Jesus never once quotes from nineteen of the books in his own Hebrew scriptures. In fact, he appears to use a very few favorites: Exodus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Hosea, and Psalms. Jesus appears to ignore most of his own Bible, yet it clearly formed his whole consciousness. That is the paradox. If we look at what he ignores, it includes any passages that appear to legitimate violence, imperialism, exclusion, purity, and dietary laws—of which there are many. Jesus is a biblically formed non-Bible-quoter who gets the deeper stream of God’s unconditional love, the spirit, the trajectory of his Jewish history and never settles for mere surface readings.
When he does once quote Leviticus, he quotes the one positive mandate among long lists of negative ones: “You must love your neighbor as yourself” (see Leviticus 19:18)… Jesus reduces the 613 clear biblical commandments down to two: love of God and love of neighbor (see Matthew 22:34–40).
He omits troublesome verses with which he does not agree, as when he drops the final half-verse from the Isaiah scroll when he first reads in the Nazareth synagogue (see Luke 4:18–19). As if to make the point, he “rolls up the scroll, hands it back to the attendant and sits down.” We can imagine them glaring at him for adjusting the Scriptures. They know the final line of Isaiah 61:2b is “to proclaim a day of vengeance from our God.” Jesus ends with verse 2a, which “proclaims the Lord’s day of favor,” and better portrays the God he knows.
Generally speaking, Jesus makes use of his own Scriptures to teach a message of radical inclusivity, mercy, and justice, and to negate the predominant religious messages of exclusion, religious righteousness, and oppression of the underdog, the impure, and the sinner.
Richard Rohr
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We used to call them “Bible thumpers”
Those people who would zealously pound their Bible
THIS is what God says
This is the WORD OF GOD
I always loved
And love still
Their passion for God
But my problem is that many of these
Intense, well-meaning people
Not only thumped the Bible, but thumped others with the Bible
Weaponizing it
Making it a book of rules and wrath
Making it about obedience and merit
Even grace becomes merit.
The tension between a religion of obedience and wrath
And a religion of grace and forgiveness
Is inherent in the Bible
Jesus saw it,
And he dealt with it his own way
Defaulting to love
Always
Love
That is the beginning and the end
The alpha and the omega
The world was birthed in love
And it is not going to “end”
However we think of “end”
In hate and punishment
In flames
Although there may be hate and flames
Cruelty and violence
Created by humankind
Along the way
To paradise
When we are asked to choose
Between merit and grace
We must choose grace
I have often thought about
The time Jesus told the Bible thumpers of his time
You will come to me and point to your zeal for God
And I will say, “I never knew you”
Sounds pretty harsh
And he tells them away from me!!!
That doesn’t sound like mercy.
But…
I think what Jesus was saying
To these people who were very much alive,
Was this
What have you done with yourself?
I don’t even recognize you.
I can’t see the person of love and mercy you were created to be
You are not reflecting the image of God
Go get yourself together.
Because right now you are hurting a lot of people
Am I playing fast and loose with scripture?
Yeah
Just like Jesus
Just like every Rabbi ever (who is worth his or her salt)
But I think Jesus’ goal was not expulsion
But transformation
From His birth to his death
Jesus was always about radical love
About expansive inclusion
He read the Torah and the law and the prophets through
The lens of radical love
He lived the scriptures through the lens of radical love
He saw the tension
And he resolved it by choosing radical love.
I want to be like that!
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