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Everyone loves a good story. A group of friends tell jokes over a pint or two at the pub; neighbours gossip over the garden fence; a couple pore over the Sunday papers and interrupt each other, ‘Hey, listen to this…’; children swap stories of holiday adventures on the school bus; old friends catch up with what’s been happening in their lives since they last spoke; a household stops whatever it’s doing to watch the next episode of their favourite soap; at the end of a long, working day, you sink into bed with your novel … and wake next morning to the news on the radio.
Human life is unimaginable without stories. They punctuate our lives at every turn. We tell them, read them, watch them, write them, paint them, make them in one way or another, absorb them all the time.
Story is central to Christian faith and tradition. We might say that Christians are those who live in and by the story of Jesus, remembering it within the community of the church, in and for their own time, and in their own lives. They find in the story of Jesus God’s truth for the world, which illuminates at one and the same time what it means to be truly human and the calling humans share to enter into the divine life of God. We read the story of Jesus to discover God’s truth for our lives, but we do not do so passively or mindlessly. We ponder the story, we question it, we argue with it, we reinterpret it, we bring fresh insights to it, we rework it in new ways for our own times and lives. This is what we do as we hear the story told, again and again, in the words of scripture, in the traditions of the church, in our repeated patterns of worship. We meditate on the story and discover its meaning as we reflect on it together, in the community of the church. The story need never grow old or cold, because it is capable of endless reinterpretation and new meaning. We ourselves never come to the same story twice, because we are always different, we are on the move, we find ourselves in different circumstances and with different needs, questions and dilemmas. As we come to the story, bringing the situation and needs of the moment, so we find new truths and connections in the story. It offers us something for the moment which feeds and nourishes us and enables us to go on.
This is why Bible study is never a static activity, but always a dynamic adventure – or at least it should be! The scriptures are not closed texts. They are, we might say, open-ended and incomplete without the interaction and response of us, the readers. On its own, the Bible does not signify; it is, like any unread book, a dead, flat text. It is only when it is read, searched, engaged, scrutinised and prayed into life by readers, breathed into life by the Holy Spirit, that the Bible can come alive as a living text, a ‘word of God’ from beyond us to our lives and situations. That process, that ‘searching of the scriptures’, demands from us all our attention, our engagement, our intelligence, our wrestling and our honesty. It demands openness to new meaning, and an expectation that we can and will receive a living word. It demands a certain kind of humility to receive, yes, but it also demands of us hard work and hard thinking. We search the scriptures, scrutinise the texts, interrogate them, struggle with them – all active words, all active processes. Sometimes the text seems to ‘speak’ directly to us and offer us a word unbidden, but often this is not so. The text seems cold or remote, it does not touch us. Or it is difficult and alien, it contains values and assumptions that we cannot relate to, that are far from our culture’s values. Sometimes the text even seems morally repugnant, and we wonder how this can be a ‘word of the Lord’. It is then that we are required to wrestle with the text, engaging all our doubts, disbelief and dismay. There is no limit to the questions we may ask of the text, no taboo on the hard challenges we can voice. The texts have withstood centuries of debate, argument and scholarly searching – they can cope with a little bit more!
But as we search the scriptures, scrutinise the Bible, challenge and critique the stories in it, we find that something else is going on. As we search the scriptures, the scriptures begin to search us. The texts interrogate us, if we will let them, put our lives under their probing light. The stories challenge us to ask profound questions of our lives, to scrutinise our motives, behaviour and hearts. As we seek to understand the texts, we find we are challenged to stand under their judgement. So the process of Bible study is a dynamic, mutual interaction between the text of the scriptures and the ‘text’ of our lives. Each dialogues with the other, and a new meaning is born out of the interaction. As we bring the stories of our lives to the stories in scripture, we find that both are challenged and changed in the process.
This process is rather like what happens when we gaze at a painting, and particularly an icon, which is something more than a painting. We begin by looking at the scene or the characters as if they were something outside us, separate from us, under our control and scrutiny. But as we are drawn into the icon, we find that the icon begins to look at us. Those large eyes of the Christ or the Madonna or the saint pierce our gaze, look deep into our souls and reveal the truth that is there. Many people experience Graham Sutherland’s huge tapestry of Christ in Coventry Cathedral in this way. We are judged by those all-seeing eyes, just as we are judged by the piercing words of scripture; yet, at the same time, we are loved and forgiven, called into deeper truth, deeper reality, deeper living. We are not the same at the end of our gazing, just as we are not the same when we engage truthfully with the scriptures. It is a living encounter which ‘converts’ us, changes us, draws us on in the adventure of faith. As we find ourselves drawn into the story, we meet Christ the Storyteller who speaks to us the truth of our lives, and reveals to us the Good News of God’s presence in our human story.
From Nicola Slee, Searching Stories: Study Guide, Christian Education, 2002 © 2002 Christian Education