To conclude this term's sermon series, Gospel and Culture, I spoke this past Sunday about the ways God uses our own language both to bring us closer to His Word and to each other in discerning it.
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readings: Isaiah 45.18-25; John 7.37-end
Sometimes I am inclined to ask myself if I really am ‘my brother’s keeper’. Or, for that matter, if there is indeed such a thing these days as ‘manna from heaven’. As I voice these doubts, it might occur to you, oh, ‘How are the mighty fallen!’ to which I might respond that it was ‘out of the mouths of babes’ that I came to learn that there is ‘nothing new under the sun’. Now this, I grant you, might be seem a bit ‘holier than thou’, such that one would do well to ‘turn the other cheek’ or perhaps instead ‘fight the good fight’. This, however, could prove a problem if one doesn’t ‘suffer fools gladly’, for as we all know, ‘the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’. I might just get out by ‘the skin of my teeth’, but after all, it’s ‘by their fruits ye shall know them’. And so on and so on and so forth.
At the first Choral Evensong of this term, I began our sermon series Gospel and Culture by suggesting that whether we’re aware of it or not, our culture remains saturated in Christian language and Christian categories of thought. And there is perhaps no more obvious example of this than the variety of metaphors, images and expressions derived from the Bible that continue even to this day to leave their imprint upon our use of English. And not just any Bible, but a particular version of the Bible, the one known as the Authorised Version or the King James Bible. As many of you will already know, this year marks the 400th anniversary of the King James, and we here at Oriel will add to countless other commemorations happening around the country with our own event here in College next term. But why, you may be wondering, should we be making such a fuss about the anniversary of a Bible translation? Here it may help to remember that for people across Europe in the sixteenth century, being able to read the Bible in their own language represented the ability to experience God’s Word directly, rather than second-hand through clergy schooled in the Latin Vulgate. And while the King James was not the first Bible translation into English and in many ways is indebted to its predecessors, nonetheless it symbolizes the settlement of nearly a century of conflict in both the English Church and the State. As an act of political, religious and scholarly consensus, then, the King James was and is a formidable achievement. Yet for all this, we are still left asking the question, what exactly is it that 400 years later we today are being asked to celebrate? Few if any would now regard reading the Bible in our own tongue as remarkable, and translations of the Bible proliferate in an astonishing variety of forms. Ironically, then, I would suggest that what we are really celebrating when we celebrate the King James Bible is not that we can read the Bible in English but rather that the Bible has the power to read us and to do so in terms we can understand. For when we celebrate the Gospel in English, we are in fact celebrating what, very loosely speaking, is ‘English’ in the Gospel.
Now, in making in this claim, let me hasten to add that in no sense am I advocating a chauvinistic reading of scripture, as though there were something fundamentally better or different about the Bible in English than when it appears in any other tongue. Rather, it’s a recognition that when any of us reads scripture, regardless of our cultural context, we are listening for God’s voice through the medium of human language, and the process of doing so inevitably shapes us. We listen for words that will help us make sense of what we may already be thinking or feeling, even as God may be using those same words to try shape those thoughts and feelings in new ways. If we are reading the Bible creatively and attentively, then, it seems to me that our reading functions as a kind of symbiosis between our words and God’s meaning. God reflects back to us in words that are particular and resonant for us the universal meaning of the Good News in Christ. It may have been this that the poet George Herbert, himself also very much a product of the culture that produced the King James Bible, it may have been this Herbert was getting at when he wrote of the Bible that ‘in ev’ry thing / Thy words do finde me out’ and ‘make me understood’. Who is to say that it is not part of God’s own work to take up the very beauty and power, as well as the humour and strangeness, of the English Bible to awaken us to His presence in the lives we are living here and now?
That this might be possible would seem to place an enormous burden of responsibility on those whose work it has been over the generations actually to translate the scriptures into various languages. What if they’ve gotten something badly wrong, what then? Be it in the specific work of translation or the more general act of interpretation, what unforeseen consequences might there be for the community of faith if the Bible were to be mistranslated or misconstrued? But here it may be worth turning to another figure in the Anglican firmament, the great Elizabethan divine Richard Hooker, who even before the King James Bible even appeared, insisted on the absolute importance of reading scripture aloud in church as part of the divine service. Hooker’s defence of this practice against those who would leave Bible reading up to individuals was rooted in his belief that only as a community can we hope to discern the scriptures’ wider meaning (V.19.5). We read them aloud as a form of worship, because we are acknowledging that no one of us alone can possibly make total sense of them and God teaches us through others’ contribution to the process of discernment. Reading them together, then, not only guards against error, either in translation or interpretation, but also affirms the coherence of the worshipping community. Only if we listen together do we have any hope of discovering God’s meaning together, of sharing the language in its richness, and in turn, of speaking that language richly and coherently to the world.
Yet as both of our readings from scripture remind us unambiguously, it is first and foremost God who speaks, and it is we who are called to listen and to keep listening for God’s Word to us. ‘I have not spoken in secret,’ declares God in the Book of Isaiah, ‘I the Lord speak righteousness, I declare things that are right’; and again, ‘I have sworn by myself, the word is gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and shall not return’ (45.19, 23). This is the universal reality, that God originates Truth and leaves it to spread and blossom upon the countless tongues of the earth. In our reading from the Gospel of John, Jesus makes his offer of salvation in terms of the same scriptural tradition, even as he challenges his listeners to receive it with fresh ears and with a different accent (7.38). Yet what we also witness in this episode is how culturally-conditioned ways of reading scripture sometimes get in the way of its wider meaning, rather than serve to open it up or clarify it. And so Jesus’ opponents use scripture as a weapon against him rather than as an opportunity for shared discernment (vv.41-4). Perhaps the most striking statement in the whole passage is actually made by the officers of the Temple, who, when asked why they haven’t already arrested Jesus, respond simply: ‘Never man spake like this man’ (v.46). The living Word will indeed make itself known regardless of our human efforts either to promote or silence it, and it is only those who finally stop talking long enough to listen who may yet hear something new and transformative in what has always been there.
And so might well we celebrate our Gospel in English, knowing it promises to mould and teach us in ways we cannot anticipate, even when the words and images and stories are all reassuring in their familiarity. For in our responses to it, it has a way of reflecting back to us our own assumptions, our own deeper feelings about ourselves and each other. And in this, the cultural specificity of our approach to God is precisely the place where God promises to surprise us the most. Here a cadence or a turn of phrase, an alliteration or an abrupt ending, can sometimes suggest to us a universe of meaning where on a previous encounter we had noticed only a grain of sand. And to multiply this potential in accordance with the fullness of the community is to see at once how varied God’s Word may be, as well as to appreciate how it may reinforce what already binds us together. For language is what we have, and it is what God has always used to make his Word known to us. So we continue to listen, may we have both the courage and patience to discover what faithful people in all tongues and all cultures have always found to be the case: that ‘never man spake like this man’.
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