On reading the Bible more slowly

And finding something new in the Easter story

Heads-up:

As a follow-up to the animated conversation about publishing and self-promotion, do go and read Hannah Anderson’s recent piece at Christianity Today, “Make the Internet Modest Again.” Anderson writes, “I’ve often wondered what we owe each other in this limitless age. Without the boundaries of space, time, and embodied relationship, how do I know whom I belong to? How do I know whom I can trust? At times, I’ve unveiled myself in innocence only to have my openheartedness met by a knife. But instead of protecting myself by hardening my heart, I’m choosing modesty. I’m choosing to actively shield the soft parts of myself so that they can remain tender, so that I can remain myself.”

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Today’s letter:

In high school, Betty Howard (later, Elisabeth Elliot) began reading the Bible from cover to cover for the first time. Her family had been devoted to the Scriptures, which were read aloud morning and evening around the table, but this was Howard’s own devotional coming-of-age. “What blessings God has given me!” she wrote to her parents from boarding school. “I’m up to Deut. 12. I usually have to get up early to read, but it’s worth it! . . . He has spoken very clearly to me through His word every morning.”

According to Elliot’s biographer, Lucy S. R. Austen, when Elliot was an undergraduate at Wheaton College, she was deeply moved by a campus speaker, Stephen Olford, whose devotional practices, mirrored her own at the time.  “I read just one chapter a day. I read it over and over, praying as I read that God will show me a new meaning in each verse. Then I meditate upon it, and finally get on my knees and pray it all the way through, back to the Lord” (63, 64).

The habit of devoted attention to the Scripture stayed with Elliot throughout her life. To be sure, it did not spare her many mistakes, even harmful theological conclusions that proved tragic for herself and others. (When I asked Austen whether she would characterize Elliot’s third marriage as abusive, she said yes.) Still, I find Elliot’s example all the more striking today, when serious reading of any kind has fallen out of favor.

I might wish for more women and men who carefully and humbly and devotedly read the Bible, who prioritized this habit, who did not seek simply to understand the words of God but to put them into practice. This, after all, is the call of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, when he reminds us that anyone who hears the words of God and does not put them into practice is like a person who builds his house on the sand. That house is unstable, washed away in spring storms.

It was the small details of Betty Howard’s devotional practices that struck me when I was recently rereading Austen’s Elisabeth Elliot: A Life. I thought of my own Bible reading, which has slowed, even puttered in the last couple of years. Last January, I abandoned my Bible reading plan within a week of the New Year, mostly because I sensed the invitation to not merely listen to the word, and so deceive myself, but to do what it says. I eventually returned to the plan, although this January, I set it aside again. Or most precisely, I lopped off the Old Testament reading and devoted myself instead, to the assigned Psalm and New Testament reading. Even with the hour I normally give myself in the morning to bend over this reading, it often feels too short.

It was when I slowed down, a couple of weeks ago, that I noticed something new in Mark’s gospel, when he tells the story of the women hurrying to the tomb on the first Easter morning (Mark 16:1-20). How many times had I read this story—and missed the detail that had so gripped me this particular day? On Saturday evening, Mark narrates, “Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome went out and purchased burial spices so they could anoint Jesus’ body” (v. 1). I could imagine how anxiously they’d waited for that Sabbath sun to set, giving them permission to do something in the midst of their grief. Oh, how we’re relieved to set about something purposeful when the world is turned upside down, just as it had been for these women when Jesus was betrayed into the hands of murderous rivals, then led—impossibly—to his execution. The Teacher, the Healer, the Master was dead, and I suppose it felt good to make preparations to anoint his body. It makes me think of how furiously I cook and clean when I’m agitated and distressed.

Spices in hand, it was evening again—and the women had to resign themselves to more waiting. Waiting, waiting: isn’t this so often the only thing we can do when God must act? Did they sleep, I wondered, on this particular night? Or did they toss nervously, waiting for the first glimmer of Sunday sun? I tended to think it was the latter, especially because Mark writes, “Very early on Sunday morning, just at sunrise, they went to the tomb,” (v. 2). I imagined the first hint of rising sun had sent them springing from their beds. They had waited, they had prepared, they had waited again, and now they were hurrying to the tomb.

Slowly and prayerfully rereading this passage, I noticed that only after the women were hurrying to the tomb did they ask, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?” (v. 3). Tactically, it seems this question comes a little late. The stone is quite obviously the biggest obstacle to their task. Spices will do no good if a heavy stone covers the tomb and blocks access to Jesus’ body. It’s of course possible that they have asked the question before and Mark has made no record of it. But it’s also quite possible—(and this is the interpretation I favor)—that Mark has described the very nature of faith. Faith sends us springing from our bed and hurrying toward Jesus. Only then, as we are “on the way,” preparations in hand, might we begin to imagine the pitfalls, the obstacles, the seeming impossibilities.

Faith, in other words, is described as movement, not analysis; as trust, not calculated outcomes. You don’t have faith when you are tallying resources and weighing their sufficiency. You don’t have faith when you haven’t budged an inch, promising to move only after you have anticipated all possible mishaps and planned for their resolution. You have faith when you are “on the way”—and even still, there are yet matters as big as this stone.

The women could have asked the question earlier, and it might have prevented their preparations. They might have stood at the cross, watching Joseph of Arimathea taking the body down. They might have followed Joseph to the garden tomb and watched him lay Jesus’ inert, mutilated form inside. They might have even observed Roman soldiers rolling a stone to seal the tomb’s entrance, and how easily they could have mused, “It would be nice to anoint Jesus’ body—but the stone. . .” Instead, the women ignore the stone until the moment it matters. And even here, what’s implicit in their question is their expectation of help: “Who will roll the stone away for us?” They see the stone as an obstacle, but I actually don’t think they see it as an impossibility.

And of course, it’s not: because what they find at the tomb is far more than anything they’ve asked or imagined. The stone is rolled away—and Jesus is gone. They’ve made faithful preparations for something far too small. They had planned for an anointing—and they have a resurrection instead.

Oh, this story. This story that I have encountered hundreds of times and built the house of my life upon. Oh, this story answers the howl of our despair with a hope that is real and substantial, grounded in historical record. How does this old, old story have power to speak to me anew, calling me–and all of us this week—to get on the way of the One who calls himself the Way, the Truth, the Life? Jesus doesn’t want so much to be believed but to be hurried after. Faith begs us to see his sufficiency, to trust his working for good, to understand that there is more divinely planned and purposed than the anointing of the dead.  A resurrection is at hand—and we are those who wake and walk in its life-giving light.

I invite you, this week, to spend your own slow time re-reading the story of Jesus’ passion: Matthew 26-28; Mark 14-16; Luke 22-24; John 13-21. I invite you to find yourself, like Betty Howard, on your knees, praying it back to God and giving thanks to the one whose wounds have healed us, remembering this, too:

“There were also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written,” (John 21:25).