“You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life.
One of the frustrating things I’ve experienced in Bible studies in books and in groups is cut and dried, fill in the blank answers to questions formulated for Bible study. Sometimes the questions were better than that, trying to help us grapple with what usually an individual application of the passage might be. But oftentimes it was little more than fill in the blanks with what the Scripture says, maybe with our paraphrase of such. There was usually not a sufficient step back to consider what it meant in the time written, and after that what it might mean in our context today. Instead, a rather flat reading, and ending there.
We need to begin with a straightforward reading of the Bible, the particular passage we’re considering. But we won’t do well at all if we stop there. Jesus told the devout Jewish experts on Scripture (remember, this was an inhouse dispute, not what Christians over the centuries have made it out to be) that their work on Scripture did not go far enough. There was a lack of openness by them to see Scripture in a new light, that light actually being Jesus himself in what Jesus taught and did and how he lived. And especially in light of the way of the cross, which made no sense at that time, and still makes little “common” sense today.
We too need to listen to that same word. It applies every bit as much to us as it did to the ones Jesus was speaking to. If we don’t grapple with all of Scripture in light of Jesus, we too will fail. And as we see in Jesus’s consideration of the Old Testament/ Hebrew Bible, which is what Scripture was to them, as well as what follows in our Bibles in the New Testament, it is not a straightforward one to one correlation of Scripture as in the texts. That actually makes the text to its original readers a desert, at least dry, and all the more so to readers later and in the present.
We must especially together consider all of Scripture in light of Jesus, the gospel’s testimony of Jesus (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), imagining together what it might mean for us, what God’s word is for us through our consideration of it.
Jesus community 