I AM an Old Testament scholar, and, when I’m invited to preach anywhere, I usually say I’ll preach from there. That usually raises eyebrows: “Really? The Old Testament? I mean, it’s full of gore, sex, violence.” And I’m like: “Yes, isn’t that great? It’s like being in Hollywood rather than Disneyland.”
People are surprised because, apart from a few chosen bits, the Old Testament is considered pretty unpreachable: violence, abuse, rape, murder, incest. . . People tell me that the New Testament is so much better. Well, yes, if you cut out Revelation, parts of Paul, and a few uncomfortable sayings of Jesus.
Let me tell you why I got interested in preaching the unpreachable. Picture a little church in Arkansas. . . Brother John is speaking; it is an all-age service, plenty of children and young people, eager to listen. The text: Judges 19. The gang rape, murder, and dismemberment of a Levite’s concubine. Perfect text for all-age?
Brother John’s sermon: This woman, she left her husband. She disrespected him; so she got what she deserved. And you, if you disrespect your leaders, that’s what God will do to you. Worst sermon ever. But it set me thinking.
You never hear preaching on Judges 19. What would it look like to do it well? What do you do with the women — and men — sitting in the audience who’ve experienced sexual violence, and for whom this text brings painful reminders? What does this text have to say to them? What kind of damage do we do if we preach it badly? And what kind of damage do we do if we don’t preach it at all?
So, what do we do with the texts we struggle with? The military story of Israel, and the way it has been used and misused over the years; the treatment of women; the strange laws of Leviticus; the violent and brutally honest language of lament; the capricious God of Job. . . the God of the Bible is so much less cuddly and therapeutic than the Jesus we have made for ourselves.
What we often do is find strategies to deal with the discomfort: we play games with ourselves and create a canon within the canon, ignore what we find difficult, or try and mount up excuses and explanations for this inexplicable God. There’s a real temptation to go into defensive mode, and think that our main task is to defend God.
God doesn’t need defending, God needs revealing.
SCRIPTURE is more complex than we often make it out to be. So, let’s be radical. Instead of starting by calling a text unpreachable, because of its horror, let’s start with ourselves. None of us read the text “as it is”. We’re human — we’re situated in time and place and culture, our imaginations are formed and limited by our life experiences and the deep values they ingrained in us.
Sometimes, it means we can’t even do the work of imagining another way of being, which then brings us into a painful clash with the world of the text. We all have things we believe so deeply that they shape the very fabric of who we are, and we can’t distance ourselves from them. . .
Becoming aware of clashes of imagination doesn’t solve our problems in knowing what to do, but it helps us realise that the problem may not be solely with scripture. Instead of jumping to judgement, or offence, or defence, we can ask: does the difference in values prompt good and valid questions?
Questions can go in two directions: today’s values can make us question the world of the text — for instance, the way women are treated or silenced, or poor response to gender violence. Equally, the text could prompt us to ask questions of how little we value the natural world, or how we care for those in their elder years.
Encountering the strangeness of scripture is about encountering otherness: it forces us to move out of our own boundaries and engage with difference, in the text and the people in and behind the text. Human beings find it difficult to attend to difference — whether in writing or in person. Interacting with the text of scripture can shape our discipleship in preparing us to interact with the other: both the other of a different culture and time, and with a God who is profoundly other to us.
To love our neighbours as ourselves (including across space and time) is to recognise our common humanity, and not to think of them as a failed attempt at being me. Teaching good engagement with the otherness of scripture can help us to embed deep discipleship, if we choose to listen, to try and understand, and not collapse the differences between us, but attend to the deep questions and challenges that arise out of meeting difference.
OUR failure to value difference often leads us to encounter what we struggle with from the point of view of moral superiority. We condemn the people and writers of the text for their backwards attitudes. Or we use the text to condemn those who find it difficult, or try to read it differently.
There are many points at which it is right to reflect on the cultures reflected in the text, and their failings. Reading the Old Testament is often an exercise in seeing how not to do it rather than models to follow.
But to consider that the writers and people are primitive, or failed to understand things as we do, is to put ourselves in an indefensible position.
If we stand with the people of the text as fallible and broken, yet loved passionately by a God of justice, then, we can ask, how does God work with a fallen humanity, with their flaws, with their cultures, with their limited imaginations, and still bring redemption and justice? What does this question enable us to discover about God — and about ourselves?
Listening to the text with this question in mind allows us both to be truthful about its horrors, and to frame our understanding of the story differently. It isn’t just the story of what God does, as if God is a completely independent actor imposing his will, with no regard, on to the people of the text. It is the story of a partnership, to use Brueggemann’s words: the human being as Yahweh’s partner, and Yahweh as the human being’s partner.
It’s a messy partnership; but it’s a true partnership, where God works with human beings as they are, with their structures and limitations, and their flashes of brilliance and inspiration. In the partnership, we see a God who attends to the other: the human being as other. God self-limits to make space for human beings to grow and be themselves — even when being themselves leads to disaster.
And the story reads as a constant commentary on the complexity of working with the other. When do you intervene? When do you break up the partnership? What happens when a partner severely hurts the other? Or when one walks away? How do we tell the story of our encounter with an other who is so vastly different from us?
All these are questions for today, of life, society, and politics. They’re the type of questions we need to be able to ask and work through, with scripture and with the wider world.
SUSPENDING judgement for a moment can also help us to ask: Who tells stories and why? Wwho reads stories and why? What kind of story is the story of Joshua, for instance, with its warfare and attributions to God of the people’s apparent thirst for violence? Do we ever tell stories like these, and what motivates the telling? How do we shape our story of our experience of God?
Let’s take an example: Joshua and Judges. One tells us, We did great, we made it, we killed them all! The other says . . . Well, we kind of tried, but it didn’t really work out that way. You can map out the book of Joshua against the beginning of Judges, and see the places that are said to be conquered and destroyed in Joshua, now only part-conquered in Judges. Judges is a reflection on the failure of the earlier triumphalistic approach.
Thomas PerkinsDr Hamley speaks at the Festival of Preaching in Cambridge, last month
Suspend for a moment the question of historicity, and just try and feel the story. People traumatised by Egypt, by slavery, by wandering in the desert — they’re faced with a new challenge: how do you make a living unless you have land? The best land is occupied by people much stronger than them. We keep being told, they have chariots of iron!
In contrast, Israel were refugees, with no resources, broken and destitute; for as much as they were the people of God, they held pain and trauma, and just as they thought things were getting better, what they thought was the promised land was already taken, and they had no chance.
As it’s told, this isn’t a story of genocide, of a greater power annihilating the weaker. It’s not Israel and Palestine today. It’s not Western nations colonising the planet. It’s a different kind of story.
The people of the text, in Joshua, fight for survival. And that adds to trauma.
We all know the stories of men who fought in the wars of the 20th century and returned with PTSD. War leaves its mark on the soul, however you justify it. It leaves a people having to work out what they tell themselves about what they’ve done, and what’s been done to them. So, they tell stories to try and make sense of it.
What happens to our questions about the text if we start reading it in its wider context, and as a witness not just to what happened in terms of political events, but what happened in terms of how people process their experiences before God, and tell these stories, and then reflect on them?
What if we start seeing the people who told stories (whenever they were written, rewritten, and edited) as real people, scared, broken, and traumatised? Because the majority of our scriptures comes from that kind of context: places of war and suffering and pain and fear, and wondering why on earth life has to be so hard, and wrestling with the painful absence of the God who promised to be there for them.
THINKING of how we tell stories is important — but it doesn’t entirely let God off the hook. I think that one of the biggest problems we have with unpreachable texts is that the God of the Bible is not the God we want. It’s not the God we make for ourselves, in our minds and in our stories.
The French philosopher Voltaire said, “God made man in his image, and man returned the favour.” Warping our image of God is an insidious form of idolatry: we distort God so that our God agrees with us — and our friends, whoever they are.
The God of scripture is bigger and greater than people imagine, and cannot be manipulated, domesticated, or bought. This is at the heart of the story of Job, a pretty unpalatable story if you think about it.
The way we often talk about Job is a bit like this: “Hey, God, I’m Job. I serve you, but I lost everything and my family’s dead. What are you doing?” And God says, “Come, Job, how dare you question me. I created the hippopotamus.”
Actually, the book of Job is amazing, and yet we often fail to see what is so profound about it.
Job starts out as a man full of certainties, who expects the world to be predictable. His relationship with God is predictable. It’s about cause and effect.
Job is slightly obsessive. He worries so much that his children might possibly do something wrong that, instead of spending time with them and loving them, he offers sacrifices on their behalf. And, when they die, he says all the right things to God (at least, to start with). He’s righteous and hangs on to it, because that’s his ticket to prosperity.
Job and his friends have a mechanistic view of the world: good things happen to good people, bad things to bad people. You can tip the balance in your favour if you do the right things with God. This way of thinking blames the victims, and traps God into a mechanistic cycle: there’s no room for freedom, no room for love, and no room for grace.
But the genius of the book of Job is that it centres on two ambiguous little words: barak and hinnam. Barak is the word for blessing. But here’s the catch. Scribes were so afraid of sinning by accident (like Job) that, when they needed the word “curse”, they were too scared, and replaced it with . . . “bless”. Confusing!
When God blesses Job with riches, is it a blessing, or a curse? When Job says, “The Lord has given, the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord,” is he really blessing God? What’s a blessing? The other word, hinnam, means either without purpose, or without cause.
Does God do things to Job for a purpose, or with good cause, or is there an element of freedom and unpredictability? Does Job bless God with an ultimate purpose, to get something out of God? Does he love God without cause (such as being blessed with riches)?
Job goes through horrendous experiences, and nothing can justify that. But the Job that emerges at the end of the book bears little resemblance to the Job of the beginning. He never finds out the cause or purpose of his suffering. Instead, he encounters God — a God wilder and more unpredictable than he had imagined — and in the encounter, he is changed.
The Job of the end sits and laughs with his friends, and spends time with his children. He even gives us the name of his daughters, and gives them an inheritance on a par with his sons. He has completely left behind the mechanistic faith that kept everyone in their place and motivated his nervous piety.
The book takes us to a place far beyond this, into a place of freedom, for both Job and God, where relationship is rooted in God’s character as the God of the covenant, and love as a free choice.
Freedom, here, is deeply connected to issues of justice: the old framework of cause and consequence trapped Job into a meritocratic view of the world where poverty and misery were just deserts. Breaking this down allows a new perspective — a much more scary perspective, because it makes the world less certain and predictable, and lament becomes a necessity.
The God of Job is wild and alien — and yet utterly caring and involved; he has control of everything, yet doesn’t share his thoughts and reasons. Job never finds out the “why” of his suffering; instead, he is invited into new life.
It isn’t an easy text to preach — because it doesn’t leave us with a cuddly feeling. Instead, it encourages us to lament, to rage, to be honest with God. God says that Job spoke what is right. Job ranted and raved, and did so before God. He engaged with the brokenness, randomness, and pain of the world, and this was right. And he got no answers.
THE Old Testament is a story of relationship, discovery, and wrestling. Spirituality is not straightforward: it is less a matter of quiet prayer and more like Jacob wrestling in the dark.
And yet, the story, with all its violence and puzzling questions, is a story of grace, again and again and again; of a God who does not repay people with just deserts, but offers grace for as long as can be done without tipping the scales of justice irreversibly; a story with multiple voices, movements, and counter-movements; and a story of justice and a battle against consistent abuses of power and forms of social organisation that destroy the possibility for human flourishing. The concubine of Judges 19 is not cut up on God’s orders. Jephthah’s daughter is not killed on God’s orders. Both are killed by men seeking power, feeding their egos, and ignoring God’s direction.
If we preach these texts, we need to preach about power, misuse of power, and damaging egos — and how God, meanwhile, works with humans as they are: small, limited, myopic, caught in their cultures.
The hard texts make us wrestle with God and how God works in the world, and wrestle with how utterly rubbish life can be. They hold up a mirror to us of who we are as human beings. Women still get gang-raped and murdered. Children still get hurt by their parents. Civil wars and massacres are everywhere, and proud leaders are still willing to sacrifice countless innocent lives. We need to preach those unpreachable texts, because they speak of real life.
Wrestling with the text, with God and with ourselves, is precisely why I didn’t want to start with the questions we usually deal with: the head questions about authorship, and culture and historicity, because, often, answering those questions seeks to close the text down, resolve ambiguities, give us meaning and principles we can hang on to. Doing this too quickly risks putting us in a place where we’re in control of the text.
The difficulties, the ambiguities, the challenges are fertile places, creative places where we can dwell with God, even if it feels like meeting God in the wilderness. They’re places where our only response might be lament and solidarity with the victims of the text and of our world, and we express our anger to a God who doesn’t stop it all. Preaching the unpreachable is about inviting others to dwell with the sorrow and pain of the world, and the questions none of us can answer.
AS HARD as it is to deal with these texts, what would be the impact of not having them there? What would it do to them to have a Bible that had only stories of a God who intervenes?
These hard texts allow the most desperate human experiences to find themselves and their agonising questions in the pages of scripture. When we read Judges 19, we should ask, where was God? As well as, how could a nation do this? How could a people be organised in such a way that not only this happens, but then they use it as a pretext for civil war, and end the civil war with abduction and forced marriage, which repeats at the level of the nation what was done to one woman? We need to ask these questions of the world back then, and we need to ask them of the world today.
Does this explain the texts? No. We still need to read well. Pay attention to history, cultural context, literary dynamics, canonical movement — these help us to see when our readings and assumptions are faulty. They help us to read the text better. But we also need to allow the text to read us, to challenge us, and, above all, call us to be honest with ourselves.
Pastorally, the difficult texts are essential, because they force us to confront what it means to be human — and still see God at work with us, not working with the ideal version of a human being, but with the reality of who we are, and shaping us, through our interaction with an alien text, its alien people, and its alien God, to turn our face towards the other, to learn to be shaped to listen before we condemn, and to be confronted, just like the Israelites, with our idols, our self-justifications, the games we play with ourselves, and with God.
If we allow the text to question us, if we lay our questions of the text side by side with our questions of the world, then we make space for God, this God who is other, to meet us, wrestle with us, and invite us into a relationship far richer, broader, and challenging than we can imagine.
And, when we do, we might say, with Job: “I have uttered what I do not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me. I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see you. . . See, I am of small account; I will cover my mouth.”
The Revd Dr Isabelle Hamley is Principal of Ridley Hall and the author of God of Justice and Mercy: A theological commentary on Judges (SCM Press, 2021) (Books, 21 January 2022). This is an edited version of Dr Hamley’s talk at the recent Festival of Preaching (Feature, 20 September).