How I became a Humanist #10: How to Read and Understand the Bible #2

Before studying theology, I think I read the Bible the way most Christians do.  If I read a section about Jesus healing a leper, I thought of it as history.  If I read a story about Jesus' geneology, I read it as history.  I looked at most the Bible as a sort of text book with stories that were more or less chronologically related.  It didn't occur to me that instead the stories might be theologically related, which is why the stories don't always occur in the same order in the various Gospels.  It's also why the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew differs from the one in Luke.  The two authors are making different points.  (I'll explain the difference between the theological difference between the genealogies if someone asks.)

Jesus Heals the Leper

One of the most common ways to see theology at play in the Bible is to observe how stories are placed alongside one another, that is, how they contrast and compare with one another (You don't need to know Greek to do this).  I'll use two examples.  Let's first start with the Gospel of Mark 1:40 - 3:6.  If you want to get the most out of this, read the text before continuing (If you can, read from a text that has no subtitles.)

Notice the following themes in several of the stories.

• Faith: 
• The leper demonstrates faith by saying, "if you will, you can make me clean."
• The friends of the paralytic man demonstrate faith by going out of their way to get to Jesus
• Mercy
• Jesus touches the leper before he heals him (this is technically against the law).  The man probably hasn't been touched by a clean person for years.  Jesus dignifies his humanity before he heals his body.
• Jesus forgives the sins of the paralytic man before healing him (again, treating the soul).
• Jesus recruits a tax collector (who worked for the Romans - they were hated as traitors).  Jesus recognizes the outcast (same with the paralytic and the leper).
• Jesus chills with tax collectors and sinners.  He's ridiculed for this - these people haven't straightened out their lives yet.  They're not the picture of charity work that you would put on a poster.  They're sinners.  He dignifies their humanity before they get it right.  He spends time with them before he heals them. 
• Jesus heals on the Sabbath.  Again, he's breaking the law, kind of.  What he's saying is "this person's humanity is more important than protecting our most sacred laws, even the Sabbath."

Jesus Heals the Paralytic (By Jan Luyken)

• Jesus Power
  If you go back even further in the text to 1:21 you see a theme of Jesus' power permeate each story.
• Jesus has power over demons
• He has power over illness
• He has power to forgive
• He has power over the Sabbath
• He even has authority to interpret scripture that the scribes don't.

When we split the Bible up into memory verses and subsections with neat little headlines, we can miss these themes.  We also miss them because we haven't been taught to look for them.  The stories tie together and are generally told alongside one another to bring about a variety of nuanced theological points.

On account of the lengthy section of scripture, I'll continue this topic next week.