Jeremy Duncan: I am completely fascinated with this complex and beautiful collection of texts we call the Bible, but I worship Jesus. Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons dot church for more information.
Hey, welcome to church. My name is Jeremy. I'm part of the team here at commons. And if we haven't met before, welcome. We really appreciate the fact that you've taken a bit of your day to spend with us here online.
But today, we start a new series. One that we had planned as part of our annual journal outline a year ago, although with some small changes. One of the things that has always shaped our community at commons is our journal project. Every year we map out an entire year of teaching all of the series that will guide us through the next 12 months together. We've been doing this now for 6 years and September will be the beginning of our 7th year as commons.
But we're going to do something a little different with this series. We're gonna do something that we've never done before. We're going to change the plan just slightly. Originally, this was slated for a 3 week series. However, some things have slipped beyond our control.
And so we are going to roll with the changes and we're going to expand this conversation to 5 weeks. Now in that, we're going to take the germ of an idea, how to come to the scriptures and what it means for us to affirm the God breathed inspiration of the scriptures, scriptures always through the light of Jesus. Because this is one of our core values at commons. Intellectually honest, spiritually passionate Jesus always at the center of our imagination. And no matter how we value or study or wave the bible, if we don't find our way back always to Jesus, we know we will have missed the point.
And so today we're gonna talk about words versus the word and why we center Jesus. Next week, we will look at creation, genesis, and storytelling is meaning making. In week 3, it will be history, violence, and knowing where we come from. Week 4 will be poetry, making sense of the unsensible. And then finally, we're going to look at revelation and an imagination for a preferred future.
But the idea here is is to gather up an overview of the scriptures and to talk about how we center Jesus in the story at each stage of the story. And I think this is a really important conversation for all of us. But maybe particularly if you're new to commons, perhaps you found us online and you're joining us during this season. I think this will help to ground you in this Jesus centered approach to the Christian story that we value. So the word versus the word, what are we talking about here?
Well, let's start with some language from our website. This is from the about page on commons.church, but it's also the first page when you open your journal. And it says, at commons, we are completely fascinated with this complex and beautiful collection of texts we call the Bible, but we worship Jesus. The scriptures lead us to the realization that Jesus is the only exact representation of the divine and that God has always looked like Jesus even when we didn't see that clearly. Because of this, we have abandoned the idea of an angry violent god in order to fully embrace the good news brought forward by Jesus.
We believe that Jesus came not to change God's mind about us, but to repair our imagination of God. Realizing this and coming to understand that God is love, we affirm surprising acceptance and scandalous grace as the way God chooses to heal all things. We desire to participate in this renewal by following the way of Jesus, empowered by the spirit, trusting that this good news is even better than we can imagine. Now we've made that language a little bit flowery. I mean, we wanted it to sound impressive on the website and all that, but there is a lot of very deeply held conviction there.
And it starts with this phrase. We are completely fascinated with this complex and beautiful collection of texts we call the Bible, but we worship Jesus. And that was meant to be a little provocative. I mean, obviously, we worship Jesus. We are a Christian church after all, but the but creates this point of tension between Jesus and the Bible, even if just for a moment.
Now that's not because we actually think there is a disconnect. In fact, the more that I study, the more I read, the more I invest myself in the scriptures, the more clearly I see them bringing me back to Jesus. But the scriptures are where I encounter Jesus. The scriptures are not. They are never a replacement for Jesus.
And we're actually going to look at some scriptures today that teach us exactly this. But understanding the landscape from the get go and reminding ourselves that the Bible is not an end in and of itself. This is the beginning of a journey that leads us always back to the risen Christ. This is one of our core convictions at commons, and I would argue it has been one of the foundational ideas of the Jesus Movement. Because we are people of the way and the way is Jesus.
So let's pray and then today we're going to talk about prologomena, words and the word, the way to the way, and how everything leads us back to Christ. God, for all the ways that you continue to invite us forward, you welcome us into the words of your scripture and through them you invite us to encounter the Christ. May we truly meet you. May the Bible be more than a book, more than something we wave, more than a prop that we use, but an invitation to encounter your heart. Divine grace and peace that comes to us, meets us, changes us and invites us into your kingdom and commonwealth.
May the ways that we study, the ways that we read actually change us. May they invite us and shape us along the way so that we become formed in the likeness of your son. Everything that we do point always to the Christ and may we be known as the people of that way. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.
K. Today I want to begin with the prologue to the gospel of John, or at least that's where we want to get to. But before we can talk about that, we need to talk about 2 things. Some textual criticism and then even before that some presuppositions. Because the truth is every single one of us come to any text including the Bible, with a set of presuppositions.
There is no such thing ever as a neutral reading. We all have ideas that we bring with us that inform what we understand, and that's okay. In fact, the more that we are aware of our presuppositions, the more we are able to see how they are coloring and informing everything that we read. So starting with our prologomena, what we think even before we begin to speak, this can be really helpful. And I'll give you an example here from real life or at least a close approximation thereof.
Pearl Jam just came out with a new album this spring. And I knew that I loved it before I had ever even heard a note of it. Now, obviously, I mean, we're talking about the greatest band in the history of rock and roll. It's not a stretch to say that I would love this music, but that's not what I meant here. I mean that I already loved it.
See, my history with Pearl Jam had already shaped me and built my trust. Let's be honest. It had shaped my identity to some point to the point where I could not not love this album. Except here's the thing. If you have listened to the new album, it is a bit of a departure, at least the first single was.
So I stayed up till midnight on the release night waiting for the first single to be made available online. And I will admit the first time that I heard of the dance of the clairvoyance, I had a bit of a moment. I mean, I'm not sure if I like this. This doesn't sound like the pearl jam I grew up with. And, yeah, of course, I want them to grow as musicians and creatives and be fulfilled as human beings, but this was not what I was expecting.
And in an era where I can listen to literally any music I want whenever I want, if this wasn't Pearl Jam, I probably would have just moved on. Except you see, I was already in a committed relationship. I already had presuppositions about the value of this music. And so I stuck with it, and I kept listening to it. And slowly, it grew on me to the point where now I honestly do love it.
Now did I just convince myself I loved it? Maybe. I don't know, but I really think it's great now. And this is what we have to understand. The trust that we bring with us, the faith that we bring with us, the presuppositions that we carry into any encounter shape what we take away from those encounters.
And the Christian faith hands us certain presuppositions when we come to the Bible. And so here is my prologomena. All of the convictions that I bring with me whenever I read the Bible. 2 things. 1st, God is love.
And second, the closest we will ever come to understanding God in the world is Jesus. As a Christian, those are my presuppositions. That's what I believe before I even open the Bible. That's the lens through which I encounter everything I read even in the Bible. So let's talk about them quickly here.
God is love. I take this statement from 1st John 4 to be definitional for the divine. God is the source of all that is good and living and creative and beautiful in the universe because God is at the core of God's self love. For me, this is why the mystery of Trinity is so important to Christianity because Trinity tells me that God is an endless dance of gift and reception of relationship and love from before there was anything. God is love.
And so God can be merciful, and God can be angry, and God could be frustrated, or God can judge, God can be just, or God can choose to be compassionate. But whatever God does, however God expresses God's self, it is only ever an expression of God's love because that's who God is. And therefore, if it isn't love, it isn't God. Now what does it mean to love? Well, I think humanity has struggled with this since the very beginning of time, and I think God has taken us on a very long journey.
I think God has been patient and gracious and kind to us along the way. But as a Christian, as someone who puts my trust in Jesus, I believe that the closest I will ever come to seeing God's love, the closest I will ever come to understanding divine love embodied in the human story is Jesus. Because I believe that the personality that sits at the founding of the universe is love and that love is incarnated in the Christ. That love is present today in the Christ. That's what the Christian faith tells me, and that is then what shapes how I read the Christian scriptures.
And this is really important because we share the majority of our sacred text with the Jewish tradition. Islam venerates both the Jewish and the Christian text, but how we read them and what we take away from them will depend on what we bring with us to them. Christians, we are not better at reading sacred texts. We're not better at interpreting Jewish stories than Jewish people are. We simply have certain presuppositions.
You could call them a faith position that we bring with us when we read the Bible. God is love, and the closest we will ever come to understanding God is Jesus. Now before we turn to a scripture that tells us exactly this, we need to look at how the same phenomena is actually happening in our Bibles. You see, we are working our way toward the gospel of John today, but the gospel of John is actually a really unique one among the gospels. We have 4 gospels in the Bible.
Each of them present a slightly different version of the Jesus story. Far from being problematic for us, this is actually one of the great gifts of the scriptures. They offer us these 4 different sets of eyes through which to encounter Jesus. Look, God is bigger than any of us. We all get that, but God is also bigger than any of our perspectives.
So anytime we try to imagine the divine, we need multiple eyes, multiple perspectives to inform us. In fact, I've always taken part of the meaning in Jesus statement that wherever 2 or 3 are gathered together in my name, there I am with them. I've taken this as an implicit endorsement of community. God is always with us, but when we come together around the same story in the same name to share with each other what we see in the spirit and what God is saying to each of us then Jesus is uniquely present in the space between us where our experiences of God can begin to rub up against each other. Jesus says I am with you always until the end of the age, but when you gather and when you come together, when you share with each other, there is something profound in waiting to be encountered.
And so in some very real sense, we need each other to encounter Jesus because we need this multiplicity of perspective to make sense of a story this big. And the shape of the scripture actually reinforces that. But of these multiple views, we have Matthew and Mark and Luke, and we sometimes call these the synoptic gospels that comes from Greek. Sin means together, and optic means sight. So the synoptic gospels see together.
In other words, they basically have the same story. In fact, in source critical work, we understand that Matthew and Luke are likely even using Mark as a source for their writing. So the theory goes that Mark is the earliest of the 3. If you read it through, it's the most basic and auction oriented of the gospels. Luke probably comes next and Matthew a bit later, and they both have their own takes on Jesus.
But for the most part, all three tell a very similar story with slightly different emphasis. John, on the other hand, well, John is different. In John, Jesus doesn't tell parables. Jesus delivers long theological soliloquies. Or Mark and Matthew and Luke all start with the story of Jesus, John begins with the formation of the universe, Where in the Synoptics Jesus is slow in letting people know who he is and what he's here for.
In John, Jesus is on mission from day 1. Part of the reason for this is because John is written much later than the other Gospels are. Mark is probably written within the same generation of Jesus or close. Matthew and Luke, possibly in the next, but John is written near the end of the 1st century, maybe even in the start of the second. And what this means is that John has a very different goal in writing.
No longer is the author focused on just what happened. I mean, we already have Mark and Matthew and Luke for that after all. Now the question, a generation of 2 Jesus followers later is why did this happen? Not what did Jesus do, but what did it mean? What was it for?
What did it accomplish? How did this change the world? How is every thing different now in the light of Jesus? So if you imagine Mark writing his gospel trying to tell you what happened so that you might believe in Jesus. John is writing his gospel assuming you believe in Jesus.
Now wanting to help you understand why it matters. Essentially, John is being written from a faith position with the presupposition that God is love and that Jesus is the closest we will ever come to understanding God. And this is how it begins. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
Through him, all things were made. Without him, nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Now that word word is the word logos in Greek.
And that logos is a complicated word with a lot of significance and a lot of baggage within the Greek tradition. In about 500 BCE, Heraclitus starts using logos in a philosophical sense to talk about truth. This idea that logos represents the true essence of something. A little later, the Sophists start using logos to describe the aspect of discourse. So truth is what we arrive at in debate, and logos is the process of discovering truth.
Socrates and Plato swing back toward Heraclitus a bit. But by the time of the Neo Platonist movement, which is what is informing the world of New Testament Greek, the logos has become, quote, the force that invests material objects with their shape and their form and their life. And this has resonance with an old old idea, the idea of wisdom or Sophia or Hokhmah in Hebrew. That's the idea that there is a God and then there is the creative expression of God that brings the world into being and gives it meaning. So when you hear in the beginning was the word and the word was with God, what do you immediately begin to think of?
Well, if you're Jewish, you think of Genesis 1:1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And how did God create? God spoke, and it was. Well, now John says that same creativity and wisdom that brought the universe to life, it is now incarnated in Jesus.
Everything that God has always been, creativity and relationship and love and wisdom now present in the human story. And granted that's a big theological concept. It's hard to get our heads around for sure. But for our purposes today, understand that what John is saying here is that everything God wants to say, everything that God wants to express, all of God's wisdom and creativity and word to us is Jesus. This is what the writer of Hebrews is expressing when they write in the past.
God spoke to our ancestors invisible qualities, eternal power, and divine nature have been clearly seen, understood from what has been made in creation. But now John says God's communication to us is no longer just through the prophets or seen in creation. God's word to us is come, is alive, is Jesus. This is the culmination of the biblical story, or as Karl Barth is often paraphrased, the Bible is the word about the word of God. Now we have to be careful with this.
Of course. I mean, we can't all just run around saying, well, Jesus told me this and Jesus told me that We will end up with as many different religions as there are Christians. The word about the word or the Bible is our grounding narrative. It's what roots us in the same story together. In our tradition, we say that the Bible is the only perfect rule for faith and doctrine.
And I've spent a good chunk of my life pursuing multiple degrees in how to read the Bible well. But as a Christian, as someone whose faith position is anchored in Christ, I am always reading through what Jesus shows me about God. I am looking for the ways that God is like Jesus. I'm trusting that the closest I will ever come to seeing God is Jesus. I believe that all of the colors and shapes, everything I encounter will lead me back to Jesus.
And so this is why later in John when Jesus turns to his closest friends and says, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my father as well. For from now on, you do know God and you have seen God. This is where I want to shout amen.
Not because this is a weapon to bludgeon anyone else into submission or reading religion the way that I do. Jesus never intended this as a threat. This was always an invitation to go back and look one more time, To presuppose the goodness of a God that would come near to us. And then to read with new eyes to reinterpret, to reimagine, to rediscover the god between the lines now made clear no longer through a glass darkly but now present and real and tangible with us. Divine love and everything it was always capable of incarnated in the human story.
The way of God. The truth of God. The life of God. The logos of the universe now present with us revealing God to us. So when we speak of the inspiration of the scriptures, when we talk about how important the Bible is, we're not talking about some flat lifeless reading of the text as if it was just some puzzle to be pieced together systematically.
We are talking about all of the ways that the long winding story of humanity has been captured in our sacred texts and those texts lead us back to Jesus. Because to speak of the word of God, this has never been a question of Jesus versus the bible. This is a statement of conviction that the words on the page lead us always to the Christ. And it is this Christ, this Jesus that leads us in the way to God. I am completely fascinated with this complex and beautiful collection of text we call the Bible, but I worship Jesus.
These scriptures lead me to the realization that Jesus is the only exact representation of the divine and that God has always looked like Jesus even when I did not see that clearly. Because of this, I have abandoned any idea of an angry violent God in order to fully embrace the good news brought forward by Jesus, Because I believe that Jesus came not to change God's mind about me, but to repair my imagination of the divine. May your imagination be open to the story of Jesus in new ways this week. May the goodness of God be evident all around you even in strange times. May you open the Bible with new eyes shaped by Jesus to uncover and encounter the divine love that sits at the center of all things this week.
Let's pray. God, for all the ways that we have opened your text and sometimes even missed you. The ways that we have elevated your scriptures above you. The ways that we have lost sight of Jesus. We're sorry.
We ask now that you by your spirit would bring us back to the heart of this tale. To the culmination of everything your scriptures are pointing us to, to our presuppositions that you are love and your love is expressed perfectly in the Christ as we begin to follow the way of Jesus, as we come to understand the truth of Jesus, as we allow the life of Jesus to take up residence inside of us, May we now begin to participate in your kingdom and your commonwealth making room for all at the table. May Jesus be our center. May we be people of that way. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray.
Amen.