‹ Back

John 13:1 "Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end."

 

Before I opened the Bible this morning, I held it as I always do and said my prayer to the Holy Spirit asking Him to guide me to what He wanted me to read for today. As I did, I had a feeling I don't get every day, but have had occasionally. It is the feeling of power coming from the book, the feeling that this book is alive, it is doing things, it is creating. As I held the closed book in my hands, I could feel something like movement from within it. I held it to my cheek and thanked God for giving it to us. Then I read today's passage, in which John reminds us that Jesus loves us to the end. Even though He had to leave this world, physically at least, He loves his own, and always will. That is why He gives us the Eucharist, and that is why we have the Bible. God's love is enclosed in both, waiting for us to receive Him and let His Spirit work in our minds, hearts, and lives. 

 

As a child I adored the Chronicles of Narnia. Those books spoke to me in a way nothing else I read ever did until I started really reading the Bible as an adult. This morning, I thought of a scene in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in which Lucy has to enter the house of what she believes to be a wicked magician on a mysterious island. She has to go to the last door on the left at the end of the second floor corridor to read a spell from the magician's book in order to free the invisible inhabitants of the island from their curse, and save her fellow travelers who have been threatened with death if she refused the mission. I still remember reading Lucy's journey to the book with such fear, and such admiration for her bravery. When she gets to the book and touches it she feels an electric tingle in her fingers. As she flips through the spells, looking for the right one, the images within it come alive. As she reads, she is tempted, hurt, and comforted. Ultimately she finds the right spell and accomplishes her mission.

 

I was thinking this morning, what if the first thing Lucy read when she opened the magician's book was that the author loved her, and would love her to the end? How would this have changed her apprehension of the magician, and how would it have helped her navigate the parts of the book she had to page through to get to the one she was meant to read? After Lucy reads the correct spell, Aslan comes to her, having been made visible by the spell she just read. He says he obeys his own rules, thus making it clear that he is the author of the book. 

 

The Bible can be confusing. We can think that the God it reveals is not who we think He should be.* But He is the author of the Bible and He loves us, and will love us to the end. So whatever is revealed in the Bible's pages must be understood with that in mind. Even the people who seem mistreated in the Bible are loved by God. The pages that apply to them are not the ones written for our lives, but they are meant to inform and educate us. In Lucy's story we learn that the inhabitants of the island are under the care of the magician at Aslan's command, and that they are not ready yet to be governed by wisdom, but only by the "rough magic" in the magician's book. 

 

What might seem to us like a rough magic, or mistreatment of people, in the books of the Bible should be read with an understanding of God's love for every one of us. We should not give into the temptation to substitute our will for His, that robs the Bible of its power and can even make it a source of temptation to pride. Instead, we should recognize that at each stage in humanity's existence, God has worked through His Word, appropriate to the time, to bring His people to where they need to be in order to know that He has loved them, and will love them to the end.

 

_________________________________________________

*Case in point - in my PREP class last week we read the Gospel of Jesus cleansing the Temple, and several of my students could not wrap their heads around the fact that Jesus, the "nicest guy in the world",  would do such a thing!