Journey, we’re talking about the God of Israel, who Christians believe has grafted us into his covenant with his people by grace. That’s new, perhaps unprecedented since Christians took civic power in exchange for blessing the emperor in 313 CE. And it’s really hard. Few of us are good at it. In my sentence above we would have to define and endlessly qualify some words: God, Israel, Christians, graft, us, covenant, people, and grace, for starters.

So there I was in class, giving a lovely talk (or so I thought) on the virgin birth. Our textbook’s author, Michael Goldberg, had slid by this sticking point fairly quickly.² His book gives brilliant, sometimes breathtaking readings of Exodus and Matthew that show Christianity itself to be a reading of Judaism, a re-presentation of the Jewish people and story and God in a new setting. Some scholars, Christian and Jewish and secular, dismiss Matthew’s quotations of Israel’s scripture. Matthew tends to break out the trumpets: Behold! This was done to fulfill . . . The easiest response among modern critical scholars is to say, Um, actually, Isaiah didn’t mean that at all. I’ve heard one rabbi say that Christians’ claims that Jesus fulfilled the law is a bit like shooting arrows into a forest, going and seeing where they stick, and then painting a bull’s-eye around the arrow. He’s not impressed. Neither have modernist biblical critics been. Isaiah 7 is not, on any reasonable grounds, about Jesus of Nazareth. As Jews pointed out millennia ago, when the prophet says an almah will be with child, it means, in Hebrew, simply a young woman (Isa. 7:14). The Jewish translators who created the Septuagint rendered the word in Greek as parthenos, a virgin. That’s an acceptable translation, not just in Greek, but in many cultures. But then for Christians to take that word as a prophecy of a future virgin birth fulfilled in Jesus is . . . not convincing. Unless you’re already convinced.

We Christians have had responses to this.³ Isaiah 7:14 seems to blow its own trumpets: Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son (KJV). Why the excitement? It’s not surprising that a young woman gets pregnant. Isaiah’s own enthusiasm suggests something more is afoot than the birth even of a very special child. Jews would say: still not convincing. In class I wasn’t trying to make the virgin birth convincing. It’s not, on its own. You only believe in it because you already believe in Jesus. If you believe God is fleshed in this one Jew, you’re ready to believe a lot more. My goal was to make it sound as not-ridiculous as possible. My colleague, Rabbi Laura, helped a great deal. Matthew is just doing what we Jews always do, she said. Reading the Bible in a new circumstance in surprising ways. She doesn’t think the virgin birth is true, I imagine. She just doesn’t think it’s ridiculous.

I taught the virgin birth in as Jewish a way as possible. Think back over the history of Israel: Almost no important figure gets born without trouble. Every time, there is a problem getting them born. Abraham and Sarah cannot have a child at first. Now they have more children than anyone can count, more than the sands of the sea or the stars in the sky. Ditto Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel. These are the children of Israel, among whom we Christians count ourselves in Christ. Hannah is desperate for a child. Her husband, Elkanah, comforts her tenderly, Am I not more to you than ten sons? (1 Sam. 1:8).⁴ The text is too nice to say it, but Hannah must think, Yeah, no, not actually. She prays feverishly. And she is given Samuel. Whom she immediately gives back to God. These stories show that God is the giver of life. They show that God understands women and men who wish to give birth more than they wish for air or water, but cannot conceive. They do not show that if we just pray enough, we will get a child, contrary to much pastoral malfeasance. They do promise that we can all bear miraculous fruit. We just don’t get to determine in what form that fruit will be born: in physical wombs or spiritual. And a great mystery hangs over it all that no one can pretend to understand.

Then we Christians start up with stories that are fashioned in the forge of Israel but not celebrated by Jews as scripture (Luke 1:5–25, 57–80). Elizabeth and Zechariah want a child, like the matriarchs and patriarchs of old. Zechariah is a priest. And Gabriel turns up in the temple to tell him the good news: old as they are, God has heard their prayer and will grant them a miraculous child, who will make for rejoicing in Israel. Zechariah’s response is priceless: I work here every day, and one thing that cannot happen is an angel cannot show up and say a miracle is coming. I have a Master of Divinity degree to prove it (I’m paraphrasing a little). The angel’s response is more priceless still: You claim to speak for God, but you can’t listen when God has something to say back? You’re not allowed to talk anymore. Zechariah is voiceless until the child’s birth, and it all turns out as the angel said: Elizabeth becomes as great with child as she ever wanted. Their son announces the coming king of Israel, savior of the world, before whom idols fall and shatter.⁵

That’s a Jewish story. Retold and treasured by what quickly became a largely gentile church, but that doesn’t make it not-Jewish. We Christians are a Jewish sect at first. Israel’s stories are not our stories originally, as gentile Christians. The Bible is not our book. God is not our God. Only by grace, through Jesus, are we given access to Israel’s stories, scriptures, salvation. And this is how that happens.

The same angel, perhaps still a little miffed from the visit with the priest, turns up to an unmarried Jewish teenager from the sticks. The angel tells Mary she’ll have a child. And that child will be God’s child. And will save the universe. All creation waits with baited breath for her reply. What will it be (Luke 1:26–38)? God will not force himself on anyone. God wants willing conspirators, not slaves. The entire hackneyed plan to save the world and make right all things humans have made wrong waits on the word of a teenage girl from a despised religion in an occupied backwater from which nothing good is supposed to come. What will it be?

OK.

Or, as the church has often rendered this in Latin, fiat, let it be. Just as God said when creation fell from his fingers: Let there be light. Just as Abram said when God appeared to him to uproot and go away and become father to countless many . . . he doesn’t say anything; he just goes. This is what God’s people are to do. When God has a cockamamie scheme to repair the world, we roll with it.

Mary’s miraculous pregnancy is a presentation-all-over-again of Israel’s miraculous pregnancy tradition. It is, of course, re-presented with a twist—a fulfillment, we Christians would say. Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah, and Elizabeth got pregnant miraculously, but a man was involved. Through the original cockamamie scheme God designed for us to be intimate with our spouse and bear the wondrous fruit of children, these women bore sons who tilted the world on its axis. Mary requires no man to get pregnant. Rowan Williams, former archbishop of Canterbury, points out that anytime anyone trusts the God of the universe, new things get born.⁶ Miracles happen. New ministries arise. The creative way of God in the world is unleashed anew and inexplicable stuff gets going. Mary trusts so much she gets pregnant. She is the first Christian. Salvation begins with her yes.⁷ Ever since, Christians have tried to go on saying yes like her. We mostly fail. But that she did not fail means salvation is loose in her and then in our flesh. And the Holy One of Israel gets born.

St. Symeon the New Theologian in the eleventh century described the virgin birth this way: God had already made a person with no parents: Adam. God had already made a person from a man alone: Eve. God has made people from two parents: all the rest of us. The one thing God had not yet done was to make a person from a woman alone: Jesus.⁸ What God started in the garden, God finishes with the annunciation. Note well: this proves nothing. There is no bull’s-eye drawn around an arrow here. It just flirts with us. It’s supposed to delight. It suggests God works in the most beautiful way possible. Like an artist finishing a canvas, God returns to the work of creation and finishes it in Mary’s untouched womb. She is like the temple: filled with divine Shekinah (Spirit) that births holiness in the world. She is like the burning bush: filled with the fiery presence of God and yet not consumed. Christians have broken out some of our highest praise and our most Israel-infused language to speak of Mary. The doctrine of the virgin birth might be wrong, but it’s not wrong because it’s non-Jewish or anti-Jewish.

Learning from Jews about the Trinity

Not bad, eh? Did my best.

But the Jewish students didn’t want to talk about Mary at all. They wanted to talk about . . . other things.

So the virgin birth is a sign that Jesus is God, right? one asked.

Yes, I said, bracing myself.

So how come you Christians have three Gods?

Yes! our Hasidic rabbi intoned. That’s why I can go into a mosque and pray but can’t go into a Christian church. You’re technically tritheists.

Pagans? I ask. He nodded solemnly.

Two other Jewish students’ hands shot up. I looked over at Laura for backup. She smiled but did not intervene, as if to say, You’re on your own, kid.

I flailed around a little and went away distraught, thinking. I’m still thinking now, months later. Do we Christians worship three gods? Of course not, we have all always been quick to say. But Jews don’t see it that way. Despite our disavowals, it sounds like we have three beings running around claiming to be God. That’s polytheism. Paganism. Not the sort of thing the God or the people of Israel regard benignly.

And, so what? Who cares if

Reviews for Surprised by Jesus Again

[nicholasjjordan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This actually might be a five star book. The writing is kind of baggy, but I love so much of what he does to call Christians to love and see the Scriptures.