The Living Word

We humans often ask a simple question of the events or subjects that confront us, "what does this mean?" Recently however, I have been challenged to ask of the world not, "what does this mean" but "what does this do/how does this function?" The idea to shift the question that I was asking originated from my theology prof on the question of tongues, but since then I have been exploring the implications of that question in art, and most recently, scripture reading.

So often we approach Scripture as though it were the object, and we, the subject acting upon it. This has led humanity down both the roads of fundamentalism and higher criticism. The driving force behind both of these movements was an inability to let Scripture act upon us; we had to tame the Scriptures, to understand them, to mine them for scientific knowledge. We treated Scripture as a dead text, something that pointed us towards God, but not a way in which we might actually encounter God.

The gospel of John refers to Jesus as being the Word, the Word become flesh in fact. The incarnation is that messy occasion where we are confronted by God and are forced to majorly deconstruct some of our ideas about the way the world is. An encounter with God shakes us in a way that leaves us forever changed. What would happen, if we read the Scriptures looking to actually encounter the living Word, not just learn about him? Try letting the text do something to you, allow it to transform you instead of obsessing over the insane question, "What does it all mean?" After a couple thousand years, we still don't really know, but we do know that Scripture does something to us, and that, I think, is something to cling to.