uh oh...
I have this evening finished reading what Christians call the first five books of the Old Testament, and what Jews call the Law, or Torah. Steeped as I am in English murder mysteries and books about dogs, I cannot pretend to much knowledge about how this body of work is read and understood from the Jewish traditions. My own Bible's notes call it "the memorial of the beginnings of God's people". They were bloody beginnings. I find this very difficult reading, and it has been slow going. Slow, and riveting, once I stopped my ears to my imaginings of the struggle of animals in the thousands that were being sacrificed. I am hoping that some of you will join in here, and help me understand what I am reading. Am I wrong to see this as a practice of substitutionary sacrifice? You must not deliver your children to be slaughtered for the god Moloch, for I am your God, but I know you have to kill something because you humans are like that, and it takes blood to get your attention, so sacrifice the firstborn and perfect of your herds and flocks for me instead.
Beyond this, though, lies a story of a people being chosen. Wanted. Desired. It also is a story ofscrewing up a relationship over and over, of being repeatedlyunfaithful and untrustworthy, and being taken back, but with ever moreconditions. "OK, but now you have to do this and that". Hence Leviticus and much of Deuteronomy. The Israelites are told over and over that God will take care of them, cherish them, put them above all other peoples if they are faithful to him, and castigate them, punish them, kill a generation of them, and keep some of them forever out of the land flowing with milk and honey if they are not faithful. And they keep wandering off.
While I have been reading this, my church has moved through Easter season, and I am also reading and hearing the New Testament. Christ has died, Christ is risen, and now we are in a waiting time before he sends the Comforter, the Holy Spirit that he promised to us, promised to send to us because he loves us. Loves. Loves. Us. This also is hard reading, because it is initiating a gnawing, a restlessness, a radical discomfort. I am not sleeping very well, actually. How does one respond to this extravagant love? Of course, I don't really mean some abstract theoretical "one". I mean me.
In the most recent edition of her brilliant radio program Speaking of Faith , Krista Tippett interviews 'new monastic" Shane Claiborne, who quotes the Danish philosopher/theologian Soren Kierkegaard as saying: "The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly."