Turn the lights on

ἦλθεν γυνὴ ἔχουσα ἀλάβαστρον μύρου νάρδου πιστικῆς πολυτελοῦς·

Mark 14.3b SBL Greek NT

We all have to confront at some point how we come to Scripture (a word meaning just “writings”).

Let me illustrate: in Mark 10 some Pharisees come to try to entrap Jesus (good luck with that, chaps…) and ask Him whether it is lawful for a man to divorce his wife. Jesus asks them what Moses commanded them.

They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.”
“It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,” Jesus replied.

Notice that Jesus tells them that it was Moses – and not God – who saw their hardness of heart and wrote this law for them.

There is no suggestion here as to whether Moses got this right or wrong in the circumstances; Jesus just tells the Pharisees that the rule from the creation was different.

Paul also famously distinguishes between what the Lord says through him, and the advice that he, Paul, is giving. Both are in scripture, but should we give them equal weight?

And my simple point here is that historically, the very “high” view of scripture we tend to hold in the 21st century evangelical and Pentecostal churches is actually a fairly recent phenomenon. 2 Tim 3.16 is famously ambiguous in Greek; “all scripture is God-breathed…” is the less likely reading. “All writing which is God-breathed is profitable…” is the obvious rendition, and leaves things a lot more open ended. Or rather, leaves us with the responsibility to hear God speak through His word, and not just use scripture in the same way the Pharisees did, as a big stick to hit their opponents with.

And I find it hard to subscribe to the view that God used human writers as automatons to record His words. After Moses broke the first set of tablets, it seems that God was quite able to write the second set Himself. The fact that this was such an unusual occurrence suggests to me that God actually wanted people to record their impressions and experiences, not just His verbatim words.

If you are still wondering what the snippet of Greek at the head of this says, possibly not what you are expecting:

“And there came a woman having an alabaster (usually a box of this soft stone) of oil of true (spike)nard, hugely valuable.”

Rather than engage in finding layers of hidden metaphorical meaning here, I just want to make the historian’s observation: oil of spikenard was indeed worth its weight in gold; and it came only from the Himalaya, growing at altitudes between 10,000 and 15,000 ft.

If you have had a mental picture of 1st century Judaea as a little backwater, shut off from the world, perhaps you have failed to understand just how connected the world already was. Yes, the Roman Empire was significant – but so were the trade routes headed out of the Roman sphere, in this case in the direction of India, via the Red Sea, Socotra in the Gulf of Aden and across the Arabian Sea. The trade with India led to so much of Rome’s store of gold disappearing over the horizon that it became a financial crisis.

So yes, this woman “wasted” something worth more than 300 days wages – and Jesus commended her, for having understood something (perhaps only in her spirit), which the disciples had been told plainly about, and which they had still not taken on board: Jesus was about to be killed, and that was far more significant than helping beggars (or indeed, light-fingered treasurers, if we listen to John).

I could go on. We don’t seem to realise the extent to which the world of Jesus was already “post Israel“. Scholars assume that Jesus spoke Aramaic all the time and that the gospels were originally in that tongue and then translated to Greek; but on what basis? Many of the cities of Judaea had predominantly Greek populations at this time. They had hippodromes! Jesus clearly knew Aramaic (“talithi cumi”), but when He spoke it from the cross the bystanders misunderstood and thought He was calling Elijah. And lots of the jokes Jesus makes, only work in Greek.

So what on earth is my point here? Just this: “the Word become flesh, and pitched His tent among us” as John 1:14 says. We sell God’s heart short when we say that the Bible is a heavenly book that descended from above, ready made and intact. That would be equivalent to “the Word turned up in a gold-plated RV and parked down the glamping end of the campsite, but invited us to supper next week…” But the reality is that the Bible as we have it – and do read about the council that set the canon of scripture for the church and ask how many of them you would have been happy to invite to speak in your church on a Sunday morning – is the work of men who were confronted by God and/or who were trying to live out God’s purpose in their time and world, and who have done their utmost to record that faithfully, as they experienced it. It captures their world as well as God’s presence with them, and His words.

But something better is coming: as Paul said,

For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

1 Cor 13.12, NIV