The Enyarts

It is such a letdown to rise from the dead and have your friends not recognize you.

The writer John tells us that Mary saw Jesus after his resurrection but did not realize it was Jesus. Jesus asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”

“Thinking he was the gardener, she said…”

I love that line “thinking he was the gardener”. It is so loaded. Jewish writers like John did things like this all the time in their writings. They record what seem to be random details, yet in these details we find all sorts of multiple layers of meaning. There are even methods to help decipher all the hidden meanings in a text. One is called the principle of first mention. Whenever you come across a significant word in a passage, find out where this word first appears in the Bible. John does this in his gospel. The first mention of the word love is in 3:16 – “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.” We then discover that love is first mentioned in Genesis 22 when God tells Abraham to take “your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love” and offer him as a sacrifice. John is doing something intentional in his gospel: He wants his readers to see a connection between Abraham and his son, and God and God’s son. John’s readers who knew the Torah would have seen the parallels right away.

Back to the empty tomb and Mary’s inability to recognize Jesus. She mistakes him for a gardener. Where is the first mention of a garden in the Bible? Genesis 2, the story of God placing the first people in a … garden. And what happens to this garden and these people? They choose to live outside of how God made them to live, and they lose their place in the garden. Death enters the picture and paradise is lost.

John tells us that Jesus is buried in a garden tomb. And Jesus is mistaken for a gardener. Something else is going on here. John wants us to see a connection between the garden of Eden and Jesus rising from the dead in a garden. There is a new Adam on the scene, and he is reversing the curse of death by conquering it. As one writer put it, “It was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.” And he’s doing it in a garden. He’s reclaiming creation. He’s entering into it and restoring it and renewing God’s plan for the world.

Jesus is God’s way of refusing to give up on his dream for the world.

Bell, Rob. (2005). Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith. Zondervan: Grand Rapids.

Posted by jared at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

To grab a few lines of Jesus and drop them down on someone 2,000 years later without first entering into the world in which they first appeared is lethal to the life and vitality and truth of the Bible.

Real people, in real places, at real times, writing and telling stories about their experiences and their growing understanding of who they are. This does not in any way discount the power of reading the Bible with no background knowledge at all, which is why these words are so powerful. We can enter into them at any level and they speak to us. Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does.

For example, the book of Deuteronomy is patterned after treaties that were common in its day. The writer essentially took a common legal document and changed the content and the names but kept the form the same.

The end of the book of Mark is arranged according to the coronation ceremonies of the Roman emperor. Maybe Mark witnessed one of these ceremonies, because he is very intentional about the order of events leading up to Jesus’ death. His readers would have been familiar with these Roman coronation events. They would have read between the lines right away. Mark wants you to see Jesus as a king like Caesar, but at the same time totally unlike Caesar.

The first three miracles in the book of John are directly related to the three major gods of Asia Minor, the region John writes his gospel to. Dionysus was the god who turned water into wine, Asclepius was the god of healing, and Demeter was the goddess of bread. So how does John begin his story? With Jesus turning water into wine, healing, and then feeding thousands of people. John has an agenda. He wants these people in this place and this time to know that Jesus is better than their gods.

When Paul writes to Timothy about women being saved in childbirth, he is making a direct reference to the goddess Artemis, whose temple was just down the street in Timothy’s hometown of Ephesus. Artemis’s followers believed that Artemis saved women from dying in childbirth, which is significant in a city where one out of two women died giving birth. Paul’s statement here has huge political, social, and religious implications. He is implying that Artemis is a fraud.

The first chapters of the book of Revelation follow the sequences of events of the Domitian games, held in honor of the Caesar who was in power at the time Revelation was written. Domitian would address the leaders of the various provinces, then his choir of twenty-four would sing worship songs to him, and then there would be a horse race. John is writing Revelation to people who had seen the Domitian games; they knew exactly what he was referring to. He wants them to see that Domitian is a fake and Jesus is the real king.

The writers of the Bible are communicating in language their world will understand. They are using symbols and pictures and images of the culture they are speaking to. That’s why the Bible has authority – God has authority and is present in real space and time. The Bible is a collection of stories that teach us about what it looks like when God is at work through actual people. The Bible has the authority if does only because it contains stories about people interacting with the God who has all authority.

The point in the book of Acts isn’t the early church. The point is the God who is at work in and through the early church to change the world. When we take the Bible seriously, we are taking God seriously. We believe that the same God who was at work then is at work now. The same God in the same kinds of ways. The goal is not to be a “New Testament church”. That makes the New Testament church the authority. The authority is God who is acting in and through those people at that time and now these people at this time.

The point is to ask, what is God up to here, now?

What in the world is God doing today?

How should we respond?

How did they respond? What can we learn from them that will help us now?

Bell, Rob. (2005). Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith. Zondervan: Grand Rapids.

Posted by jared at 09:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)