On Being Right

I had an interesting revelation a few weeks ago. I had been asked to fill in and teach the adult class at the congregation we are attending. This was fairly rare for me, because I’m usually involved in some way in the children’s classes (though I’m not very good at that, I am willing to do it, and that is more than half of the battle). The class was about giving, I think, because one of the scriptures we were looking at that morning was the story of the rich young man. Most of you know that story. A man comes to Jesus and says, “What must I do to have eternal life?” Jesus answers with a litany of pious deeds and the guy says, “Well, I’ve done all of that since I was a kid.” Jesus says, “Just one more thing then: go and sell everything you have and give it to the poor.” And the guy goes away sad because he was very wealthy and couldn’t go that far. I started talking about how challenging this verse was to me because, although I know that Jesus was directly challenging this guy, I still fill compelled to put myself through the sort of introspection that this challenge entails.

The man who normally teaches the class confronted me about this and said, “Well, I don’t think Jesus is talking to us.” Another person agreed, and they continued in a way that was strangely angry. After asking a few questions for clarification, I finally figured out what had made them so angry at me. They thought that I was using the class as a forum to examine them – and they felt judged and put upon by my imposition. Now both of these men are old enough to be my father, so this may be a generational issue, but regardless of that, it showed me that they had a vastly different paradigm for scriptural inquiry than I did. As we talked it out, I was enlightened to learn that their paradigm for Bible study and thus for public forums like a Bible Study class, is to take the text and to discover what it MEANS. That is to say that they look at a text and they try to determine what its exact meaning is, and then they assume that the textual meaning – especially in the case of a commandment of some sort, applies to all people universally.

In this case they had actually done the opposite. They had decided, inferred from the text that the injunction that Jesus makes to the rich young man in this passage was just for the rich young man, and therefore had no real application universally. That is to say that since this is NOT a commandment from Jesus for all of us to sell all of our possessions, that there is nothing pressing here in this story.

My approach to scripture is quite different. I treat it like an exotic animal. I feel like I know it fairly well, but I’m always alert for the possibility that it may have a dangerous surprise for me. So I reread old stories without having “solved” the puzzle. I reread them to discover what might speak to my heart and help to make me a better person. I also don’t go into a class with an agenda to “teach” some pre-conceived truth, but rather to be a part of the process of discovery. I actually do this with all knowledge. When I teach in a classroom, I’ve had students complain because; I don’t give them “the answers.” This is because, for the most important questions, I’m not certain that there are any definitive answers. So that questions like: What is happiness? What is beauty? What is good? Are more important as questions than as answers. I do look for answers as they relate to the question of “so what do I do with this?” But I don’t really look to answer the question of what you should do with it, just the question of what I should do with it.

It isn’t that I don’t believe that there is an ultimate truth, I’m just not certain that we can ever do anything but get an approximation of what that truth is, and I am certain that I don’t have any right to dictate to you how your search for God and goodness should progress. I’m just in charge of this one little bit of life – my life, my action, my ethics, and even that is sometimes beyond my control.

So if you ask me to teach your Bible class or any other class, know that you may leave without the “right” answers, but together we might be able to enjoy the possibilities that dance around all the possible questions. Which is more “true” learning?