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Hidden in His Own Story. Andrew Walton
Читать онлайн.Название Hidden in His Own Story
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isbn 9781532607592
Автор произведения Andrew Walton
Жанр Религия: прочее
Издательство Ingram
What is now known in biblical scholarship as narrative criticism evolved out of this dynamic of identifying and exploring the elements and craft of storytelling in the Bible and other texts. However, before and behind the formal study of biblical stories are the stories themselves both individually as narrative units and collectively as meta-narrative which can also be understood as “primal story,” the story from which other stories grow.
In his book The Bible Makes Sense, Walter Brueggemann expands on previous assertions of German Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad and English New Testament scholar C. H. Dodd, that the Bible has its roots in two primal narratives—the exodus and the resurrection. Brueggemann says a primal narrative is “the most important story we know, and we have come to believe it is decisively about us.”3 He goes on to say that “von Rad has made it clear that these assertions come behind and before any reasoned theology or any apologetic concern to justify faith to outsiders.”4 In other words, the primal story is contained in every other story, past and present, and is the portal through which every other story is filtered.
Primal stories (yes, we can and do have more than one) are so powerful that they shape everything happening afterward. Primal stories also change the past by becoming a lens through which we see and reimagine everything prior to their telling. The future emanates from the primal story and the past leads up to it.
We All Have Primal Stories
The Bible is not the only place we find primal stories. We all have primal stories in our lives and communities that literally define who we are: death, birth, marriage, divorce, a love affair, achievement, failure, sickness, injury, epiphany, and abandonment. The list is endless, as are life’s experiences.
In order for people to really know who we are it is important for us to tell and hear our respective primal stories. The same is true for our knowing Jesus. The way we come to really know the person Jesus is through his stories and particularly his primal stories.
A Man Hidden in His Own Story
Of course Jesus never actually says, “This is the central story of my life from which the past and future emanate.” However, if we accept the premise that the parables and teachings of Jesus are his personal tales, we now have a collection of stories in which we can identify topics, themes, and characters. Also, the detail and care with which a story is told is usually an indicator of that story’s importance to the teller. By observing and exploring all of Jesus’ stories and teachings we begin to see common elements and can then imagine one or more of these stories as the source from which all the others come.
Emerging from the whole of Jesus’ stories and teachings are several common elements, including but not limited to healing, forgiveness, persistence, faith, kindness, fairness, generosity, and love; all grounded in compassion, but not compassion as mere empathy. Rather, the compassion described of Jesus in the gospels, splagchnizomai, which literally means “to be moved in the bowels,” the bowels believed to be the seat of love and pity. One can imagine splagchnizomai as intense, visceral emotion akin to suffering that is prompted by another’s suffering. In numerous stories of healing Jesus is reported to have splagchnizomai toward the individuals as well as crowds of people who are made whole.
Such compassion opens up vistas of hospitality, liberation, regeneration, and new life. Jesus, being fully human, can be assumed as not unlike most people in that he would have told stories which came from his own experiences, passions, prejudices, and perspectives of compassion.
A Note to the Reader
The reimagined story that follows is drawn from parables and teachings attributed to Jesus, as well as events recorded in the four gospels. The actual Scripture passages from which the story emerges appear in the appendix in approximate order of reference.
There are no chapter titles or numbers but rather pauses between stories within The Story, indicated with the Hebrew word Selah that is used throughout the Psalms and is believed to mean “pause and consider.”
I’ve written this story as an invitation for you to reconsider and reimagine both the humanity and divinity of Jesus. My invitation goes out to people who are not familiar with the Bible stories and have only heard them through other sources. It also goes out to many who have rejected traditional interpretations of the stories as religious dogma. I also extend the invitation to many people who are so steeped in the stories that they have become cliché.
Even the most clever storyteller or writer of fiction can never totally disguise or deny their personal influence on the story. And most of us have had the experience of someone beginning a story with, “I know a person who . . .” when in fact that “person” is the one telling the story. Why not imagine the same when Jesus says, “Once there was a man traveling on the way from Jerusalem to Jericho? . . .”
Selah
1. Wikipedia.com, s.v. “Josephus on Jesus.”
2. Wikipedia.com, s.v. “Tacitus on Christ.”
3. Brueggemann, The Bible Makes Sense, rev. ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 23–26.
4. Ibid, 24.
The Story
When the sun goes down in the desert and darkness caresses the earth, the warmth of day quickly becomes the cold of night. As the brilliant colors of the sunset fade to black, the heavens awaken. A clear desert sky overwhelms one with mystery and awe.
We sat under such a sky with a roaring fire between us. Weary and needing sleep, I wanted to lay my head on the ground and dream, but the voice on the other side of the flame was insistent.
“Tell me your story, Jesus.” The voice appeared to come from the flames that pierced the darkness and dispelled the cold.
“My story? What do you mean by ‘my story’?”
“Tell me who you are, Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph and Mary.”
“You know who I am.”
“Perhaps. But do you?”
My response surprised me, “I’m not so sure anymore—who I am.”
“So tell me your story, from as far back as you can remember.”
Selah
Mystery was no stranger to my mother. She saw the world through eyes of wonder and by doing so made life wonderful. To her nothing was ever simply as it appeared. There was always something else behind, in, and through what most people saw as plain, ordinary, or even dull. Sunlight sang, plants and flowers danced, water played, and the moon and stars held secrets of time. There were times when she looked at me with the same wonder. She had reason to know the world this way.
Mother worked hard at taking care of our family. She cooked, sewed, cleaned, shopped at the market, and brought water from the well. Not only did she work hard she did everything with a joyful spirit, even the most difficult tasks, as if she carried a secret deep within that permeated her life with joy.
When preparing the food for our family, she was particularly joyous. One day as she prepared flour for baking bread she took a small jar from a hole in the earthen floor. From the jar she pinched a small bit of powder, sprinkled it in the flour, and then began mixing.
“Mother,